Home Alone-America: The Hidden Toll of Day Care, Behavioral Drugs, and Other Parent Substitutes by Mary Eberstadt

Read it. NOW.
Of course, giving this book to a Sleepy Mommy to read is just preaching to the choir. But after reading it, I just wanted to snatch up Hambet, hold him tight, and never let him out of the house again.
Eberstadt acknowledges the knee-jerk “mommy wars” objection (She’s making us feel guillllllllltyyyyyyyyy for having a careeeeeeeeeeer!) but points out that there are other big social forces at work: divorce and illegitimacy, and the loss of the support of extended family, are the other two “rulers of the empty hearth.” These forces have, over the past few decades, led to more and more children spending less and less time in the care of their parents or other family members (page xx). Over the same decades, the personal and social health of children and adolescents has gone down the tubes. Eberstadt contends that it’s time to stop our social denial: “At a time when roughly half of all children will have no biological father in the home at some point, and well over half of all mothers with children under the age of six are employed, it is time to stop talking of mere ‘correlations’ and start asking some questions about cause.”
Mark Shea isn’t the only one who’s noticed the rationalization “Adults and their needs come first; children are resilient.” Eberstadt also points out that much of the public discussion of the “mommy wars” and so on focuses on the needs and desires of adults: adults who “feel fulfilled” by going to work — or by staying home. Not too much discussion of how this looks to the kids. In the course of the book, she focuses again and again on turning to the discussion to the immediate experience of children. For example, a couple of years ago a study came out that showed (again) that children in day care were more likely to get sick. Some defenders of the day care status quo greeted this news with glee, rationalizing it as good news, because the children would be able to build up immunity and would get sick less often “in school.” So, Eberstadt points out, does this mean that the child’s immediate suffering is unworthy of consideration? Doesn’t it count? The promise of getting sick less often in first grade is not much consolation to a toddler screaming in pain from an ear infection, longing for the comfort of his daddy or mommy. But the pain, here and now, of children rarely enters into the discussion.
Eberstadt looks at day care, child aggression, the increased diagnosis of mental problems and learning disabilities in children, sexual activity in teens, raunchy popular music, and the proliferation of teenage boarding “boot camp” reform schools. Again and again, she discusses what these mean to adults — and then turns them over to look at what they might mean to children.
For example, little children in day care are more likely to be aggressive — for example, biting other little kids. Biting seems to be a particular problem; Eberstadt reports finding article after article in day care professional literature advising how to stop biting epidemics. Some people ask what’s the big deal? they’ll outgrow it in a few years.

[But this is] the wrong question — the one about ends, not means. The right questions, the one addressing the overlooked moral dimension of all this, is: What, after all, is the mental state of a bunch of babies and todllers who take up biting as a habit? And we can all figure out the answer to that without reaching for the social science bookshelf: these kids aren’t happy. They are exhibiting a self-protective animal instinct, which suffests that they feel unprotected. It is something we would all understand readily enough if, say, zoo animals were to attach each other more frequently in their quarters than in the wild. (And if they did, we would, of course, deplore it and blame the zoo.) Doesn’t that apparent internal turmoil say something undesirable about hos institutional care is experienced by at least some small children? (p 12)

Between the “separationists” — the “it takes a village” crowd who cheer for day care is downright good for children — and the widespread outsourcing of parenting to day cares and preschools, have we as a society become desensitized to the needs and feelings of children — and to normal childish behavior? For example, what’s behind the overprescription of Ritalin and similar drugs? Could it be that normal childish behavior is now being seen as pathology? Is prescription becoming another way to outsource parenting? More and more children are being diagnosed with disorders such as autism-spectrum disorders, depression, and bipolar illness (I was astounded to find that someone out there has been diagnosing infants as “bipolar”.) Are some of these kids being treated for their response to an unhealthy environment? Maybe some kids just aren’t cut out for the stress of being away from home twelve hours a day. (I did not know this, but apparently there is also a growing problem of Ritalin abuse — kids selling their Ritalin to other kids. When I was doing bedside nursing, we kept the Ritalin in the locked drawer with the morphine and other narcotics.)
The chapter that really curled my hair was the chapter on STD’s. We’re expected to be glad that teenage pregnancy is down, because that means that teens are “being responsible.” Of course, condoms and oral contraceptives do nothing to halt the spread of many STDs — and Eberstadt cites a 2004 study reporting that “of 18.9 million new STD cases in the United States in 2000, about 9.1 million, or half, were found in people between the ages of fifteen and twenty-four. ” (p.125) The scariest STD is the human papilloma virus, which causes icky genital warts in the short run and can cause cervical cancer in the not-so-long run. More and more young women are developing cervical cancer; I know a woman in her early thirties who has just been diagnosed.
The most obvious way for parents to discourage their teens from early sex is, of course, supervision. When a responsible adult’s keeping tabs on things, the after-school special gets back to being cookies and milk. But Eberstadt suggests two more ways in which parents, especially fathers, have a particularly important role to play (besides driving off suitors, of course.) One is a really interesting discussion on recent research on pheromones — that a girls age at menarche may be affected by the presence or absence of her father — or of an unrelated male such as a stepfather. The other is the fact that children living apart from one of their biological parents are more likely to become victims of sexual abuse.
Eberstadt’s ultimate point is that it’s time to face reality and renorm our society to acknowledge that children — and society in general — are better off “when more parents spend time with more children.” And that doesn’t mean that ALL mothers MUST stay home with ALL children. For some families, dad might be the one staying at home. It’s unavoidable that some families are going to end up as single-parent families, or having both parents in the work force. But if there are plenty of other parents at home with their kids, that’s enough social “padding” to absorb that stress: you’ll have just a couple of kids in a kindergarten class under that stress, for example, instead of half the class. You’ll have more parental eyes looking out the windows as the kids walk home. You’ll have more parents who have time to lead after-school clubs, or who could welcome an extra kid into their house for some family after-care.
I read a review of this book that gave me the impression that the reviewer had read the first ten pages and the back cover, stuck her fingers in her ears, and started singing, LA LA LA LA LALA, YOU CAN’T MAKE ME FEEL GUIL-TY over and over again until it was time to submit her copy. Our whole society has been doing that for years. Hopefully this book will prompt more people to take their fingers out of their ears and start listening to our kids.
Home-Alone America: the Hidden Toll of Day Care, Behavioral Drugs, and Other Parent Substitutes
Mary Eberstadt
Sentinel, 2004