A Paradigm Shift in Parenting

Mary Eberstadt’s Home Alone America: The Hidden Toll of Day Care, Behavioral Drugs. and Other Parent Substitutes is a culture-changing book. But don’t take my word for it. Listen to The Economist: “Eberstadt’s passionate attack on the damage caused by the absence of parents suggests that we may be approaching some sort of turning point in social attitudes, where assumptions about family life and maternal employment start to change. It has happened before — it could happen again.”

Rich Lowry has already done a great job of recounting some of the core claims of Home Alone America. I want to talk about what makes this book so powerful — over and above its important arguments about day care, behavioral drugs, teen sex, specialty boarding schools, etc.

From the very first page of the book, we’re in a different world. Eberstadt begins with a gentle pledge to break our social taboo on attending to the effects of working motherhood on children. And Eberstadt keeps her promise — so much so that she needs to create a new word, “separationist,” for a certain kind of feminist. (The London Times is now touting Eberstadt’s “separationist” coinage as the latest hot buzzword.) Instead of talking about “feminism,” which gets us debating how to balance the interests of women against the interests of men, Eberstadt talks about “separationism,” which gets us debating how to balance the interests of children and adults. What we usually call “divorce,” Eberstadt calls “the absent father problem.” Eberstadt’s language sends a powerful message: It’s not about adults. It’s about what separates or unites adults and children, and what that means for them both

NO REACTIONARY Not that Eberstadt is calling for a return for the ‘50s. Eberstadt doesn’t demand a ban on divorce, nor does she call on women to stop working outside the home. But Eberstadt does ask us to balance the needs of parents and children in a fundamentally new way. Decisions about divorce and working motherhood can only be made by individual parents. But to strike the right balance between the needs of children and adults, parents need to break the taboo set up by “separationist” feminists — the taboo on looking at the real costs and consequences of parent-child separation.

When Eberstadt considers our current way of balancing work and family, she doesn’t see a well-established and smoothly functioning social system. Instead she sees an “ongoing, massive, and historically unprecedented experiment in family-child separation.” An unresolved “experiment” — that’s how Eberstadt understands our society’s way of rearing its children. And she’s right. We’ve barely begun to look at the real effects of the profound social changes that followed in the wake of the ‘60s. That’s why Home Alone America is not another book about the stresses and trials of working mothers or divorced parents. Above all, Home Alone America is a book about children.

RAISING THE MORAL BAR A number of thoughtful observers have pointed out that, for all our wealth and technology, Americans don’t seem to be any happier nowadays than we were in the past. Eberstadt thinks she knows why. Life is better for American adults, who are financially, legally, and morally freer than they’ve ever been. But life is not better for American children, says Eberstadt, “no matter how much more pocket money they have for the vending machines, and no matter how nice it is that Dad’s new wife gave them their own weekend bedroom in his new place.” In fact, it’s actually wealthier children who are more likely to labor under some of the disabilities of our new family dispensation. According to Eberstadt, well-to-do children come home more often to neighborhoods so emptied of adults (and therefore unsafe for outdoor play) that they simply throw the deadbolt and “get no exercise more strenuous than walking from the video game to the refrigerator.”

Eberstadt’s chapter on day care is a great example of what makes this book so interesting. While Eberstadt does bring some important new information to bear on the day-care debate (check out her discussion of biting), the real originality lies in her point of view. For example, even the most “separationist” feminists concede that children in day care are more likely to get sick. The interesting thing is the difference between what the separationists and Eberstadt do with that fact.

Eberstadt lays out the “creepy” rationalizations given by Susan Faludi and her colleagues for the high rate of day-care-borne infections: “[Children] soon build up immunities”; “they’re hardier when they are older.” Then Eberstadt lowers the boom: “Now step back from this discussion for a moment and ask yourself: If we were talking about anything but day care here, would anyone be caught cheering for the idea that some little children get sick twice as often as others?”

Eberstadt’s discussion of day care manages to shift the moral stakes of the debate. She turns the issue away from the long-term effects of day care and onto the immediate unhappiness that many children suffer when put in day care for too long. Feminists who champion the benefits of parent-child separation have set the moral bar far too low. Essentially, says Eberstadt, the feminist position amounts to: “If it doesn’t lead to Columbine, bring it on.” Eberstadt wants to raise that moral bar.

WHO’S PROBLEM? Consider the way Eberstadt transforms the work of Harvard professor Jody Heymann. Writing from the adult point of view, Heymann talks about how difficult it is for parents to balance the intense demands of work and child-rearing. Sometimes, when it’s impossible to miss a day of work, even a child with a fever has to be deposited in day care (against the rules). Concentrating on the child’s point of view, Eberstadt stresses that this not only spreads disease, but prevents day-care workers saddled with a sick child from attending to the well ones. Whereas Heymann calls for more and better government-funded day care, Eberstadt shows that this is unlikely to solve the underlying problem.

