Day Care: Sick Plus Bad Equals Good? Part 2

by Mary Eberstadt

(Page 7 of 7)

What could be more natural than that? Of course women and men want to enjoy their children; children are enormously enjoyable. But in that one-sided focus on what women want, a hidden but very real insensitivity betrays itself once more. If mother-child separation is so hard on mothers that even pro-separation feminists see it feelingly, then how much worse is that separation for a baby or toddler who does not understand time or distance? Once more, doesn't that added confusion and distress, all the harder for a being unable to grasp what is happening, carry moral weight of its own?

A third body of evidence that suggests how far our separationist experiment has dulled our thinkers to real babies and children is this: Virtually every sophisticated school of thought now ascendant has participated one way or another in the rationalization of hands-off parenting. In an important book published in 1999, Kay S. Hymowitz broke particularly crucial theoretical ground explaining just this. She examined the state of American childhood, not from the bottom up but from the top, at the level of the numerous contemporary theories that have served to justify parental disengagement. Ready or Not: Why Treating Children as Small Adults Endangers Their Future - and Ours outlined in field after field (law, education, and psychology both popular and academic) how the past thirty years have seen a transformation in the way children are perceived - one that de-emphasizes adult guidance and authority while ultra-emphasizing the intrinsic capacities of the child in the absence of such guidance. Uniting all these apparently disparate theories, she demonstrated, is "the idea of children as capable, rational, and autonomous, as beings endowed with all the qualities necessary for their entrance into the adult world - qualities such as talents, interests, values, conscience and a conscious sense of themselves."

The same insistence that Hymowitz discerned in elite fields of thought is true also of popular child-rearing advice books, which take their direction from a medical establishment profoundly reluctant to roil the political waters over day care. Almost all leading cultural authorities, including the American Academy of Pediatrics, have now managed a good word for the putative benefits of "early socialization," which is to say nonparental child-rearing; and though some are careful about the issue of institutional care, almost all glow with the putative benefits of having mothers out of the house. The country's leading popular child care experts have all revised downward over the years their estimations of just how much young children need their mothers, with every single one concluding that children need less of their mother's time and presence than was previously thought.

Then there is the telling literature of a different sort: the kind for children themselves. This literature emphasizes parental needs and resolutely draws a happy face over children's longings; pamphlets exhort those too young to tie their shoes to be "independent," and stories, articles, and self-help columns share the message that the happy and fulfilled (that is, less encumbered) parent is also the better parent. Has anyone strolled the children's aisles of the bookstore lately? Have you seen a copy of Carl Goes to Day Care or any of the many other books for children who are years away from reading - who, indeed, don't even have all their baby teeth yet - but are targeted for the theme that separating from Mommy every morning isn't all that bad? Do we really think the new get-tough approach reflected in these texts for tots is in any way an improvement on the at-home adventures of Dick and Jane?

Those texts are also only one manifestation of the desensitization that proceeds apace. Not only ideologically but also practically, the signs of other envelope-pushing are out there - including round-the-clock day care, or night care, a trend already established in Scandinavia and now beginning to appear in the United States in response to parental demand.26 Though only a dozen or so centers currently exist, every reporter mentioning the trend predicts robust growth; "some people have to be available [for work] at all hours," as one trend analyst puts it.27 And what is it like for these children who are not even allowed the familiarity of their own beds? Not to worry. After all, "each child brings something special to his or her cot: a pillow, a well-worn blanket, a favorite toy."

Similarly, during 2003 alone, several stories sprang up around the country about parents using public libraries - yes, libraries - as emergency day care centers, including depositing children there for the day who are far too young to read.28 In short, from real-life stories to expert literature of all sorts, there is one and only one prevailing cultural answer to the question of just how much babies and toddlers need, and it's this: They need less than previously thought.

Shrinking the Need Down to Size

Laura Schlessinger once asked members of an audience to stand up "if you could . . . come back as an infant . . . raised by a day care worker, a nanny, or a babysitter." No one did, and Schlessinger went on to ask why anyone who could choose otherwise would prefer this for their children. In effect, she was asking a question not about outcomes, but about the immediate moral content of the experiment. Of course she was excoriated in the usual places. But should she have been? How many readers thinking of their own childhoods would answer her question any other way?

In sum, the real trouble with day care is twofold: One, it increases the likelihood that kids will be unhappy, and two, the chronic rationalization of that unhappiness renders adults less sensitive to children's needs and demands in any form. Of course, as advocates often say, most children not in home care are likely to turn out fine (they are resilient). Of course, many adults have to work, and some absolutely have to use out-of-home care. Of course, no one can have his mother all the time, and likely no one should. Of course also, by extension, children are only one of several actors in any given drama, even if they are also the most vulnerable; in other words, their immediate emotional needs cannot and do not always trump.

But can they, should they, ever trump? That is the question advocates will not answer. Single parents, frantic parents, infants being packed off to hospital-style rows of cribs called "school," toddlers who go for institutionalized walks roped together like members of a miniature chain gang - this is what the experiment means day to day. But our separationists manage to worry instead about the opposite: an alleged excess of maternalism, of "overparenting" (Joan K. Peters), an oppressive "mommy myth" (Susan J. Douglas and Meredith W. Michaels), and all the other phantoms said to be haunting and impeding - who else? - the modern mother.

Their own rhetoric and that of the long-running day care wars proves overwhelmingly otherwise, and so do the plain facts. The 2000 census clinched the point that more and more mothers continue to opt out. Between 1975 and 1993 the percentage of children under age six with employed mothers rose from 33 to 55 percent. By 2000 it had climbed to 70 percent. Of course not all those women are working full-time and out of the house, but the trend away from home and toward the workplace is very clear. And so is what it represents: the near-total cultural about-face in the way society views working mothers. Once, as has been widely noted, staying home with one's children was judged the right thing to do, both intrinsically and for reasons of the greater good, by mothers, fathers, and most of the rest of society. Today, the social expectations are exactly reversed.

Before we start worrying ourselves about the alleged perils of too much mothering, we might first look at how much energy and sophisticated thought continues to go into rationalizing too little mothering and what exactly that says about us. We have collectively become one of Shakespeare's most unattractive characters - wicked daughter Goneril who, when faced with an old father demanding his prerogatives of age, diminishes those wants of his over and over. However many horses and knights King Lear demands, she allows fewer; whatever he agrees to, she reduces further still. Just so, contrary to the bitter complaints of our separationists, has our social standard governing exactly what babies and children can demand of us veered in the direction of less. Once upon a time, after all, parents and experts worried about whether five-year-olds needed a mother in the house; now, when kindergarten has become full days in many or even most districts, and before- and after- school programs abound, that worry has apparently gone the way of the buggy whip. Not so long ago, parents and experts wondered whether two- and three-year-olds could thrive if they were out of their homes and away from their families at preschools or day care all day, but when packing them off became routine rather than rare, and subjecting them to a rotating set of strangers became thought of as a head start, a good many adults with other things to do decided that that problem had been pretty much solved, too. Having so efficiently shrunk the pool of children we might need to worry about by quite a lot, we now reduce ourselves to scholastic nitpicking over the few who are left: infants and toddlers.

Well, how about it? What real need does a five-year-old have of his mother or home? What need does a three-year-old have? A babe in arms?

King Lear has a pretty famous answer to questions like those: Oh, reason not the need. What the ideological devotion to day care finally amounts to is just that - reasoning the need, ruthlessly trying to square what for the youngest children will always be a circle with many orbits but only one center.

© 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.