The Case Against Day Care

...Private day care centers are not required to meet the federal standards and operate under state requirements, which are usually less stringent, because of cost...

...In New York City, the only place where a large network of government-funded day care centers has been established (under Title IV of the Social Security Act) it now costs $3,750 per child per year for day care, which, as The Wall Street Journal has pointed out, is roughly equivalent to the price charged by Manhattan’s swankiest nursery schools...

...who take care of his physical needs can be trusted and will not desert him...

...The Westinghouse report was, and still is, criticized by some feminists and social activists as being “too narrow,” but when later private studies and even the government’s own Office of Economic Opportunity’s inquiry supported the Westinghouse conclusion, enthusiasm for Head Start and early education began to wane...

...It had been given no real thought, but had simply grown up in response to a problem...

...And since psychiatrists believe a mother should care for her infant at least during the first year of its life, she could at the same time care for another woman’s two-yearold or three-year-old and be paid a government allowance for each child...

...Susan W. Gray, a child psychologist from Peabody College in Nashville, Tennessee made a quiet statement that was quickly lost in the excitement of Albert Shanker’s political arm-flexing and feminists’ demands...

...The day care coalition has kept together even though its members remain divided over the question of who should be eligible for government day care...

...In the words of a statement to the committee signed by five child psychiatrists: 3 “There is considerable evidence that less than ‘quality services’ would inflict both immediate and long-range damage to the development potential of vast numbers of children...

...Yet large-scale day care centers are being presented as the only answer...

...Enter Albert Shanker The day care lobby has been awaiting a more favorable climate in which to launch its next offensive, and it would be hard to imagine a setting more conducive than a CarterMondale administration...

...They believe that an infant kept all day in a large day care center will be uhable to develop the necessary intensity in its relationship with its mother figure and will compensate by developing an unusually strong attachment to the other children in the nursery, resulting in a loss of strong individual identity...

...and Ohio University compared children who had been in Head Start with children who had stayed at home during their preschool years .and found almost no intellectual difference between the two groups...

...Suggestions abound, but they have received little public notice...

...and Sweden, two countries in which full-day group care facilities are widespread, have expressed concern about possibly deleterious effects of extended care...

...In a new’era’of day cqe, the next generation could well be the kind that would never struggle, as itg mothers Qave, to m&e a better world...

...At most kibbutzim, children actually sleep away from home, in a center...

...Psychiatrists who testified at the hearirigs on Mondale’s day care bill, both those supporting day care for jow-!ncome children and those opposing it, were unequivoca...

...In the last five years, however, several studies have attempted to update Bowlby’s findings...

...Another alternative was proposed at hearings on the new Mondale bill in 1975...

...Indeed, in New York City, where government day care is more advanced than anywhere in the country, a family earning $16,000 a year can receive a subsidy of $26 a week to keep a child in a public day care center...

...This is not only easier from the standpoint of transportation, but the mother knows the family day care worker personally, which helps build trust...

...On one side are the psychologist s, psychiatrists, and church leaders who would limit it to children of lower-income families, and on the other side are the feminists and the AFL-CIO, who favor a much grander effort...

...It is feasible and not costly...

...Bruno Bettleheim learned, in his study of the children of the kibbutzim, that their system of group care for infants and children had not been planned in advance...

...As most studies in the field indicate, infants and young children cared for in a group setting tend to develop unusually strong attachments to the other children in the group, and some of the studies showed that day care children were less able to cope with stress while separated from their peers...

...In the case of families with incomes under $7,000, the annual cost of the proposed child develop ment program could amount to $17 billion...

...Often care is provided in the child’s own community...

...Gradually he comes to believe that his mother figure and the small group of other people (father, babysitter, grandmother, etc...

...In one country, Hungary, the government is moving away from day care and now pays a day care allowance for each child directly to the mother...

...Wherever they felt there might be something that would give them away, even if it wasn’t personal at all, they couldn’t bring it out...

...John Brademas and Mondale] of what both called landmark legislation...

...Kagan said: “Up until five years ago the best professjonal guess was that day care would -do harm...

...Now a few studies, imperfect thpugh they are, find no harm if the day care is of a high quality...

...However, this trend has recently been reversed...

...He recently told a congressional subcommitee: “We believe very strongly that the time has come for the country to develop a system of universal day care, child care, early childhood education, an entire package of services, both universal and free...

