The Hidden Toll of Day Care and Behavioral Drugs, Part 2

by Mary Eberstadt

(Page 2 of 7)

I say as much to signal that I do know by raw experience a thing or two about what other writers have belabored, that is, the financial and other "trade-offs" of motherhood, including the penalties. The writing and editing that are my avocations have been made possible only by the alignment of figurative stars detailed in the acknowledgments. If any one of these fixed points had been otherwise, these chapters could not have been written - and I do not mean that as the usual authorial throwaway but as literal truth. This is in that sense an unlikely book.

And I am in some ways an unlikely author. Who does this woman think she is? a friend says people will be wondering. Doesn't she know what planet we live on, what real life is like? Well, yes. In particular I know certain of the trends singled out in these pages the same way other readers will know them: by experience. My own parents divorced when I was young, my mother (a nurse) worked out of the house frequently, and I was raised for the most part in a large - and, as it turned out, happy - blended family of siblings, half-siblings, and occasional stepsiblings (my stepfather, a widower, had older, mostly grown children who also came and went). In other words, my personal experience for the most part was not of the catastrophic kind that shows up over and over in the statistics on divorce, single motherhood, and the rest of the broken-home track record - statistics that play a serious part in the pages ahead. So a second reason that this book might seem unlikely is this: My own personal history runs somewhat counterclockwise to parts of its argument.

But this is exactly why I bring these facts up - because if I can put my own autobiography aside in judging evidence, then so can this book's readers, no matter what personal experiences they might also have in tow.

For unlike most of the adult-focused literature alluded to earlier, this is not, in the end, a personal story. It is not about me, it is not about you, and it is not about my cousins in New York or your neighbors down the street. It could have been written by anyone, married or not, parent or childless, in possession of the same empirical and other evidence. The purpose of these pages is not to ask what any one woman or man or family has decided to do. It is rather to ask what the accumulation of many millions of such decisions is doing to the children and adolescents of this society.

Consider a few examples taken from the pages ahead, of how this distinction plays out. It was one thing when teachers could count on large numbers of parents to help with volunteer work, because there were enough intact families and mothers at home. It is quite another - to cite recent reports in the New York Times - to have only two or three in any given kindergarten class who will pick up the slack for any event. Any one mother or father unavailable during the day is not a problem in the first instance; multiplied by many as it is today (ask any elementary school teacher), it is a problem.

But the multiplication of the effects of absent parents goes well beyond the solitary teacher now shorthanded for field trips and spelling bees. Some of the latest data on children's mental and behavioral problems are simply amazing - amazingly bad, that is. Violent crime by teenagers is down, and that's great. Yet as chapter 2 indicates, none of the explanations for why crime is down point to any general increase in mental or other stability among kids. Meanwhile, behavioral "issues" of all kinds are up in another segment of the population - the diapered, the preschooled, the kindergartners. Clearly, they are learning this feral behavior, at least in part, from one another, whether it is biting in day care or kicking and hitting later on. In other words, though your child might not be the offender on the playground, because you have taught him, say, that bricks aren't supposed to be projectiles, plenty of other children haven't learned that lesson at home - and their parental abdication affects not only them but you and your child, too.

Consider a third example: It was one thing when there were enough mothers, siblings, and others around after school to allow easy access to playgrounds, parks, and one's own or other backyards in the afternoon. In that world, as Alan Ehrenhalt observed in Lost City, there were enough "eyes on the street," enough informal networks of adults, to make outdoor play (among other child and adolescent amenities) a regular feature of life after school. But the situation today is something else again - with neighborhoods so emptied of adult presence that even the richest kids just go home, throw the deadbolt, and get no exercise more strenuous than walking from the video game to the refrigrator (in fact, better-off children are more likely to be "caring for self" after school than others further down the economic ladder). And the unintended consequence of that new norm is something we hardly need social science for at all, because the evidence of our senses is trustworthy enough: Time in front of the screen is up; exercise and outdoor play of any kind is down; and kids, in the United States and almost all comparable countries, are fatter than ever.

None of these adverse outcomes was intended, of course, by the adults whose individual decisions ended up contributing to them. But that difference between action taken and action multiplied - between microcosmic intention and macrocosmic effect - is part of what this book is all about. It asks a question that has not been asked satisfactorily or answered so far in our literature on the modern family: Has the United States already reached a "tipping point" in this society of unattended children and teenagers? It also asks whether millions of individual decisions, taken for millions of individual reasons, have cascaded over the social cliff to our larger detriment.

It will be said - it was already said by would-be critics months before my writing was finished - that this book is too hard on women, especially the modern working mother. That is an erroneous characterization of its thesis. There are two main engines of the empty-parent home and its fallout. The first is the divorce/illegitimacy explosion - or what might be called the absent-father problem. The second is what is often the flip side of that explosion, working motherhood - or the absent-mother problem - which is sometimes a real choice and sometimes not. To these I would add a slightly less powerful but still significant force: smaller and geographically scattered extended families - or what might be called the absent-grandparent and -sibling problem. These are the rulers of the empty hearth - not one single social force ("working women") but three.

The literature gathered so far about our experiment in family separation makes one thing clear: From the point of view of a great many adults, the trade-offs among contemporary adult freedoms, and particularly the gains made by women in the paid marketplace, are definitely worth it from the point of view of those free to choose. Whether they are also worth it from another perspective - that of the children and adolescents left behind by the adult exodus into freedom - has not yet been answered, in large part because the adult voices dominating the discussion have been reluctant to ask it.

This book seeks to open that question. It seeks to get adults offstage for the duration of these pages and put children and adolescents front and center instead. It is an effort to ask what the empirical and extra-empirical record shows so far about this relatively new and unknown world in which many parents, children, and siblings spend many or most of their waking hours apart. The essence of home-alone America is just this: Over the past few decades, more and more children have spent considerably less time in the company of their parents or other relatives, and numerous fundamental measures of their well-being have simultaneously gone into what once would have been judged scandalous decline. It is the argument of this book that the connection between those two facts cannot possibly be dismissed as coincidence. At a time when roughly half of all children will have no biological father in the home at some point, and well over half of all mothers with children under the age of six are employed, it is time to stop talking of mere "correlations" and start asking some questions about cause.

© 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.