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he debate over
day care is not over; in fact, it never happened. Convincing evidence
has demonstrated that day care is harmful to children, and that toddlers
are better off at home than in group care — but, owing to decades
of liberal deceit, censorship, and hypocrisy, there has never been an
honest discussion of this issue. This maddening tale is the subject of
Brian C. Robertson’s well-researched new exposé.
Robertson’s
determination to confront the child-care establishment with hard facts is
certainly matched by the depth of commitment of the villains in his story:
The “day care deception” is one project that finds liberals arguing to boost
the profits of big business, expand tax cuts for the rich, and sabotage
women’s choices.
From its earliest
days, the feminist movement was on a collision course with what was widely
known to be true about the crucial relationship between mother and child.
To her credit, Simone de Beauvoir confronted this problem honestly when
she argued that “women should not have that choice [to stay home], precisely
because if there is such a choice, too many women will make that one.”
Cultural and economic
forces had to be marshaled to convince mothers that they shouldn’t rely
on husbands for support while sacrificing their careers to care for children
at home. Because the needs of small children are irreconcilable with the
demands of women’s liberation, they would be the littlest casualties in
the battle for equal rights.
In this effort,
feminists — and a commercial day-care industry now worth $36 billion
a year — have been wildly successful. Today, 63 percent of preschoolers
are in regular child-care arrangements other than with their mother at
home. More than half of this child-care population spends 35 hours or
more a week in substitute care. In 1995, the number of preschool children
cared for in organized facilities outnumbered, for the first time on record,
those cared for by babysitters in the home or in family-run day care.
Robertson details
the consistent research findings showing that day care is physically and
emotionally harmful — but only a few brave experts are willing to
risk the wrath of the establishment by talking about this evidence. One
of them is Dr. Burton White, a leading expert on the first three years
of life, who continues to plead with mothers not to delegate the care
of their children to anyone else in the early years because “babies form
their first human attachment only once.” More typical is Dr. Benjamin
Spock, who, after flatly informing 1950s mothers that day nurseries are
“no good for infants,” deleted this advice from 1990s editions of his
manual because it made working mothers feel guilty (and to no avail, because
they were headed to work anyway). Spock himself admitted: “It’s a cowardly
thing that I did; I just tossed it in subsequent editions.”
In 1977, researcher
Selma Fraiberg argued that even high-quality day care is harmful because
it prevents children from forming the healthy attachment to one caregiver
that allows them, in turn, to form lasting commitments as adults. Her
book, Every Child’s Birthright, was attacked for promoting an agenda
that was off-message for the feminist project. But the bad news kept coming.
That same year, the disappointing results were in on a pilot program at
Yale University designed to provide the optimal day-care setting. The
researchers concluded: “Group care, even under the best circumstances,
is stressful for very young children.” Seemingly every year since has
brought fresh evidence about the negative effects of day care on young
children; by 1991, one social scientist was revealing a most unscientific
frame of mind by angrily declaring that “psychologists must refuse to
undertake any more research that looks for the negative consequences of
other-than-mother care.”
Because mothers
of young children working outside the home are an immutable “fact” of
modern life, feminists have had to be creative. They have dreamed up theories
about the speed-bonding that can take place between mothers and babies
in mere days, and have argued (with no supporting evidence) that children
cared for by their mothers alone are disadvantaged. Following the feminists’
lead, media coverage generally ignores the majority of the evidence and
focuses instead on the happier study results found in advocacy articles.
When a comprehensive government-funded study clearly showed that longer
hours in non-maternal care correlated with behavior problems, it was argued
that such problems weren’t actually problems at all. After all, Time
magazine pointed out, demanding attention is a “healthy skill to develop
if you are in a room with 16 other kids.” One editorial argued that an
aggressive kindergartener might grow up to be an aggressive CEO rather
than a mere bully.
Brian Robertson
spends some quality time researching the researchers. Dr. Sandra Scarr,
one of the most influential day-care researchers, has published four books
and over 200 articles that amount to a massive corpus of propaganda. She
argues that babies have no particular need for their biological mothers,
that they flourish by having numerous caregivers, and that the maternal
instinct is the result of cultural conditioning. She has been on the faculties
of Penn, Yale, and the University of Virginia; in a conflict of interest
that wouldn’t be tolerated in any other field, she has also served on
the board of directors of the largest day-care chain in the country, where
she became CEO while also serving as president of the American Psychological
Society.
The only question
Brian Robertson leaves unanswered is exactly who has been deceived. The
guilt that daily accompanies working mothers to the office is explained
by polls that consistently show that even dual-career couples believe
children are better off if cared for by a mother at home. Despite the
best efforts of the child-care establishment, it appears that mothers
and fathers continue to know best. It’s government policymakers who know
so little.
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