Day Care: Sick Plus Bad Equals Good?

by Mary Eberstadt

(Page 6 of 7)

For parents who do not have options apart from institutional care, the increased likelihood that day care children will be sick and unhappy are facts of life. They are necessary evils, regrettable but far better than the alternative, which is no care at all. And yet the most curious fact in all our day care debate, one that brings us to a third and very interesting sort of harm being caused in all this, is that these problems are not seen that way by certain other adults - namely, the separationists dominant in the day care debate.These advocates do not see institutional care as a "necessary evil." They do not write of mother-baby separation with the ambivalence most mothers feel. They refuse to acknowledge that day care might cause damage of any kind to any child - unlike the many parents who must use it and who worry about just that. The least analyzed and perhaps also the weirdest dimension of our day care wars so far is the insistence by such advocates that what most people think is bad news - more sick kids and worse-behaved ones - is actually good and maybe even great. And this brings us to a third kind of harm in our experiment in separation: The ideological defense of separationism is further coarsening adult moral sensibility.

For example, anyone actually charged with the care of little children knows that a sick baby or toddler is a uniquely pitiful thing, in part because such a child is too young to understand why. Yet such natural empathy is not the prism through which the sick child problem in day care is viewed by our advocates. Generally speaking, their response to the sick kids problem has run one of two ways: Either ignore it altogether or rewrite the script so that sicker is actually better.

Thus, in A Mother's Place: Choosing Work and Family Without Guilt or Blame, Susan Chira acknowledges "several studies have also shown that children in day care suffer from more ear infections and illnesses in general," and then brushes it off with "[but] they are hardier when they are older." Susan Faludi in Backlash sounds the same note: "They soon build up immunities." Similarly, when a well-publicized 2002 study showed that babies and toddlers in day care get sick more often than those at home - about twice as many colds, for example - the advocate cheer going up around the country was notably creepy. As one lead researcher explained, this finding "lifts a heavy stone off the backs of guilt-ridden parents who put their children in large day care centers. The benefit to having colds in the toddler years is that kids miss less school later when it counts."

Now step back from this discussion for a moment and ask yourself: If we were talking about anything but day care here, would anyone be caught cheering for the idea that some little children get sick twice as often as others? I think we all know the answer to that one. And that dissonance raises the question of what exactly is going on with this sort of callousness about small children. It is very hard to spend even a day in charge of a sick baby or toddler and be able to accept the Nietzschean line that what does not kill him will make him stronger - in other words, that being sick is good for him. But what if you are not around it, if it has been made someone else's problem? Might you then be a little less tuned in to just how much a sick baby or toddler needs?

And just as some people have managed to find "good news" in the increase in sick kids, so, too, has there been no lack of advocates who give a thumbs-up to the documented increase in aggression and other behavioral trouble. Belsky antagonist Allison Clarke-Stewart, for example, rationalized the aggression problem in 1989 this way: "Children who have been in day care think for themselves and want their own way" and "are not willing to comply with adults' arbitrary rules." Others have gone further. A University of Chicago psychologist offered the particularly Orwellian response to the 2001 NICHD study that "aggression" was actually "self-assertion" and that day care babies and toddlers were simply "much more sturdy little interactors" than tots at home. A writer for Salon similarly opined that it is "better to be smart and cheeky than dim and placid." It was elsewhere suggested that the traits being measured by NICHD are the same alpha qualities of future corporate titans. As with the advocates who have no trouble finding a silver lining in sick kids, so has there been no shortage of those who have translated bad behavior into diapered rugged individualism.

And here again the moral sensibility of our separationists seems to be a different order from that of most people - including most parents, whether they use day care or not. Anyone who has ever done playground duty with small children knows exactly the difference between an "assertive" little boy playing loudly with a truck and another little boy who just used the same truck to hit another child over the head. Just about anyone who has spent time around small children knows the difference between real aggression and childish high spirits. But what about parents who aren't around to learn this much in the first place? Might they not have a dimmer understanding of that distinction than other people do?

