February 20, 2006

Tales From The Crib

The dangers of daycare are many

Jennifer Margulis

The front cover of Mary Eberstadt’s book, “Home-Alone America: The Hidden Toll of Day Care, Behavioral Drugs and Other Parent Substitutes” (Sentinel), depicts a little boy in a striped shirt and jeans clinging to the leg of his power-suit-clad mother.

Although her son’s face and body, with his arms wrapped around his mother’s leg, are in the photo, the mother’s face is not.

Instead, we see the evidence that she is a successful working woman: shapely shaven legs, a stylish leather briefcase, a tailored olive-green suit jacket and tight-fitting skirt. This mother’s a woman who spends time on her appearance and who keeps fit, she has good taste and plenty of money to buy nice clothes.

The back of the book shows another little boy hanging onto his father. Both parents are in flight — their knees are bent, their briefcases are in front of them — and they’re trying to rush out the door to work while their offspring hold them back.

Maybe it’s a toddler who bangs a sippy cup at your knees while you’re trying to make dinner or a 4-year-old who stands in front of you so you can’t take another step without picking her up while you’re out on a walk — we’ve all experienced a time when our child’s needs and our own have been at odds.

But the subject of Eberstadt’s book isn’t the occasional battle of the wills between parents and children; it’s the full-fledged social crisis that America is now in because of the early and ongoing separation of parents and children.

Eberstadt argues that, from infants to teenagers, children of every age are suffering from parental absenteeism or the absent-parent home.

While parents justify their choices to leave children in the care of others for long hours every day by showing off their children’s accomplishments later in life (“My son graduated from Harvard last week and he was in daycare”), Eberstadt argues that “the kid’s all right” argument misses the point.

Kids in daycare, she writes, are not all right if you look at their daily lives.

Daycare makes children more belligerent and aggressive. It also makes them sicker. It also makes them sadder. While these may be unpopular assertions in a post-feminist age, where going to work is seen as a woman’s incontrovertible right, if not her responsibility regardless of real or perceived need, Eberstadt offers credible citations from myriad scientific sources to back up her claims.

Eberstadt is considered a social conservative. I would describe myself as a progressive liberal. Yet as a writer who works from home and who spends as much time as possible with my three children, I found myself agreeing with her.

As I read her argument against daycare, I remembered a sunny morning when a friend and I took our children to the park. There were three daycare providers there each caring for seven or eight children. The daycare providers — two of whom were dangerously overweight — were chatting and smoking cigarettes, completely oblivious to the children. When they saw us playing chase with our daughters, these little toddlers clamored for attention from us as well. So Sonya and I took turns pushing them on the swings and hoisting them onto play structures.

Then Sonya noticed that one little boy had a poopy diaper. She had to call out several times before getting the provider’s attention and then remind her 20 minutes later that the child in her care still had a poop in his pants.

As she walked to her minivan with the boy in her arms, the daycare provider spoke to him with frustration and anger in her voice. “Not again!” she all but shouted. “I already changed you once today.”

I’ve often thought about that day in the park. The parents of every one of those children undoubtedly believe they are doing what’s best for their kids, and their families. I recognized a couple of the toddlers there, and knew they came from affluent homes. Their parents’ decision to put them in daycare was not because they “had no choice.” In fact, with the rhetoric of “early socialization” these days, parents feel social pressure to put their kids in out-of-the-home care (my brother once lectured me about why my 3-year-old needed day care). Yet the crowd control mentality of overworked and poorly paid care providers can be frightening.

We never know what’s really happening with our children in daycare, do we? That’s one question that “Home-Alone America” really brings home.

Jennifer Margulis is the mother of three and the author of “Why Babies Do That: Baffling Baby Behavior Explained.”