A Mother’s Love
If it takes a village to raise a child in Africa, why not here?

By Stanley Kurtz, fellow, the Hudson Institute.
May 12-13, 2001

ow that the initial wave of reactions to the controversial government-funded day-care study has run its course, it's

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time to take a step back. Why is day care a problem in this country? Why has this study ruffled so many feathers? Is it possible to speak truthfully about what's at stake in the day-care dispute? And what are the prospects for a solution?

To answer these questions, we need to recognize that the greatest threat to day care is love. I know that sounds like old news — and totally smarmy to boot. But the challenge posed to day care by love is deeper than you might think.

Conservatives and feminists usually line up on opposite sides of an argument about human nature. Conservatives insist that children have a natural and irreplaceable need for their mother's love. Feminists answer that a restructured society can find new ways to meet children's needs. After all, there are plenty of countries where children are raised cooperatively by relatives, neighbors, and mothers. If it takes a village to raise a child in Africa, why not here? There's an answer to that question, and the answer is "love."

Feminists are correct to say that children outside of Western society are raised by multiple caretakers. But the twist is, cultures that rely on large groups of caretakers treat their children in ways that we never would, or could. In non-Western societies, precisely because so much of life revolves around groups, one-to-one bonds of love are downplayed — even feared. That's because intense romantic love tends to break couples away from the group. These are the sorts of societies that practice arranged marriage.

And it isn't just romantic love that gets downplayed in group-oriented societies. There's also a tendency to play down the attachment between a mother and her child. Since a child is thought of as belonging to the entire group, parents are often discouraged from making too much of their offspring — particularly when neighbors or kin are around. Childcare researchers who travel to non-Western societies are often struck by how little eye contact, cooing, and empathic attention they find between mothers and children. Mothers feed their children frequently in these societies, and hold them continuously, but they often don't interact with them emotionally and verbally the way we do in the West. Mothers in these cultures may still feel a strong emotional connection to their children, but in both childrearing and in marriage, the one-to-one empathic relationship we call "love" tends to be discouraged.

That has everything to do with the reasons why day care remains controversial for Americans. Individual freedom is the key to American life, and free individuals build families through one-to-one love: love that is freely chosen, and love that is based upon the appreciation of one unique individual for another. Unlike mothers in many parts of the world, American mothers are preoccupied with, and delighted by, the unique characteristics of their babies. They talk to their babies, watch them, and echo their coos and moods in ways that mothers in traditional parts of India or Africa generally do not. Instead of teaching their children to feel like responsible members of an honorable village or kin group, American mothers teach their children to feel like uniquely loved individuals. So there really is something "cultural," and not just "natural," about the way we raise our children. But everything about America's individualist and love-based culture of child rearing makes it harder — not easier — for us to put our kids into day care.

Working mothers in India, by contrast, are known for having a relatively easy time of it. That's because they're used to being one of a number of caretakers, and can generally leave their kids with someone else in the extended family. But American mothers are far more likely to be troubled by day care — precisely because the way we Americans raise our kids depends upon knowing a child — and being known by him — as a unique and irreplaceable object of love.

So the ultimate irony is that the very same American individualism that has feminists demanding absolute equality with men makes it almost impossible for women to achieve it. Our individualism drives our ever-more-radical demands for equality, but it also makes us build our families upon love. And love is a jealous mistress.

Women nowadays want equality with men, but they also want to express their unique personalities through the way they love and raise their children. That means it's hard to give those kids up for as long as it would take to get to the top of the corporate ladder. Even if a woman were convinced that spending the larger share of the week in day care would do her child no harm, it would still be difficult to give that child up. That's because day care isn't her care. And especially nowadays, the whole point of raising a child is to express your individuality through the unique and irreplaceable bond you cement with your child. So, the cultural argument here actually tells on the side of the conservatives. Precisely because of our democratic, individualist culture, we Americans will never fully reconcile ourselves to day care.

The interesting thing about the day-care fracas is how little it took to ignite the tinderbox of working-mother guilt that's been lurking just out of sight for decades. Feminist critics of the newly released day-care study have written as though this research was merely the culminating moment in a near-constant bombardment of social messages meant to condemn working mothers for their shirking. But the truth is, there have been only two major studies — released 15 years apart — that suggest serious potential problems with day care. There might easily have been more, but the firestorm of criticism provoked by the first study sent a very clear warning to any researchers thinking of putting feminist orthodoxy on this subject to the test.

And that's not all. Far from condemning working mothers, nearly all advice books on child rearing available today have been scrupulously purged of anything that might sound a discordant note on the subject of day care or working mothers. This was established in May of 1995 in a wonderful article in Commentary by Mary Eberstadt entitled, "Putting Children Last." In that article, Eberstadt shows that even those child-rearing experts most inclined to be skeptical of extended early separations between mothers and children — people like Dr. Spock and T. Berry Brazelton — were long ago forced by feminist critics to remove any suggestions from their books that early extended day care might be a problem. In fact, Eberstadt shows that most popularly available writing on mothering now claims that day care is not only equal to home care — but actually better. As to how much maternal absenteeism might be too much, according to Eberstadt, none of the advice books any longer dares to say.

So in reality, criticisms of working mothers have long since been banned from our magazines and bookstores. How, then, can the furor over the latest day-care study be anything but a manifestation of the silent guilt of working mothers — guilt that derives, not from negative "social messages," but from a disturbance in the unique and irreplaceable relationship of love at the heart of our practice of mothering?

Feminists have offered two sorts of reactions to the recent findings on potential risks to children left in day care for extended periods. By far the most widespread response has been a lawyer-like attempt to deny or mitigate the obvious implications of the findings.

Nearly every feminist attack on the NIH study, for example, highlights the fact that the jump in the aggressiveness of children in prolonged day care "falls within the normal range" of childhood aggression. That makes it sound as though nothing disturbing is going on. It may be true that kids left in day care for most of the week aren't being turned into psychopathic killers, but that's not the point. It may be entirely "normal" to have classroom bullies, but who wants their child to be that bully?

Ah, but then there was Washington Post columnist Marjorie Williams's extraordinary column, "Mommy At Her Desk." For all the feminist obfuscation and denial, Williams's column was that rare, honest response that quickly takes us to the heart of the matter. After ticking off the usual happy-faced rationalizations for day care, Williams came back to the "persistent private kernel of doubt and remorse that almost 40 years of social change have left pretty much intact." Williams said she'd finally given up on finding The Answer — that perfect balance between work and mothering that would at last relieve her of her guilt. "... I finally realized, my task was not to find out the one answer, but to learn how to live with the knowledge that in pursuing my work, I am in some degree acting selfishly." It's not that Williams has decided to give up her work. She's simply acknowledged the fact that there's an inescapable trade-off between the fulfillment she gets from her work, and the happiness of her children.

That is the truth. And as I've said before, it isn't necessary for a child to manifest empirically measurable levels of classroom bullying for that trade-off to be real. Simple but persistent disappointment will do.

However assiduously feminists attempt to bury the relevant research or writing, the day-care debate is not going to disappear. This is one of those areas where the culture wars are doomed to lurch on, unresolved, for years. Again and again, feminists tell their conservative critics that the toothpaste isn't going back in the tube. Women are working, and that won't change. Maybe not. But that "persistent and private kernel of doubt and remorse" isn't going anywhere either. Our internal conflicts over day care are ineradicable. That's because the same irrepressible yearning for individual freedom and equality that powers feminism also puts a single mother's love at the soul and center of childcare. There may be no easy way — as individuals or as a society — to strike the balance. But let's begin by admitting the truth. The trade-off between a mother's workplace fulfillment and the happiness of her children is real.