...Since Bowlby’s studies were of children in full-time institutions, such as orphanages, it was uncertain just how they would apply to children in day care centers who are with their mothers at night and on weekends...

...And the trend toward shorter working hours, which now seems well established, may lead to more participation by fathers in child raising...

...In a country where it is at least supposed that work is one of the great sources of satisfaction in life, it’s wrong to deprive women of careers...

...Bettleheim, throughout his study, kept coming back to the striking differences between the kibbutz-reared children with their flat personalities and the idealistic and highly individualistic, suhivors of the &ettos who are their parents...

...And this is just for low-income children...

...Day care first came before Congress in 197 1 , when an informal coalition of day care advocates, consisting of church leaders, social activists, educators, representatives of welfare groups, feminists, and leaders of the AFLCIO, successfully pushed a day care bill through both houses...

...Even those who are strongly opposed to the concept of day care often speak out in its favor because they believe that it can be of value in rescuing the child in extraordinarily bad circumstances, the child who is neglected, abused, or terribly poor...

...A recent study of legislation affecting children by Gilbert Y. Steiner of The Brooking Institution said: “The results of a few simple arithmetic calculations are not flattering to either the House or Senate sponsors [Rep...

...The alternatives all pale in comparison to the bright vision of a national network of gleaming new day care centers filled with rows of cribs and brightly colored toys...

...Quality day care means, of course, a clean and safe environment, but it also means a high ratio of adults to children...

...Bronfenbrenner found that there had been only a handful of studies on the subject and none examining day care children past the age of five...

...A 1969 joint study by the Westinghouse Electric Corp...

...It is extremely difficult to prove conclusively that something will be harmful at some time in the future...

...A new bill was introduced but has been on the back burner because of dampened enthusiasm in the House and the strong probability of a veto by President Ford...

...This is family day care, that is where a mother in her own home cares for a limited number of young children, typically no more than six or seven...

...The list of examples is long: agricultural subsidies, federal aid to impacted areas, the school lunch program, slum clearance, the student loan program, food stamps, and on and on...

...we are embarking on a program that will run well into the billions of dollars, that will dwarf in size and expense and effect most other social programs the American government has instituted...

...And I must emphasize that quality day care with a hgh adult-to-child ratio is what we are talking about...

...Bruno Bettleheim, in his study of the Israeli children raised in group nurseries in the kibbutzim (The Children of the Dream, Macmillan, 1969) concluded that although the children were well cared for and happy, they did indeed form unusually strong attachments to their peer groups...

...An Israeli teacher who had taught in both kibbutz schools and those outside told Bettleheim: “I tried all kinds of methods of teaching them [the kibbutz children] to be spontaneous, to be creative in their writings...

...Kremlinologists who study official Soviet Union pronouncements have noticed an astonishing reversal by the government from praise for their 50-year-old day care system to concern over the possibility that day care causes “deprivation of psychological stimulation” and “one-sided or retarded development...

...Shanker seems to represent the most likely path to legislative success.’’ There are many strong arguments for hesitation on day care: the misgivings of psychiatrists, the evidence that other countries experienced in day care are now seeking alternatives, the difficulty of maintaining quality standards, and the exorbitant cost...

...Using the actual present-day New York City cost you reach $33 billion...

...But even taking the experts on their own terms, the record clearly shows that if government programs designed to help the disadvantaged also have appeal for the middle class, the middle class will find a way to take advantage of them...

...The emerging leader of the day care coalition is Albert Shanker, president of the AFL-CIO’s Federation of Teachers...

...All these arguments in favor of day care come readily to mind because they appear regularly in magazines and newspapers...

...Shanker would have children enter public school at the age of two, and he points out that our declining birth rate, which leaves schools empty and 175,000 teachers looking for jobs, makes day care the answer to teacher unemployment...

...anything less would definitely do damage...

...Perhaps one problem with raising children in a capitalist society is that you don’t get paid for it...

...Bronfenbrenner said: “It may well be that by three years of age, day care children do display less adaptive responses to stressful situations in which age mates are not present...

...Children are in smalI groups, and the atmosphere is more homelike...

...He found that there was positively no difference in intellectual development between children raised in day care centers and those raised at home...

...profound, unintended effects...

...This makes an attractive option in expanding the number of day care slots available for children who need them...

