Child's play

National Review, May 19, 1997 by Ramesh Ponnuru

WASHINGTON, D.C.

A lot of parents of small children received good news on the morning of April 4. "Day Care Study Offers Reassurance to Working Parents," ran the Washington Post headline. USA Today had the same story ("Day care not harmful to growth or bonding"), and a quote from the study's coordinator, Sarah Friedman: "These are heartwarming findings." If parents tuned in to ABC's Good Morning America, they could catch Joan Lunden interviewing Dr. Friedman. Or they could see her on CNN (introduced with, "Here's some good news . . .").

These stories were based on a press release the previous day by the National Institute for Child Health and Human Development. The Post summarized it this way: "As a group, children in day care learn to think and talk just as well as those cared for by their mothers. . . . [but] the quality of care matters." All the stories dutifully noted these revelations; the New York Times ran a story taken straight from the press release.

The study, like the report on an earlier phase of the research publicized a year before, was not published in a scientific journal. The press release said that its findings would be presented at a child-development conference on the afternoon of the 4th (i.e., after the wave of uncritical press accounts). Even then, no paper was presented; the results were simply posted on a wall. It took five days for the skeptics at the indispensable Statistical Assessment Service (STATS), which monitors media misuses of data, to obtain the research.

When they did, it turned out that most of these kids in "non-maternal care" weren't in what most people think of as day care at all: their fathers or grandmothers were taking care of them. And while previous research indicated that problems set in for children who spend more than twenty hours a week in care, this study lumped kids below the threshold with others above it. "It's science by press release," complains STATS research director David Murray. That did not stop Hillary Rodham Clinton from devoting a column to the sub- ject: "Here is some news that should bring peace of mind to millions of parents. . . ."

Two weeks later, the First Lady presided over a White House Conference on the Brain designed to promote early-childhood education, long a hobbyhorse of the Left. What's new is that the familiar claims about the importance of such education to cognitive development are now being treated as a neuroanatomical fact. The argument, in brief, is that a child's environment can help or hinder the explosive growth of dendrites and axons in the brain that takes place in the first three years. If the child does not interact enough in these early years, the damage to his brain structure, and thus his mental potential, can't be undone later. Hence the need for "enriched environments" and "Early Head Start" programs.

A full-fledged media campaign is now under way. On April 28, ABC aired a spe- cial, "I Am Your Child," produced by Rob Reiner, hosted by Tom Hanks, and starring Robin Williams, Whitney Houston, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and other brain scientists. (Reiner also addressed the National Governors' Association. Think of it as "Meathead's revenge.") The same week, Newsweek published a spe- cial issue on "Your Child," featuring a concluding essay allegedly by Mrs. Clinton. "I've never seen a media campaign so well put together," marvels Mur- ray. The main player is the Families and Work Institute, which is underwritten by the usual suspects in the foundation world -- MacArthur, Heinz, Carnegie, etc. The campaign has also enlisted the support of the American Library Association, American Association of Pediatricians, American Public Welfare Association, and other groups.

Where is all this leading? To a senior Republican staffer in the House, "It's just an excuse to spend another trillion dollars on a Head Start program that doesn't work." No doubt the First Lady, given her druthers, would have grander ambitions. Liberals have tried for years, usually at the state level, to professionalize day care with licensure. In her day-care column, Mrs. Clinton wrote, "Too many child-care workers are undervalued, underpaid, and undertrained." When they're paid and trained according to liberal specifica- tions, most families probably won't be able to afford them any more; the government will have to step in with generous subsidies.

But the argument is full of holes. In a forthcoming paper, McDonnell Founda- tion president John Bruer points out that the notion that age three is the point of no return is largely based on experiments on rats and monkeys. By three, rhesus monkeys are sexually mature. A three-year-old human, on the other hand, really isn't ready to start dating. In addition, to jump from the fact that extreme sensory deprivation retards brain development to the conclu- sion that slight changes in sensory stimulation will affect it is a simple non-sequitur -- one encouraged by use of the phrase "enriched environments," with its connotations for yuppies of tickets to the Nutcracker. Says Murray, "You must not make the leap that people living in Detroit or on the Anacostia river [in D.C.] are deprived in this sense because they're playing stickball in the street instead of taking Montessori classes. We don't know."