Nasty, Brutish, and Short: Children in day care-and the mothers who put them there

National Review, May 28, 2001 by Richard Lowry

The feminist answer to any disquieting day-care study is always to call for spending on better quality care. Marian Wright Edelman, among others, sounded this reliable trumpet in response to the new NICHD study. But the search for the holy grail of high-quality care will be everlasting, like the quest for the elusive "true Marxism." What distinguishes high-quality care is lots of intense, personal attention (cooing, stroking, bouncing, babbling) over an extended period of time- in other words, exactly what real mothers would do, but for an hourly wage. This kind of care is hard to find, and expensive. A 1995 University of Colorado study found that only 8 percent of day-care centers caring for infants and toddlers were "high quality." The obvious response to bad news about day care shouldn't be to agitate to subsidize it further, but to urge moms to work less and spend more time with their kids. It's a notion that liberals never want to raise-they would sooner discuss reinstituting Jim Crow or exhuming and reexecuting the Rosenbergs.

Work has, in post-feminist America, become central to the identity of women (and child-rearing doesn't count). Work is an act of historical redemption for all those centuries of oppression and sexism, so that sounding at all skeptical about it is to be identified with those former forces of darkness. When negative day-care studies appear, there's a palpable worry, not that the children are endangered, but that women's careers are. Time.com ran a piece dismissing the NICHD study "in an effort to keep half of America's workforce from running screaming from their offices." Author Susan Chira captured the work-as- redemption sentiment perfectly in her A Mother's Place: Choosing Work and Family Without Guilt or Blame, as she described the release that came with leaving her newborn at home: "When I returned to work [full time], I left behind a gnawing sense of oppression, boredom, and guilt that had cast a pall over my maternity leave" (her maternity leave had been six months long; she took an 18-month leave to write her book).

As the subtitle of Chira's book suggests, avoiding guilt and bad feelings is an obsession for working moms. But where does this guilt come from? Is there one television show, for example, that portrays working mothers in anything but a heroic light? No, this guilt must be something working mothers conjure themselves, some tickle in the back of their brains saying that they shouldn't be abandoning their children for much of the day. (For a snapshot of the sheer physical alienation that leaving a young child at home entails, consider this passage from Brian Robertson's There's No Place Like Work: "Almost three hundred American employers, including Aetna, Eastman Kodak, Cigna, and Home Depot, now offer 'lactation support rooms' where female employees can take regular breaks to attach electric pumps to their breasts in order to collect the milk in bottles for their infants in day care. Some companies, aside from the 'pumping rooms,' have 'lactation consultants' to help mothers solve breast-feeding problems.")