...The women were reluctant to give up their new job equality to care for the children for even a short time, and since every strong back was badly needed in those early days, a system of group nursery care was hastily adopted as the easiest solution to the problem...

...It does not require the heavy capital investment which constructing day care centers requires...

...An infant establishes what Erik Erikson calls “basic trust” during the first months of life...

...Aside from all the uncertainties about how day care actually affects children, it’s clear that one can’t be uncertain about day care that is of less than top quality...

...The methods that worked in the city schools did not work in the kibbutz...

...The Foreign ExDerience Another way to approach the question of how day care affects children is to look at the experiences of other countries...

...Women with children are working outside the home, and there is no chance that we will ever go back to the age when a woman was expected to stay home and bake cookies until her last child graduated from high school...

...The plan adopted by Hungary to pay a day care allowance is one...

...Their parents usually visit with them for a couple of hours in the evening and a day each weekend, but it’s still a more extreme case than day care, though certainly analogous...

...and they tended to conform too quickly to group pressures...

...It would enable a woman to work outside the home, secure in the knowledge that her children were safe, clean, and well fed...

...The question of day care boils down ta this kind of cycle...

...in their o inion that day care with a lower aging...

...Estimating the’costs of a universal government day care system is mind-boggling and would surely necessitate a sharp increase in either the federal deficit or taxes...

...Brademas’ House bill estimated the cost at $350 million a year and Mondale’s bill set it at $2 billion...

...Another possibility is part-time jobs...

...But Shanker, unperturbed by such matters, is determined to move his 175,000 unemployed teachers en masse onto the federal payroll...

...Most people do not know that psychologists and psychiatrists have grave misgivings about the concept because of its potential effects on personality...

...Early studies showed that it was harmless, but now years later, we find it can indeed be harmful...

...The great bulk of a person’s personality and character are formed within the very first years of life, and psychiatrists have always stressed that a satisfactory relationship between a child and a mother figure during that crucial early period is essential for healthy personality development...

...Whatever harm day care may do, the reasoning goes, it is surely better than the environment in which these children now live...

...After this trust is established, the baby is able to turn his attention outward and begins to develop elementary skills and curiosity about the world...

...The National Academy of Sciences asked Dr...

...to mothers are attractive becausq they migIit...

...A few hours a day in a day care center hardly seems to be the answer for children who are seriously abused, and denying people the right to raise their children simply because they are poor hardly seems just...

...Solutions often create far worse problems than the ones they solve, and even the best-ifltentioned people can opt for a seemingly simple solution which will\ hav...

...And it is difficult to see how we could ever be sure that just because the requisite number of adults was on the payroll, a child was indeed receiving quality care...

...But as Bettleheim points out, his work is much less critical of the kibbutz method of child-rearing than other more conventional studies using scientific methods have been...

...Although none of Mondale’s proposals for large-scale day care systems has become law, federal aid to day care centers has continued to grow each year under a variety of other programs: the Social Security Act, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, President Ford’s WIN Program, the Model Cities Program, the Concentrated Employment Act, and the Education Professions Development Act...

...Jphn Bowlby, president of the International Association of Child Psychiatry, conducted an influential series of studies of children in institutions that concluded: “It is essential for mental health that the infant and young child should experience a warm, intimate, and continuous relationship with his mother (or permanent mother substitute) in which both find satisfaction...

...Experts agree that anything but quality day care is clearly damaging to a child...

...In his report to the National Academy of Sciences, Bronfenbrenner said: “It is of interest that in conversations with American specialists, professionals and parents in the U.S.S.R...

...Others are longer paid maternity leaves subsidized by the government and efforts by either friendly persuasion, court action, or legislation to change company and union seniority rules so that women do not lose seniority when they take maternity leaves...

...No kibbutz children score in the lower range of the scale, and none score in the upper range...

...For me, and I suspect mopt people, it’s a pleasant, rewarding, and genuinely meaningful way to spend a few years...

...Not only has the public not been warned of the potential dangers of day care, it has been led to believe that care in a center is superior to home care because it enables children to receive the benefits of “early education...

...Gray said: “I should like to emphasize an aspect of day care which is generally neglected in discussions of the field and certainly in the attention of the public...

...When I encouraged them, the children in the kibbutz wrote eagerly, but they would never read out what they wrote in front of the class, nor would they show it to the other youngsters...

