The Guilt Game
The truth about day care.

By Stanley Kurtz, fellow, the Hudson Institute
April 26, 2001 9:10 a.m.

ince the release of last week's research findings on the dangers of day care for kindergarteners, the media have been busy emphasizing the limitations of scientific research. These are the same folks who used to scoff at the tobacco industry's claim that the relationship between smoking and cancer was merely an unexplained coincidence. Now we're told that a clear correlation between time in day care and behavioral problems in school can be dismissed until all the causal arrows are drawn. Are we willing to wait that long?

The limitations of empirical scientific research on child rearing are legion, but the media to date has spun them in one direction only. Striking a pose of above-the-fray scientific detachment, New York Times reporter Sheryl Gay Stolberg had a piece in last Sunday's "Week in Review" that could have been titled, "A Thousand Reasons Not To Pay Any Attention To Studies That Knock Day Care." The silly old public, we were told, ignores the many qualifications on research findings, and looks instead for a superficial bottom line. But real scientists, Stolberg said, recognize what research does not establish, as well as what it does.

Stolberg has a point. Given the limitations of science, the effects of day care are unlikely to be precisely as the recent study suggests. They're almost certain to be worse. So far, we've only learned about the harms of day care that can be easily measured. But what's easily measurable and what's real are two different things.

Fifteen years ago, Jay Belsky, the principal investigator of the new day-care study, unleashed the wrath of America's feminists for daring to publish research suggesting that children placed in day care for more than 20 hours a week were at risk of insecure attachment to their mothers. "Insecure attachment" is a technical term for a significant disturbance of relation between mother and child, as indicated by some very particular empirical psychological tests. Those tests of maternal-infant attachment are probably the best scientific instruments we have for making sense of a child's rich and complex emotional world. But truth to tell, they are very rough instruments indeed.

A child who tests out as "insecurely attached" to his mother has definitely got a problem. But the designation of "secure attachment" in no way assures that a particular child isn't facing lots of inner turmoil. Plenty of messed-up little dudes and dudettes register a technical designation of "securely attached." The best observational tests on preschoolers reliably pick out only the most serious problems. That means when a study points to the obvious negative effects of day care on a few easily identifiable problem children, others are likely to be suffering in ways that are harder to verify, but nonetheless real. That's one of the limitations of science that our detached and scientific corps of feminist journalists has so far failed to point out.

Stolberg's story in the Times points to the fact that even though 17 percent of children spending large amounts of time in day care experienced behavioral problems, "83 percent of them did just fine." This argument was repeated later that day by reporters like Cokie Roberts and Gwen Ifill. But Belsky's research did not establish that 83 percent of children spending most of the week in day care are doing "just fine." He merely established that 17 percent of them have a tendency to bullying and disruptive behavior.

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.

Meanwhile, the press has offered up a whole series of one-sided rationalizations for dismissing Belsky's findings. We're told that it's unrealistic to expect women to stay home with their children when a third of America's families will fall below the poverty line unless the mother works. Well then, how about at least calling on upper-middle-class women to spend more time with their kids? Or how about supporting pro-marriage initiatives that might prevent single mothers from having to choose between day care and destitution? Funny, but none of these ideas has yet occurred to the phalanx of feminist journalists lined up in opposition to Belsky.

Belsky himself, careful scientist that he is, makes it clear that his research establishes only correlation, not cause. The press jumped all over that one, turning somersaults trying to come up with a way to explain the findings that would not indict day care. No one dared connect the dots on the most obvious explanation. Isn't it apparent when kids packed off to day care for a huge chunk of the work week begin to exhibit "cruelty," "explosive behavior," and "demands for a lot of attention" that they are angry and bereft at the loss of their mother?

But here's the catch. This will be almost impossible to prove. Modern molecular biology may finally have been able to identify the genetic changes in the lung caused by smoking, but empirical psychology simply has no equivalent of electron microscopes and DNA research. The sort of in-depth interviewing that it would take to make sense of a child's subjective reaction to separation from his mother could never be operationalized in a testable way, at least not to the satisfaction of all the contending parties in this dispute. Of course smoking was causing cancer long before we were able to prove it. Something's hurting those kids. And it isn't too difficult to see what it is. Do we really want to wait around for a scientific smoking gun that will never come?

But there's something obvious that may be the best evidence of all about the harmful effects of day care. The one thing every journalist is quick to acknowledge is that working mothers already feel extremely guilty about leaving their children. The existence of this free-floating mass of working-mother guilt is why the very existence of studies like Belsky's are supposed to constitute a cruel and gratuitous attack on women. Feminists talk about this working-mother guilt as though it's been artificially imposed by "society." But the guilt derives from the process of mothering itself, and it tells us something tremendously important about what's been going wrong with America's mothering.

I don't mean to suggest that the mere existence of maternal guilt proves that a woman is a bad mother. On the contrary, a certain level of guilt is a necessary part of being a good mother — or a good person. Someone who is "conscientious," says the dictionary, is "obedient or loyal to conscience; habitually governed by a sense of duty; scrupulous." Of course everyone should be conscientious about their duties to others, but especially in this age of social atomization, it's mothers, above anyone else, who understand the burdens and glories of being obligated to another human being. A conscientious mother — mother loyal to her conscience — inevitably knows and struggles with a certain level of guilt. Such a mother is good. Many of us have forgotten the inescapable necessity of some reasonable sense of guilt to any human flourishing. Mothers cannot forget.

But the excruciating sense of guilt that we're told now dogs working mothers is something else again. Something like that cannot be caused by superficial "social messages" like the Belsky study. That sort of guilt can only come from a deep internal sense that the unique and loving connection with a child is being interrupted too frequently. An ability to face and understand the meaning of this guilt is far and away the most subtle, important, and powerful diagnostic test of mothering that we have. Do we still have the strength — as individuals, and as a society — to remain loyal to this call of conscience?