The Real Trouble with Day Care

by Mary Eberstadt

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Not too long ago - ironically, on a day I had spent buried under just a little of the vast literature on what is called "early child development" - our ten-year-old daughter skipped home from school with some unexpectedly apt news. Her class would soon be volunteering some time at a local day care center - and not just any day care center, but the snazziest of several in our Washington, D.C., neighborhood, a cheerful and inviting high-end sort of place much prized by the parents whose infants and small children spend their weekdays there.

Like most girls her age, this one adores babies and toddlers, so she was elated at the idea. It was all the more surprising then when she returned home on the day of her visit with a long face. As things turned out, the day care center had not been the fun she had expected, and the reason was this: "There was a boy, a little boy, who was really sick and cried the whole time. His ear was all red, and he shrieked if they even touched it. The day care ladies were nice and everything, but he wouldn't stop. It was just so sad. All he did was keep screaming the same thing over and over: Mommy! Mommy! Mommy!"

In this way a distressed ten-year-old, empathizing with an even more distressed two-year-old, captured something I had been struggling to formulate for weeks - namely, exactly what our long-running national controversy over institutional child care is not about. It is not about that screaming toddler. It is not in fact about the immediate emotional experience of any toddlers or babies who spend most of their waking hours out of their homes and in nonfamily care. That is to say, for all the many things our discussion is about, it is not about this perhaps most prosaic of facts: institutional care as it is experienced by real, live, very small children.

No, our ongoing national child care debate - and it is a real enough debate, among the most heavily documented controversies of our time - is a more sanitized, abstract, at times even a fastidious thing. It is told of, by, and for educated adults, and its vernacular is that of scholarly social science. Does day care affect long-term "personality development"? "Cognitive ability"? "Educational readiness"? Is "attachment theory" out and "early socialization" in? Where are the "longitudinal data" in all this, and just how "statistically significant" are those sample sizes? These are the sorts of things that we talk about when we talk about day care, whether we ourselves are "for" it or not.

And just as the argument over institutional care is dominated by talk of outcomes and effects, so also is it advocated on the same basis: results. "My kids got dropped off at day care," as a feminist put it one Mother's Day in the New York Times, "and one is now finishing up at Brown, and the other went through Harvard and Oxford." "Our son," parallel-bragged another in the Washington Post, also that Mother's Day, "got a 3.6 grade point average in grad school and was the valedictorian of his class" - and in addition, "Our daughter [is a] Shakespearean actress." The day care proof, as advocates see it, is in the achievement pudding. In a 1997 book called When Mothers Work: Loving Our Children Without Sacrificing Ourselves, Joan K. Peters summarizes some of the research behind such boosterism: this British study argues that children of employed mothers read better than those of at-home ones; that American study claims that children left in day care from one month on develop higher cognitive and language abilities; and Alison Clarke-Stewart's work argues that day care children are more confident and "socially skilled" than others.

It is not only advocates who think that institutional care rises or falls by the standard of outcomes, but also, for different reasons, the critics of institutional care. For the most part these writers make the opposite empirical point - either that data do not suggest the rosy outcomes advocates believe in or that the "good" data on cognitive and language skills are outweighed by the "bad" data on a variety of behavioral problems. The work of Jay Belsky, perhaps the best-known authority to raise questions about day care's possible negative impact on some children, exhibits both lines of empirical criticism. So does researcher Brian C. Robertson's 2003 book, Day Care Deception: What the Child Care Establishment Isn't Telling Us, which uses the "bad" data to argue that if parents knew more about the real facts of day care, they would try harder to avoid it. Moreover, even critics who have made nonempirical arguments against institutional care tend to invoke the long run - that is, the imagined effect on such protocitizens down the road. One particularly interesting recent example is a 2003 essay called "A Schoolhouse Built by Hobbes" by Bryce Christensen, which argues against day care on the grounds that it weakens the attachment to family necessary for later character formation, thus contributing to the overindividuation of American society.

Generally speaking, then, both the critics and the advocates of institutional care agree about one thing: It is the effects, whether behavioral or cognitive or other, that make or break the case for day care. This emphasis on the long run is only natural, of course; parents do indeed care very much about results of all kinds. In fact, as the ones most likely to have the long-term interests of the child at heart, parents by definition must care about such things; it would be perverse if they did not.

Yet this focus on the long term, natural as it may be, has also obscured one important related point: To say that day care should be judged on the long-term results is not to say that those results are the only measure by which to judge this experiment. Here, as in other serious arguments, ends aren't everything; the question of what happens in the here and now also needs to be factored in.

Let us momentarily grant for the sake of argument that most children who grow up in institutional care turn out fine. To advocates this is where the controversy over day care begins and ends; case closed. But they are wrong. The notion that "most kids will turn out fine anyway" does not end the question of whether institutional care is good or bad; actually, it should be only the beginning. That other question, about immediate effects, demands to be answered, too. It is not about whether day care might keep your child out of Harvard ten or twenty years from now or launch him into it, but, rather, about the independent right or wrong of what happens to him day to day during the years that he is most vulnerable and unknowing. Reduced to its simplest form, that inquiry goes something like this: What about the way this radical change in care is experienced by babies and young children? Do we know anything about that, and, if so, does that knowledge deserve any moral weight at all?

This chapter is an attempt to answer that question about contemporaneous as opposed to long-term harm. It argues that institutional care is a bad idea for parents who do have a choice because it raises the quotient of immediate unhappiness in various forms among significant numbers of children, and the continuing ideological promotion of such separation causes the related harm of desensitizing adults to what babies and children actually need. Yes, many parents have to use day care. But there is a difference between having to use it and celebrating the institution full-throttle. What follows is an argument about why that difference matters.

© 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.