...Work is supposed to be one of the great fulfilling experiences, but for a lot of Americans, perhaps even most, it’s just tedium, whether experienced in an office or on an assembly line...

...And for women who for economic reasons have to work full-time, day care is a necessity...

...In studying adolescents and adults who had been raised in a kibbutz (only four per cent of the population of Israel lives in kibbutzim), Bettleheim found they had great difficulty in forming strong personal relationships with others, even in marriage...

...Some Alternatives But there are now 4.5 million working mothers with 5.7 million children under the age of five...

...And we all know what recommends day care to compassionate legislators...

...the arguments against day care do not...

...The Obscured Truth There’s one more alternative to day care that seems these days to be increasingly ignored: staying home and raising your own kids...

...While the kibbutz nurseries have succeeded in eliminating the underachiever, they have also eliminated the scholar, the artist, and the leader...

...Bettleheim’s study is controversial and has been criticized as being subjective, which indeed it is...

...Less Able to Cope -~ Bronfenbrenner found the studies on emotional differences between the two groups to be inconclusive...

...We are moving inexorably toward this new way of rearing our children, with hardly a second thought...

...The Israeli women who settled the kibbutiim were the strong survivors of the European wartime ghettos, and they were determined not to have children, but to work alongside men doing heavy farm labor to create their new nation out of the wilderness...

...Family day care is favored by many parents, because children are in small groups...

...I spoke with Professor Jerome Kagan of Harvard University, a leading expert in the field, and asked him why, if misgivings about day care are so widespread, the question of whether or not it is harmful can’t be settled by research...

...Cooperative nurseries and baby-sitting clubs are already in widespread use in some places...

...Faulty Arithmetic When quality day care is maintained, or when government programs plan to maintain it, it is tremendously expensive...

...In some of our larger cities the cost of keeping a single child in a government day care center for a year is more than the annual cost of welfare for a family of four-food, shelter, and clothing...

...Benjamin Spock, one of the few outspoken opponents of day care centers, has said of these statements: “The Soviet authorities now realize that they have been producing some drones with their group care in the first two or three years...

...The Soviet Union, Sweden, and Israel have all had many years of experience with group child care, and have all had less than heartening results with it...

...All the day care children in the @dies attended so-called “qyality” centers...

...But despite their plans, babies were born...

...Marjorie Boyd is a Virginia writer...

...And yet most day care centers in this country at present do not meet the widely accepted standards of “quality” because the govenunent has never enforced the standards it adopted in 1968...

...well counteract the momy neurosis, besides ensuring that chjld-care money goes to the people who need it @stead of being siphoned off in large pdrt by a massive bureaucratic strqcture...

...Congressional advocates of day care centers have paid little if any attention to these costs in formulating their legislative schemes...

...The persuasiveness of the lobby was reflected in the Senate vote of 49 to 12, but the bill was vetoed by President Nixon in December 1971, and Congress failed to override the veto...

...perhaps the reqgon woEk is thought of as so universally” worthy is q a t it’s universally‘ paid, and people in America too often tie the valye of what they do (and even of themselves) to haw much qpney they get fov doing it...

...they were lacking in creativity and individual initiative...

...But the major charge against day care continues to be that children cared for in large centers will suffer damage to their emotional, rather than intellectual, development...

...But day care has been around only a short time...

...The currently accepted standards, those adopted by the government, are one adult for each infant under the age ’of six weeks...

...For some people, of course, raising children is a tedious waste of time too, and those people probably shouldn’t have children...

...Another good analogy would be the birth control pill...

...A fight between two children in a kibbutz is a rare occurrence...

...Dr...

...A U. S. government study of day care in the Soviet Union, Hungary, East Germany , Cz e c hoslovakia, Greece, Israel, and France found widespread concern over the effects of day care on children, and the report noted that there was no recorded case where a senior official running a day care center made use of that center for his or her own children...

...It would mean that the neglected child who now wanders through busy city streets with his door key hanging from a string around his neck would be in a safe place, and it would mean that the infant left alone, dirty and crying in his crib, would be clean, warm, and well fed...

...In the 1950s Dr...

...It should be noted that the $17-billion figure arrived at by Brookings uses a cost per child that would not provide “quality” service...

...As a mother of small children, I understand the strong appeal of a government day care system...

...one adult per four children from six weeks to three years...

