The Hidden Toll of Day Care, Behavioral Drugs, and Other Parent Substitutes

by Mary Eberstadt

The argument of the pages that follow could scarcely be more controversial to many contemporary readers. Of all the explosive subjects in America today, none is as cordoned off, as surrounded by rhetorical land mines, as the question of whether and just how much children need their parents - especially their mothers. In an age littered with discarded taboos, this one in particular remains virtually untouched.

This book challenges that social prohibition. It strives to shed light on one of the fundamental changes of our time: the ongoing, massive, and historically unprecedented experiment in family-child separation in which the United States and most other advanced societies are now engaged. Whole libraries have already been devoted to one side of this experiment. For decades everything about the unfettered modern woman - her opportunities, her anxieties, her choices, her having or not having it all - has been dissected to the smallest detail. From Simone de Beauvoir to Betty Friedan to any number of other recent feminist-fueled writers, the ideological spotlight remains the same: It is on grown women and what they want and need.

Much the same is also true of the vigorous recent literature running counter to feminism. Woman in her own right is also the focus of a recent boomlet in popular literature emphasizing the benefits to mothers of nurture. Even in fictional treatments of the having-it-all question, it is women once again who are the main narrative event.

In other words, to invoke a suggestive phrase from years past, the "mommy wars" have so far been about just that. Whether celebratory or critical, left wing or right wing, fictitious or factual, most of the literature devoted so far to this great social experiment has one critical common denominator: It is all about the adult side, and particularly the female adult side, of the absent-parent home.

Yet very little has been committed to print about the darker side of this massive experiment: namely, the sharp rise in child and adolescent problems that has occurred alongside this increasing adult, and particularly maternal, exodus from home. As the pages that follow show, to ask what scholars and researchers are turning up about the state of American youth is to invite a barrage of depressing information on mental problems, behavioral problems, sexually transmitted diseases, educational backwardness, and more. As William Damon, one of the first writers to have apprehended this empirical slide, put it in his book, Greater Expectations, in 1995, "Practically all the indicators of youth health and behavior have declined year by year for well over a generation. None has improved. The litany is now so well known that it is losing its power to shock [emphasis added]."

Like Damon, some other observers have also commented on one or another aspect of this deterioration. Both rightward-leaning Francis Fukuyama (The Great Disruption) and leftward-leaning Robert D. Putnam (Bowling Alone) have noted independently that one factor driving the lessening of "association" in American life is the reorienting of adult attention, particularly women's, away from the home and neighborhood and toward the workplace. Numerous other writers have made a different broad sociological point - that what advantages the modern adult often disadvantages the modern child: Midge Decter (An Old Wife's Tale), David Ellkind (The Hurried Child), Arlie Russell Hochschild (The Time Bind), Barbara Defoe Whitehead (Dan Quayle Was Right), Christina Hoff Sommers (The War Against Boys), and Kay S. Hymowitz (Ready or Not), among others. Perhaps most important, in his 1995 book, Fatherless America, David Blankenhorn broke critical ground by drawing attention to the empirical correlations between troubled children and one particular subset of the adult-emptied world, i.e., absent fathers.

And so the time seems ripe to examine at book length these two established facts of our world - absent parents of both sorts and contemporary child problems of all sorts - and ask some obvious, if necessarily blunt, questions about the relationship between the two. Why are millions of American kids - almost one in four boys, according to the latest estimates - taking drugs to alter their behavior, with millions more said to stand in need of that same regimen? Why, to take numbers from elsewhere in the field of psychiatry, are depression, anxiety, and behavioral disorders apparently skyrocketing among children and teenagers? What might help explain another major health problem unknown until recently: namely, the millions of American (and European) juveniles now at risk for overweight and obesity? What does the epidemic of sexually transmitted diseases - some of them incurable - mean for the present and future health of today's teenagers? And to reach beyond social science, what exactly is at the melancholy core of current popular juvenile culture, especially what is dearest to them of all - their music?

These questions and others like them are the detailed stuff of this book. It is my hope that readers of varied political persuasion will hear the answers out. I believe many of us sense already that it is time for a turn of debate, that there is more to this brave new domestic world of ours than just the latest juggling act of modern Woman or the latest polemical lament that men cannot be made to do their share of the housework. And many people, especially many who are parents, compare their own childhoods to those of their offspring and worry about what the pages ahead illustrate - that there is something new under our bright material sun; that the kids aren't, in fact, all right.

In his recent book, The Progress Paradox, Gregg Easterbrook asks a question that seems to be on other American minds lately: Why is it that our unprecedented material abundance and our extraordinary leaps in health and longevity have not been matched by any related leap in morale? Similarly, in One Nation Under Therapy, Christina Hoff Sommers and Sally Satel address a version of the same problem: Why is it that so many Americans, against the evidence, think themselves to be in parlous psychological shape? Also in 2004, researchers from Duke University led by Kenneth C. Land unveiled a major study of children's well-being that was begun in 1975 and used twenty-eight different measures. They expressed their surprise at how stagnant the overall score appeared; indeed, were it not for the decrease in juvenile crime, the composite score for 2003 would have been lower than that in 1975. If things are going so well, these and other voices have lately come to ask, then why don't we all feel better?

I believe the answer to that question is clear. Life is better today for many American adults; they are freer in all kinds of ways, including freer from social stigma in their personal moral choices, than any generation that preceded them. But life is not better for many American children, no matter how many extra Game Boys they have, no matter how much more pocket money they have for the vending machines, and no matter how nice it is that Dad's new wife gave them their own weekend bedroom in his new place. In fact, for a significant number of today's kids, life is worse in important ways than it was for their parents. And somewhere inside many of us adults know it.

And now a word about what this book is not. It is not an exercise in systematic social science by a card-carrying social scientist. It does not pretend to cover exhaustively the many criteria by which the well-being of children and adolescents may be judged - as the Land et al. study mentioned earlier sought to do and as numerous other statistical compendia assembled by armies of data-crunching researchers also attempt. Instead, this book singles out a number of particularly elemental subjects of concern to parents everywhere - among them day care, sex, music, and mental and physical health - and explores each one through a variety of evidence, from conventional social science and medical studies to books and TV shows and music videos and other unconventional measures of kids' inner lives. I do not pretend that this list of concerns is exhaustive, but I do think it is fundamental in the sense that most American parents worry about exactly these things. They are what might be called the apples of the book - meaning that while oranges might also exist, it is by the apples that the argument of these chapters should be judged.

Such is one summary of this book's message. As to the question of messenger, I am an at-home mother of four whose "fieldwork" consists mostly of fifteen or so years spent around sandboxes, schools, carpools, baseball games, and the like and whose intellectual work is conducted by fits and starts and at odd hours in the basement, one wall over from the washing machine and another removed from the Nintendo setup. I am an Ivy League graduate and former State Department speechwriter, and I haven't had a "real" office in more than twelve years. Until very recently motherhood meant that I did little writing apart from the occasional essay or review. Today things are different. Three of my children are in school all day long and the youngest is on the verge of it, so there is more time for reading and writing than there has been for years. I have a part-time paid babysitter who is upstairs with my youngest while I'm down, a husband who often works at home, and older children who also help out. Thus the "how" of this book.

© 2004 Penguin Group. All rights reserved.

About the Author

Mary Eberstadt is a part-time research fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution and consulting editor to Policy Review, the critically acclaimed journal of conservative thought. Her essays and reviews have also appeared in the Weekly Standard, The Wall Street Journal, and Commentary.