But the real question is, Who’s problem are we talking about? Up until now, public discussion of issues like day care has been dominated by feminist journalists and academics who take their own career decisions for granted and call on society to make their lives easier: How can I be equal to a man if society won’t give me better day care? Eberstadt strides into this situation and asks a totally different series of questions: Are children any happier in day care than they are with their mothers? If not, should that effect a woman’s career decisions? Are unhappy children who bite and get aggressive or ill in day care growing tougher, stronger, and more ruggedly individualist, or is it we adults who are being coarsened to needs of our children? Although I’m inclined to believe the latter, the important point is that until now, the choice between these two points of view hasn’t even been posed. The separationists who’ve controlled the public debate up to now have excluded Eberstadt’s sort of questions altogether. That’s why this book is so impressive and important. Over and above the statistical issues, on just about every page, Eberstadt breaks a taboo, shifts a perspective, and forces us to look at the lives of children in new and more vivid ways.

DEFINING DEVIANCY One of the cleverest reversals in the book comes in the chapter on children’s mental health. Increasingly, we’re medicating children for mental illnesses that barely existed in the past. Take “separation anxiety disorder” (SAD), defined as “developmentally inappropriate and excessive anxiety concerning separation from home or from those to whom the individual is attached.” This syndrome is now said to affect about 10 percent of the nation’s children. One of its symptoms is “refusal to attend classes or difficulty remaining in school for an entire day” — in other words, what used to be called “truancy.”

Are 10 percent of the nation’s children really in need of treatment for SAD, or are most of these children actually behaving more normally than mothers who have little trouble parting from their children for most of the day? Is it surprising that children get SAD in the absence of their parents? As Eberstadt suggests, maybe we need to define a whole new range of disorders: “There is no mental disorder...called, say, preoccupied parent disorder, to pathologize a mother or father too distracted to read Winnie the Pooh for the fourth time or to stay up on Saturday night waiting for a teenager to come home from the movies. Nor will one find divorced second-family father disorder, even though the latter might explain what we could call the ‘developmentally inappropriate’ behaviors of certain fathers, such as failure to pay child support or to show up for certain important events. There is also nothing...like separation non-anxiety disorder to pathologize parents who can separate for long stretches from their children without a pang.”

TOWARD A NEW SOCIAL CONSENSUS Despite her playfully brilliant reversal of our questionable tendency to pathologize children who miss their parents, Eberstadt does not in the end reverse the pathological finger-pointing. Eberstadt clearly acknowledges that some mothers have no choice but to work and that some marriages suffer from gross abuse. She knows that the pressures and constraints on parents today are many, and often severe. Yet Eberstadt makes a passionate and persuasive case that, when it comes to the welfare of children, we have fallen out of balance. We may not want or need to return to the ‘50s, but that cannot and should not mean that anything goes. The traditional family is not infinitely flexible, and changes do have consequences. Despite its real benefits, our new-found individualism has been pushed too far. That’s because we have taken our eyes off — or because separationist ideologues have forcibly shifted our eyes away from — the consequences of our actions for our children.

So what does Eberstadt want? Quite simply, she wants a change of heart — a new social consensus: “It would be better for both children and adults if more American parents were with their kids more of the time....it would be better if more mothers with a genuine choice in the matter did stay home and/or work part-time rather than full time and if more parents entertaining separation or divorce did stay together for the sake of the kids.” This new consensus may be difficult to achieve. Yet it is easy to understand, and it would not demand a wholesale reversion to the pre-‘60s era.

I’ve tried to give just a taste of what Home Alone America has to offer. The battle will rage over the statistics, the causal arrows, and such. But the power and originality of this book go way beyond all that. Its strength comes out on every page, as Eberstadt casts aside orthodoxies and forces us to look at ourselves and our children with new eyes. (And I haven’t even talked about the music chapter, my favorite.) I can’t pretend neutrality, since I was privileged to see Home Alone America in manuscript, and am thanked by the author for my comments. I’m honored by that mention, because I agree with The Economist that this book has the potential to change the way our society thinks about the family. In the same way we now look back to the “Dan Quayle Was Right” article as a transformative moment in our family debates, we may someday look back on the publication of Home Alone America. We’ll be the richer for it if we do — as you will be if you read this wonderful book.

I'm a Christian, so "blood" and "natus" don't matter to me. It certainly doesn't matter to God.

Sure it does. God made the nations and appointed them to their lands and gave them different blessings. See Genesis 11 and Acts 17.26. If it weren't important to God for us to belong to different nations, He would not have divided us by language at Babel, and He certainly never would have taken up a particular relationship with the Israelites.

What doesn't matter with nationality is one's own relationship with God. God doesn't care with respect to that relationship from where you come or who you are.

But when it comes to interpersonal relationships, we necessarily feel more allegiance to our own family, then our own nation, and then to closely related nations, than we do to people from other more distant nations, because humans are creatures of nationality. Our fellow nationals understand our speech and look familiarly like ourselves. That's why America has a special relationship with England, and not with Nigeria or Thailand.

The dictionary is a liberal source?

