Posted on 08/08/2003 3:51:17 AM PDT by JohnHuang2
If there's anything that we all care about, it's "the children." Almost everything Democratic President Bill Clinton ever did was for "the children." Republican President George W. Bush long ago made the slogan of the liberal group the Children's Defense Fund -- "Leave No Child Behind" -- his own. We will do everything for "the children": spend untold taxpayer dollars on them, tuck them away in bicycle helmets, get hysterical about any perceived threat to their health or safety -- anything but acknowledge the harm done to them by day care.
In a devastating new book, "Day Care Deception," Brian C. Robertson marshals the overwhelming evidence about the risks of day care and explains why much of academia and the media try to cover it up. Any negative information about the effects of day care is considered out of bounds because it will upset one of liberalism's most sainted groups: working mothers, whom feminists adore as the vanguard of their assault on the "patriarchy."
The drumroll of day care's negative effects on kids includes higher rates of illness, including acute respiratory illness, ear infections and diarrhea; insecure attachment to their mothers; more aggressive behavior; and in the case of children of well-educated mothers placed in poor-quality care, slowed cognitive development.
Burton White, former director of the Harvard Preschool Project, writes, "After more than 30 years of research on how children develop well, I would not think of putting an infant or toddler of my own into any substitute-care program on a full-time basis, especially a center-based program."
White's forthrightness is rare. More typical is the surrender of the late Dr. Benjamin Spock. For years he maintained that nurseries are "no good for infants." But by the 1990s, he had dropped the advice, because it made working mothers feel guilty. "It's a cowardly thing that I did," he explained. "I just tossed it in subsequent editions." Researchers and journalists who are themselves working moms have a similar impulse. "I wanted to find that the child care was good," pro-day-care researcher Allison Clarke-Stewart has said. "I'm a working mother."
Despite the widespread use of day care and the propaganda campaign on its behalf, parents know it isn't best for kids. According to a comprehensive survey of parents in 2000 by the New York-based polling agency Public Agenda, parents say one parent staying at home is better than "quality" day care for kids under 5 by a margin of 70 percent to 6 percent. It should be a goal of public policy to make it easier for these parents to act on their natural instincts.
Our onerous tax regime, which tends to force both parents into the workplace, is the place to start. According to Robertson, about half of married couples with children in the mid-1950s paid no federal income tax, thanks to a generous $3,000 personal exemption. If this exemption had kept up with inflation, it would be $10,000 today. The tax code's dependent-care tax credit is, perversely, only available for parents who go to licensed day-care providers, a bias in favor of commercialized care that is worse for kids than the informal care provided by grandparents and neighbors.
If it were financially possible, many mothers would -- to feminists' dismay -- stay at home with their young children or work part-time while relying on informal day-care arrangements. Indeed, there has recently been a slight downturn in the number of mothers who re-enter the workforce within the first year of a child's birth -- probably as a result of increases in the child tax credit.
The biggest, most important change would be for the culture to stop showering praise and adulation on working moms in order to save some for those mothers who make the personal and financial sacrifices necessary to stay at home with their young children. No group in our society is so selfless or does so much for "the children" as stay-at-home moms. But we value some contributions to children's well-being more than others.
Thats how we finally cracked the problem, although we still see little of each other. A kind of twisted version of "tag".
I don't believe that anyone worked harder at trying to make the "day-care" thing work more than we did. We have a book with well over 200 names in it of "sitters" we either interviewed and found lacking (sometimes to a criminal degree), and those we agreed to try, only to leave a month or two later.
There seemed to be a common theme amongst persons providing day-care in their homes. It was, "I'm going to stay home with my family. I'm going to have the time to clean my house, cook nice suppers for my husband, and give my children quality time. Oh and by the way, your kids can hang around, (if they stay out of the way). AND THEN YOUR GOING TO PAY ME FOR IT! Oh and by the way, your also going to pay the taxes that I owe on the $400-$600 a week I make doing this, because I will not surrender my SSN so you can claim the child care dredit on your taxes.
We gave up.
After 7 years of trying, we simply found that to do it right, is not possible.
Remember that couple on the east coast that hired a girl from England to live in their home and care for their child? They were both Doctors with thriving practices. They had the money, the resources, and the time to do it right and make child-care work. All they got was a dead baby. Thats when my wife and me stopped trying.
You know what? We ended up making more money out of it! Although the wife went to part time, we no longer were paying the $100 a week to a baby sitter. We were no longer being forced to take a day or two off from work once a month because our kids were sick, or the baby-sitter's kid was sick. We wer'nt paying for Doctor visits nearly as much.
I guess our income was at exactly the right level to make the change work. But my advice to prospective parents is don't have children until you can live on one pay-check. Forget what you see on T.V. or read in the Mags. You must and will settle for your children having less quality care, period.
Its the white peoples fault.
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