Nasty, Brutish, and Short: Children in day care-and the mothers who put them there.

Contemporary culture values sensitivity and softness, the "nice" virtues, above almost all else: except, we have now learned, when it comes to one particular segment of the population. These are preschoolers who spend more than thirty hours a week in day care. They, it turns out, can possess all the fierceness of William Wallace, and most of the nation's cultural pooh-bahs will pronounce themselves well pleased. The new appreciation of aggressiveness comes in response to the now-infamous national study finding that long stretches away from a mother's care tend to make toddlers more aggressive and defiant.

This study, by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), reports that kids in non-maternal care tend to be associated with qualities such as "gets in lots of fights," "cruelty," "explosive behavior," "talking too much," "argues a lot," and "demands a lot of attention." Time magazine, reflecting the line taken by many liberal commentators, responded this way: "Should we even be worried at all? The researchers noted that almost all the 'aggressive' toddlers were well within the range of normal behavior for four-year-olds. And what about that adjective, anyway? Is a vice not sometimes a form of virtue? Cruelty never is, but arguing back? Is that being defiant-or spunky and independent? 'Demanding attention' could be a natural and healthy skill to develop if you are in a room with 16 other kids." And getting in fights? Explosive behavior?

This line is in keeping with a tendency in academia and the media to find a way to pronounce anything associated with day care-up to and including infectious illness (about which more later)-a good thing, so as to shield working mothers from any bad news. Career moms need such coddling for a reason. Mothers who choose to work full-time jobs and routinely leave their young children with others for much of the day are not normal: They are a historical aberration; they represent a minority preference among women; and they run exactly counter to the standard of motherhood that should be encouraged by society. No wonder elite culture treats them as hothouse flowers, who must hear nary a discouraging word. But the fact is that working moms are at the very center of a variety of cultural ills. Maybe a little stigma is exactly what they deserve.

The last three decades have wrought a wrenching change in American family life, with the once-dominant traditional family-featuring a breadwinning father and a mother at home with children-becoming only one option in a lengthening menu. From the mid 1970s to the late 1980s, the percentage of kids under five with employed mothers nearly doubled. According to the Department of Labor, that number has continued to climb. Between 1990 and 1999, the percentage of mothers with children under age three who were in the job market increased from 53.6 percent to 60.7 percent. Many families rely on informal arrangements involving relatives, friends, and neighbors for child care, but about a third turn to institutional care. It is primarily to spare their feelings that the cultural elite strains to debunk studies like the recent NICHD one.

Usually, disturbing results in day-care studies are dismissed as the product of poor-quality care. But the NICHD study found the negative behavioral effects across the board, for every type of care, good, bad, or indifferent. Doubters have tried to minimize the study: 1) by arguing that it wasn't measuring anything bad about day care per se, just the effects of children being around other children. But the study controlled for this, and still found day-care kids more aggressive than kids at home with their moms. 2) By suggesting that the day-care- associated aggression was in "the normal range" for all kids. But the important fact is that there is an aggressiveness gap between children in day care and children at home. 3) By wondering if nasty-sounding "aggression" isn't really just healthy assertiveness (Sam Donaldson in the nursery). Yet the study distinguished between the two.

It's true that children in higher-quality care in the NICHD study were more cognitively advanced than kids at home or in poor-quality care, but this silver lining should be judged against a backdrop of decades of evidence that day care harms children. For roughly 25 years, research has found a correlation between day care and disobedience. So, day-care apologists have lots of practice in explaining it away (here's liberal psychologist Alison Clarke Stewart in 1989, hailing disobedient day-care kids: "They are not willing to comply with adults' arbitrary rules"). 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 (a 1994 international study found that 50 percent of children in care full time had an insecure attachment to their moms); and in the case of children of well-educated mothers placed in poor-quality care, slowed cognitive development (children apparently suffer from the contrast between the rich interaction they get at home and the less stimulating atmosphere in day care).

The feminist answer to any disquieting day-care study is always to call for spending on better quality care. Marian Wright Edelman, among others, sounded this reliable trumpet in response to the new NICHD study. But the search for the holy grail of high-quality care will be everlasting, like the quest for the elusive "true Marxism." What distinguishes high-quality care is lots of intense, personal attention (cooing, stroking, bouncing, babbling) over an extended period of time- in other words, exactly what real mothers would do, but for an hourly wage. This kind of care is hard to find, and expensive. A 1995 University of Colorado study found that only 8 percent of day-care centers caring for infants and toddlers were "high quality." The obvious response to bad news about day care shouldn't be to agitate to subsidize it further, but to urge moms to work less and spend more time with their kids. It's a notion that liberals never want to raise-they would sooner discuss reinstituting Jim Crow or exhuming and reexecuting the Rosenbergs.