And here is the point in the argument where we leave the narrow matter of institutional care and look more widely at what is said about babies and children more generally in the service of the separationist experiment. Here, too, interestingly enough, the same sort of callousness implicit and explicit in the day care literature makes routine appearances. Consider a recent example from the letters page of the Atlantic. Writer Caitlin Flanagan had recently penned a largely favorable review of a book by Laura Schlessinger, a review that angered some readers, including one named Nancy, who chided Flanagan for worrying overmuch about middle-class children of divorce. Flanagan aptly replied, "Since writing my review of Laura Schlessinger's new book, I have had countless people tell me that they can't stand her because she's 'mean.' But Laura says you'll hurt a child if you divorce; don't do it. Nancy says she can't work up much compassion for a nine-year-old from a broken home. So who's mean?"

What Flanagan did not go on to say in her short space, but what anyone reading the cable traffic on separationism will know, is that this bitter letter writer to the Atlantic is not alone. She represents a robust tradition of advocates and ideologues who have spent decades doing just what she did: getting very worked up over what mothers ought to have freedom to do and, simultaneously, becoming very dismissive of the possible fallout for children. And once again it seems fair to ask whether practicing what one preaches has had the effect of numbing our separationist advocates just a little as to what babies and children actually need.

Look, for example, at what counts as the moral limbo bar in the day care debate - the lowest one imaginable. Essentially, advocates have settled for this position: If it doesn't lead to Columbine, bring it on. But that is obviously a very low perch from which to judge day care or anything else. Commenting on the NICHD study linking time spent in day care to aggression, scholar Stanley Kurtz observed something important that ought also to have been obvious to other readers: that the adverse implications were hardly limited to the kids bullying and hitting and that things were likely quite a bit worse than the numbers on aggression alone might suggest. Rather, "Chances are, if a significant percentage of children in day care evidence clear behavioral problems, or show up as insecurely attached to their mothers, then there are plenty of other children in less obvious, but still significant trouble. If some kids are responding to chronic separation from their mothers with anger, surely others are feeling depressed. Low-level depression is a lot harder to find and verify observationally than obvious classroom bullying, but that doesn't mean it's not there." Less obvious, but still significant trouble. For advocates hardened by the demands of separationism, this kind of moral nuance does not exist.

Similarly, the insistence on the equality of "good" institutional care simply erases from the equation something important and also subjective: how very young humans see the world. Routine and familiarity are everything for small children. Yes, everything. I am no absolutist about nonmaternal care - with four children that would be a physically and intellectually untenable position. Very often some warm body - an older sibling, a babysitter, my husband, assorted grandparents - stays with my youngest so that I can do any one of the many things that small children make difficult or impossible. But the separationist insistence that it doesn't matter whether a baby or toddler is in the house or not simply rings ignorant of what the first two or three years of life are all about. Just being at home carries with it all those nonparental things so comforting to little children - from a familiar bump in the wall to the presence of a pet or sibling to a ripped-up book that must be found this minute.

Even the recent boomlet of lifestyle pieces about mostly well-off career women who have decided to stay home with their small children exhibits an inadvertently revealing one-sidedness of feeling - again, one obviously connected to the influence of separationist thought. One of the more discussed New York Times Magazine articles in 2003, for example, was "The Opt-Out Revolution" by Lisa Belkin. It argued about the "glass ceiling" problem that more women aren't hitting because they just don't want to, and one reason they don't want to is that they want to enjoy the company of their children. Similarly, Time magazine's cover story in March 2004, "The Case for Staying Home," cited dropping out of the rat race and enjoying the children as two lures that are perhaps more powerful than yesterday's generation of mothers understood. Even mothers who are vigorously pro-separation speak of the same unbidden pull they feel toward their children. Joan K. Peters, as staunch a defender of day care as any, has herself related, "Once, when I was late [getting home from work], I arrived nearly hysterical with worry that I had passed some absolute point of emotional safety for my infant - that in divine retribution for my absence, something awful might have happened. I was so upset that I snatched my daughter from my babysitter's arms and sank with her on the couch, holding my coat around us both."

© 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.