The Kids Aren't Alright.(Day Care Deception: What the Child Care Establishment Isn't Telling Us)(Book Review)

Day Care Deception: What the Child Care Establishment Isn't Telling Us, by Brian C. Robertson (Encounter, 280 pp., $25.95)

The debate over day care is not over; in fact, it never happened. Convincing evidence has demonstrated that day care is harmful to children, and that toddlers are better off at home than in group care-but, owing to decades of liberal deceit, censorship, and hypocrisy, there has never been an honest discussion of this issue. This maddening tale is the subject of Brian C. Robertson's well-researched new expose.

Robertson's determination to confront the child-care establishment with hard facts is certainly matched by the depth of commitment of the villains in his story: The "day care deception" is one project that finds liberals arguing to boost the profits of big business, expand tax cuts for the rich, and sabotage women's choices.

From its earliest days, the feminist movement was on a collision course with what was widely known to be true about the crucial relationship between mother and child. To her credit, Simone de Beauvoir confronted this problem honestly when she argued that "women should not have that choice [to stay home], precisely because if there is such a choice, too many women will make that one." Cultural and economic forces had to be marshaled to convince mothers that they shouldn't rely on husbands for support while sacrificing their careers to care for children at home. Because the needs of small children are irreconcilable with the demands of women's liberation, they would be the littlest casualties in the battle for equal rights.

In this effort, feminists-and a commercial day-care industry now worth $36 billion a year-have been wildly successful. Today, 63 percent of preschoolers are in regular child-care arrangements other than with their mother at home. More than half of this child-care population spends 35 hours or more a week in substitute care. In 1995, the number of preschool children cared for in organized facilities outnumbered, for the first time on record, those cared for by babysitters in the home or in family-run day care.

Robertson details the consistent research findings showing that day care is physically and emotionally harmful-but only a few brave experts are willing to risk the wrath of the establishment by talking about this evidence. One of them is Dr. Burton White, a leading expert on the first three years of life, who continues to plead with mothers not to delegate the care of their children to anyone else in the early years because "babies form their first human attachment only once." More typical is Dr. Benjamin Spock, who, after flatly informing 1950s mothers that day nurseries are "no good for infants," deleted this advice from 1990s editions of his manual because it made working mothers feel guilty (and to no avail, because they were headed to work anyway). Spock himself admitted: "It's a cowardly thing that I did; I just tossed it in subsequent editions."

In 1977, researcher Selma Fraiberg argued that even high-quality day care is harmful ...