It can be. Liberals exercise thought control over people by getting them to accept their definition of words, ideas, and thought constructs.

Think of words like "gay", "choice" or "privacy". Think of "abortion provider" replacing "abortionist". Do you visit a "podiatry provider" or "podiatrist"? An "optometry provider" or an optometrist"? Even better, the word "discriminate", which used to be thought of as a virtue, as in "She is such a good bargain hunter, she discriminates between the quality of goods offered with a very keen eye." Or how about "tolerance" which used to mean grudgingly accepting a negative for a perceived greater good, but which now means openly accepting and embracing formerly condemned persons or behaviors?

These redefinitions extend into politics too. Thus, Conservatives are not "progressive" because "progress" is defined as the implementation of the socialist-liberal agenda, while the conservative agenda is portrayed as "regressive" and "reactionary". And "freedom" has become not the ability to choose the good, but a liberty from any destraint to choose either what is right or wrong as equally valid alternatives - a definition which obviously pits freedom as contrary to law and order, rather than law and order being a service to our enjoyment of freedom. Thus repealing morals laws is portrayed as "widening personal freedom" rather than as "legalizing moral turpitude" or "causing moral confusion", as if sinking into personal degredation is anything but an enslavement to passions. And similarly, refusing to prosecute adultery is protrayed as "letting adults be free" rather than as "undermining marital contracts".

Then there are ideas constructed by liberals out of wholecloth to eliminate previously used words with widespread stigmatization. Think here of the transformation of "sodomites" into "homosexuals", and the inclusion in the latter group of celibate men who do not practice sodomy but suffer from an attraction to men, and the exclusion from the latter group of men who practice sodomy but also engage in normal sexual intercourse. Or there is the redefinition of a word such as "child", not in what it is but in what it brings to mind. A child is now a "burden" with high lifetime costs to be met, rather than a "blessing" of posterity to the parents.

Lastly, there are words liberals try to shove down the memoryhole in order to make them socially unacceptable. One might think here of "fornicator", "bastard-child", "pervert", "deviant", "sodomite", etc.

The whole process is really quite Pavloian in the conditioning people are given through the mass media to accept the liberal reworking of the language.

And Noah Webster would certaily be horrified by what is put out in his name nowadays, given his strong Chritian convictions.

Is the dictionary a liberal source? It is if written by liberals with an agenda, which the modern Webster's certainly is.

But you felt BETTER when your kids told you they like you better when you aren't around?

You misinterpret. My kid's point was that I was a happier person, more upbeat, positive, and interesting when I was working than when I was not. My occupation at the time was writing and producing children's magazines, which probably had something to do with it. And I mostly worked at home, tho when I work I'm so focussed, I don't pay much attention to anything else. But I could afford live-in help. And oh yes, I had more money to spend on them when I was working than when I was not. Life was just more fun. Many working mothers are terrific parents.

Just remember, these children weren't produced by an orphanage. They were produced by a mother and a father, who now do not have their children.

If they were wanted by their parents they wouldn't be in an orphanage. Most children up for adoption in China are girls, who are considered undesirable in a culture that prefers sons. Because of the one-child policy, many infant girls are not put into adoption, but are rather abandoned to starve or so forth, so the couple can try again for a son. I have little sympathy for these mothers and fathers "who do not have their children." They do not deserve them. If they go extinct because they have killed or adopted out all their females, they got what they deserved

Imagine if 1/2 million American kids were sent to China every year for adoption.

That would be the fault of Americans, who should not have children they cannot take care of.

One point about "sodomite" - it's a more inclusive word than "homosexual." Heterosexuals can be sodomites too if they engage in sodomitic practices.

The way things are today and how people behave, it seems a very large number of them are.

Frankly, I am far more disgusted with sodomites in general than with any man who is simply struggling with an attraction to men provided they attempt not to indulge their weakness. There are plenty of people with all manner of weaknesses like kleptomania, nymphomania, or a tendency to lie. It is purposefully indulging in these weaknesses that is repulsive, not the fact of having inner demons.

This book isn't going to do much good. It's nice that someone is writing about the damage being done to children by our modern child-rearing methods, but the author pulls back from recommending any serious change to the status quo. By definition, without any serious change in the status quo, it will remain status quo. And that is not encouraging for children.

As far as societal trends taking care of the problem by themselves, that is certainly not going to happen. The current generation reaching marital age are astonishingly clueless, as I see from first-hand experience, and things will continue to deteriorate absent major changes in societal structures.

Being an American--claiming to have allegiance to ANY nation, for that matter--has nothing to do with genetics.

"I have to disagree with that statement."

You're absolutely right--I was disagreeing with myself as I typed it, just didn't want to interrupt my fractured thought process. The fact that there IS NO specific gene--or gene pool--for Americans is part of what makes us so much better than every other nation. I grind my teeth whenever I read or hear of some foreign national sneering at the intolerance of America. Not one single country on earth has the amount of ethnic diversity that we have in our great country. All things considered, we are the very epitome of tolerance.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.