...It would mean that she would not have to lose her seniority at her company or in her union when a new baby is born, or face re-entering the job market with rusty skills and little self-confidence as her last child enters school...

...At Peabody we have made a systematic study of improving the quality of family day care by working directly with the family day care mother to help her improve the quality of education and social stimulation she provides for the children in her care...

...Carter has promised “a national day care program” and Mondale has long been the principal supporter of day care legislation in the Congress...

...Incidentally, no one has yet come up with a way to police a vast system of day care centers to make sure that quality standards are maintained...

...Take fluoro-carbons...

...People who support day care for the disadvantaged only should realize that there are better solutions for the disadvantaged, and that even if instituted on a limited basis, day cpe would quickly spread throughout society...

...A recent study by the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare of 607 federally funded day care centers in nine different states found that 70 per cent faded to meet federal standards of health and safety and that children’s lives were actually endangered in some of them...

...When you use the figure of $2,000 per child per year, which experts estimate as the minimum cost of quality care, you come up with a figure of $21 billion...

...These doubts about day care did not come out fully in Congressional testimony because the experts have presented their judgments in a confusing nianner...

...and one adult per five children four to five years of age...

...The legislation, popularly known as the Mondale day care bill, provided for various health and nutritional benefits for children of low-income families and set up a fairly large-scale system of federally funded day care centers, as well as providing for after-school and summer care...

...Accordingly, until researches are carried out comparing the behavior of day care and homereared children outside the center or other peer group settings, the possibility that children raised in full-day group care may be less adaptive to stress and less secure in relations with adults remains an open one...

...If there are too many different caretakers or too frequent changes in caretakers, the baby’s fear of being left alone interferes with his normal development...

...the damage probably wouldn’t show up until later on...

...The Case Against Day Care by Marjorie Boyd The election of Jimmy Carter and Walter Mondale makes it probable that we will soon have some kind of federally subsidized system of day care centers...

...Even if other considerations, such as questions about the value of early education and the effects of day care on emotional development, were not involved, the astronomical cost of this plan should give us pause...

...And Czechoslovakia recently revised its laws to provide for a six-month paid maternity leave...

...And one recent Sovie t publication, commenting on day care, talked inspiringly of the importance of each individual developing his own unique potentialities so that he can make an “original or even revolutionary contribution” to Soviet society . Dr...

...Many experts are now certain that at some point they will damage the ozone layer, but they can’t prove it...

...Most psychiatrists recommend that an infant be with its mother for at least the first year of life...

...nor do they know that officials of countries that have had considerable experience with day care are now warning of its harmful effects on children...

...It’s one of the great flaws of the day care lobby that jt has managed to obscure this truth, to imply that time spent raising one’s own chgdren is time wasted...

...So, if we are to maintain a holding pattern until researchers can determine conclusively just what the effects of day care are on children, we must have alternatives...

...While Steiner attributes these wildly unrealistic cost estimates to the poor mathematical skills of members of Congress, it could be another example of the legislative foot-in-thedoor game...

...The Brookings study of legislation affecting children said of the day care lobby: “. . . a substantial number of the coalition’s important participants have moved quickly toward the Shanker position as a practical course...

...Urie Bronfenbrenner of Cornell University, an expert in early child development, to evaluate the various new studies on the effects of day care...

...To rush into it now would seem foolhardy indeed...

...The yomen’s movement has been con: cerned primarily with the prgblems of youqg and intelligent and creative working mothers who, it seems f+r to say, are in large measure the product of the care they received 9s i n f v p and children, from attentive mothers...

...A sizable investment in improving the quality of this service would yield large returns...

...The results of kibbutz scholastic tests make eerie reading...

...Even a 5Gpercent participation rate would have meant $8.5 billion...

...Once you get a foot in the door by getting a program authorized at an outrageously low price, a lobby for the continuance of the program immediately springs up and starts to grow-social activists, recipients, employees, and their relatives and friends-all pressuring Congress so that the program will be continued regardless of the cost...

...There are signs that his position is gaining support among other members of the coalition...

...The assumption by parents that early education would be of great and lasting value was responsible for the widespread popularity in the 1960s of the Head Start program and for the movement to longer nursery school hours...

...They are all, clustered quite close together around the middle, unlike any other comparable group of children...

...The study also found that 40 per cent of the centers failed to meet the minimal federal standards for staff-child ratios...

...Proposals to repl&e clay care wit$ direct payments...