Two conferences on child care
Edited by Phyllis Schlafly eagle forum & legal defense fund, 1989
Until quite recently the accepted wisdom was that it was best for children to be raised in a family of loving parents (one of each gender was assumed) who knew their responsibilities and accepted the personal sacrifices required of them. Now, of course, that understanding of the family’s function is deemed not only unattainable but undesirable. We are told that the cost of living is now so high that in order to fulfill our longing for an increasing number of trinkets and toys it is necessary that there be two working parents. And if the parents are out working, then “who will rock the cradle?”
The answer for many is Mother State. For them the state is the provider of all good things, the one, true, and only providential god. Thus to the state is directed their fervent, insistent cry for universal daycare. But as the authors of these addresses point out, there are a number of important considerations that must be explored thoroughly before we allow ourselves to be smothered. This book of eighteen essays is assembled to address those questions and to arm the reader with valuable facts and considered opinion.
To my mind, Midge Decter’s lightly humorous examination of the “ideologies about child care” was the best offering. She describes those energetic social engineers who, desiring not to face their responsibilities as parents in favour of the good life, constructed high-sounding theories which were intended to veil their immaturity and their flight from the sacrifices of adulthood. Says Decter: “In general, what those privileged, educated, articulate women were seeking was an overarching structure of theories that would make it legitimate for them, first, to have husbands without being wives; and then to have children without being mothers.”
Decter criticizes the push for daycare as a dangerous retreat from the family. She argues that the responsibilities of child rearing cannot be fulfilled adequately while a career is being pursued at the same time. This we all know in our heart. But to justify our actions the self-serving contrivances of social science are brought into play in order to bolster indefensible arguments with lace-thin “factual” evidence.
For those who may be temporarily confused by the pronouncements of social scientists who are no longer rooted in reality, Schlafly has included the required contrary evidence in articles with titles like “Home Grown Children Have the Advantage” and “Health Risks From Daycare Diseases.”
Why are such articles required reading? Because the universal daycare proponents have been astonishingly successful in confusing what should be clear to just about every parent. They have so dissembled the obvious truth that we now must hire an army of social scientists to study, and then conclude what we already knew: You don’t have to be a scientist to know that children will be better off and a lot healthier if they have two parents who care for them full time and who are sufficiently immune from life’s bobbles that they will remain committed to the job until the kids are mature enough to go it alone!
I admit I am skeptical, especially when the author of “Attachment and Infant Daycare” with appropriate seriousness quotes a British psychiatrist “well-known for his theory of attachment” to the effect that “the attachment relationship that a young child forges with his mother forms the foundation stone of personality.” Is this news? Although articles like this can be interesting, mostly they tell us what is patently clear, except to those who have a particular agenda to push. It is because of them that so-called scientific evidence such as this is required to convince legislators of the right course of action. William J. Bennett, however, is one politician who relies on his own wisdom. He suggests five principles that should guide legislators in considering childcare policies. Among them is the principle that the policy must strengthen the family, not weaken it. Another is that it must not penalize those families which opted to have a parent stay at home. And, for those who chose to have non-parental child care, the government must not favour one kind over another (e.g. state- run over private). Again, it is surprising that such common sense even has to be stated.
However self-evident the arguments may be, this book is a valuable compendium of interesting reading. Although it contains many first-rate writers and arguments, give it to friends who teeter because it won’t convince the strident and the doctrinaire. They will require something akin to a religious conversion. Douglas Ball is a freelance writer living in Mississauga, Ontario.
