Just stay home!

Human Life Review, Spring 1998 by McFadden, Maria

In the sexual suicide society, the only winner is the state. Increasingly in control of childbirth and "child development," that state will usurp the last bastion of human privacy and individuality: the home.

George Gilder, Sexual Suicide, 1973

In a recent cover story in National Review, "Day Careless," Maggie Gallagher writes that "a growing number of child-development experts have joined the ranks of parents who worry that extensive day care is not good for young children." The research she cites includes studies which assert that day care is definitely not good for babies' biological health: they are much more likely to acquire respiratory infections at earlier ages, not to mention chronic ear infections, which can lead to hearing loss and learning problems.

She reports on a large number of studies that link early, full-time day care with psychological, social and behavioral problems: children become less attached to their parents, more resistant to authority, more aggressive with peers, and, in cases of low-quality care, can become cognitively delayed. A 1995 national study by the University of Colorado found 40 percent of day care for infants and toddlers to be of harmful quality (only eight percent was considered "quality"). Gallagher found especially disturbing one study of mother-child relationships, which detected "A small, but measurable deterioration" in babies' and toddlers' attitudes toward their mothers and mothers' sensitivity toward their children as time in day care was accrued.

The occasion for Gallagher's article was the Clinton Administration's newly-unveiled initiative to respond to the child care "crisis" with a huge increase in subsidies for day care. (In January, President Clinton proposed a $21.7 billion dollar program.) As Gallagher and many others have pointed out, this attempt to respond to a crisis is at best misguided: the majority of American parents do not want institutional day care arrangements for their children-they want to keep care-giving at home, with family members, nannies or au-pairs. Nor do most parents see child-care as an area for governmental intervention. The Clinton (read Hillary?) scenario on day care has been played much like the health-care fiasco. Last fall, the White House convened a "conference" on child care stacked with "experts" on only one side of the issue, that of increased government involvement and regulation of day care. The resulting plan is to give tax breaks for day care, and "improve it," while doing nothing-in fact, even making it harder-for parents who want to stay home, work part-time, or have private child-care arrangements.

Why, with all the negative data coming in about day care, is the Clinton Administration pushing it? Gallagher offers one "obvious" answer: "The day care industry [is] a multi-billion dollar concern which, like so many businesses, looks to use the power of government to increase its profits." And day-care workers are seen as a potential loyal voting bloc, like the teachers' unions. But there is also a social agenda, which is very much in accord with both the Clintons' politics and policies and radical feminism: put pressure on Americans to accept the social rearing of children. You know, It Takes A Village. While most Americans would probably still agree that, as Columnist Michael Kelly writes, "It primarily takes not a village but parents-2 of them" to raise a child, the idea that our children ought to be nurtured by government programs and paid experts is influencing parents perhaps more than they realize. The pervasive message of the day-care advocates is that women ought to be in the work force, and not "just" stay home.

A prime example of this message is a book glowingly reviewed in January in the New York Times Book Review and no doubt displayed prominently in the "Parenting" section of your local Barnes & Noble or Borders Books. In -When Mothers Work: Loving Our Children Without Sacrificing Ourselves, Joan K. Peters argues that, in fact, it should not be the mother's relationship and caretaking of the child that is most important, so worrying about mother-child bonding isn't the issue. Feminists who have supported the choice of stay-at-home moms, as a matter of fact, have only done so out of pressure to be "politically correct." Actually, she says, all mothers should work outside the home, and if they don't, they are harming their children, because the children won't learn to have independent and family lives. "Children flourish with multiple attachments," and will be happy and secure if they are cared for by a variety of caring adults. (In other words, "the village.") "We now presume that the common cause of all children's woes is their mothers' work, which prevents full-time nurturing. Meanwhile, we ignore the more complicated root cause: our failure to modernize motherhood, to restructure family and change society along with the changing character of women's lives."

To Peters, obviously, feminism has not gone far enough. Even worrying about whether or not children get sufficient mothering is a throwback to what should be an outdated era of gender differences. Some of what she writes in her book is simple common sense, e.g., that mothers who give themselves and their interests up entirely for their kids can become resentful and hurt family harmony, and that it's a good idea for fathers to take time off to nurture their children. But the book is riddled with statements that are quite radical and radically against the notion of mothering being a unique enterprise.