Home-Alone America: The Hidden Toll of Daycare, Behavioral Drugs, and Other Parent Substitutes
by Mary Eberstadt
Penguin. 218 pp. $29.95
Two-thirds of American children under six have mothers who work. Many spend their days with nannies, relatives, or stay-at-home dads. But most attend daycare. An institution virtually unknown in the United States prior to World War II is now a normal part of growing up.
The question of how children have fared as a result of this transformation constitutes one of the great flash points of the culture wars. Liberals embrace daycare for its liberating potential. Social conservatives oppose its spread, fearing it undermines traditional family life. In support of their position, both sides invoke the welfare of the children involved. Depending on whom you believe, daycare centers are either loving homes away from home, or tear-soaked holding pens that stunt the emotional and intellectual growth of their wards.
In Home-Alone America, Mary Eberstadt has produced a manifesto for the conservative camp. The author, a Hoover Institution scholar and stay-at-home mother of four, believes children are happiest and safest when they are under the close supervision of mommy and daddy. Her book is an indictment not only of daycare but also of latchkey children, broken homes, boarding schools, and all the other trends that encourage the separation of child and parent.
As Eberstadt concedes, most studies show that daycare has little effect on children’s long-term development. But even if such results were to be believed, they ignore, she argues, the acute, if unquantifiable, psychic distress children suffer in the here and now.
Eberstadt’s description of American daycare centers is bleak. A major problem is simply health. Thanks to the concentration of so many bodies in a single space, she reports, the facilities act as incubators for everything from lice to ringworm. Most daycare centers bar infectious children from attending. But parents have become experts at evading the rules. One disturbing trick involves pumping a feverish child with Tylenol prior to drop-off. The practice is reportedly so common that staff workers now ask children each morning whether they have been given any “pink medicine.”
Eberstadt draws on scattered sources to argue that daycare children are prone not only to illness but to disobedience and aggression as well. One study shows that measured levels of cortisol, a barometer of internal stress, tend to be higher in children who attend daycare than in those cared for at home. Eberstadt also emphasizes anecdotal evidence suggesting an epidemic of biting. What “is the mental state of a bunch of babies and toddlers who take up biting as a habit?” she asks. “These kids aren’t happy. They are exhibiting a self-protective animal instinct, which suggests they feel unprotected.”
Things do not get much better, Eberstadt tells us, when children graduate from daycare and begin their school years. In days of yore, middle-and working-class American boys and girls would come home to a loving mother, a home-cooked meal, and an evening of hopscotch or stickball. But many of today’s children are greeted by an empty house and a microwave dinner. Without parents on hand to ensure safe streets, outside play is off limits. And so evening entertainment consists of unsupervised television, video games, and web surfing.
Diminished parental contact, Eberstadt theorizes, fuels many of the problems facing today’s youth—including obesity, drug use, promiscuity, venereal disease, and poor scholastic performance. Though she presents few data to support these claims directly, she doubts whether much hard evidence is needed. To her mind, it is simply common sense that a working mother will be less able to monitor what her children eat, drink, or smoke, whom they bring home after school, or where they go at night.
Children themselves often realize something is wrong even if their parents do not. To prove the point, Eberstadt presents a chapter-long deconstruction of hit songs that testify to “the damage wrought by broken homes, family dysfunction, checked-out parents, and (especially) absent fathers.” She builds her case with a long list of confessional lyrics from such Top 40 acts as Papa Roach (“I know my mother loves me / But does my father even care?”), Everclear (“I blame my family / Their damage is living in me”), Blink-182 (“What stupid poem could fix this home?”), Good Charlotte (“mother’s gone and your father hits you”), and Snoop Doggy Dogg (“It’s probably pop’s fault how I ended up”).
Why do the media and mainstream mental-health establishment ignore what Eberstadt contends is the most obvious cause of all this pent-up sadness and resentment? The answer, she writes, is that liberals have succeeded in stifling dissenting views. To attack daycare is portrayed as an attack on women in the workplace. To point out the pathologies that accompany fatherless homes is seen as an attack on single mothers. Forced to explain the problems besetting today’s children, cowed experts focus on more politically acceptable scapegoats—that is to say, mere symptoms—like television, fast food, or violent video games.
As for parents themselves, they are too vested in their careers, materialistic ambitions, and second marriages to give due regard to their children’s well-being. Many simply outsource their children’s problems to psychologists and pharmaceutical companies. Thus the explosion in diagnoses for such formerly unknown conditions as attention deficit disorder, oppositional defiant disorder, separation anxiety disorder, and conduct disorder. Once a clinical-sounding label has been slapped on a child’s depression or wild behavior, a prescription for potentially dangerous and addictive pills quickly follows. A study found that, by 1996, more than 6 percent of American children were taking psychiatric drugs like Prozac, Ritalin, and Risperdal, and the numbers are almost certainly higher today. Among well-to-do families, Eberstadt reports, these drugs have “become something like cognitive orthodontics.”
Coming on the heels of her merciless takedown of modern parenting, Eberstadt’s prescriptions for the problems she identifies are moderate by comparison. America’s economy, she seems to recognize, is now built around the expectation of dual-wage earners. She also acknowledges that for many families—poor ones, especially—having a parent stay home with the children is simply not a realistic option. She is thus careful to direct her message at those whose means permit them a choice. Such families, Eberstadt argues, must accept the simple truth that “individuals and society would be better off if more parents spent more time with children.” If acting on that truth sometimes means forgoing a second income, or keeping a troubled marriage together for the sake of the children, so be it.
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Home-Alone America is a passionately argued work that will resonate strongly among the many Americans who share Eberstadt’s fears regarding daycare and its ilk, and the appearance of this book marks her promotion to a four-star general in the mommy wars. Still, one wonders how many readers who do not already embrace her hell-in-a-handbasket thesis will come away fully convinced. In too many places, Eberstadt’s argument is hobbled by an over-reliance on anecdote, extrapolation, and straight-out conjecture.
At one point, for instance, Eberstadt acknowledges that some of the trends she attributes to the new parenting—in particular, teenage violent crime and suicide—have dropped in the last decade. She waves away such facts with the sweeping but thinly supported claim that “today’s good news does not reflect on the connection between kids and parents, whereas today’s bad news does.”
Elsewhere, Eberstadt notes that many mass murderers were abandoned as children, then goes on to theorize that “if feral behavior at the extreme seems rooted in extreme parental absence, it may be possible that feral behavior of other kinds is also rooted in less extreme but nonetheless significant parental absence.” Similarly, she makes her case against daycare by situating it on a continuum of neglect that includes not only single parenthood but also such horrific extremes as the orphanages of Communist-era Romania. This argument will make an especially easy target for critics: social scientists and health professionals alike recognize that there are plenty of things in life that are harmful in large doses but harmless (or even beneficial) when taken in moderation.
Reductionism of this kind leads to yet another flaw. As any parent can attest, the quality of daycare varies widely. While some facilities answer to the almost Dickensian description Eberstadt offers of bawling, diseased children wandering about unsupervised or roped together on outdoor excursions “like members of a miniature chain gang,” these are not places that members of her upper-middleclass target audience will recognize, let alone place their children in.
Such faults of argumentation notwithstanding, there is still a large grain of truth at the bottom of Home-Alone America. Even putting aside Eberstadt’s more aggressive claims, she makes a strong case that parental absenteeism is taking its toll on American children. At the very least, she will help break the taboos that stifle debate on this critical issue. Many American parents and the experts who guide them seem as intent on protecting their cherished dogmas as on protecting children. Home-Alone America will help them get their priorities straight.
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