Andy Warhol famously said that everybody is a celebrity for fifteen minutes. Topics are like people. The media and the public latch on to certain issues for short periods of time, until they lose interest and move on to the next cause. Vouchers, extasy, global warming have all had their moments in the sun. Parenting and motherhood is now getting its fifteen minutes of fame.
Home-Alone America is the latest book on the topic. Like many of these other books, it over simplifies a complicated reality and fails to provide a remedy.
Mary Eberstadt maintains that parents are abandoning their children in daycare centers and letting their teenagers fend for themselves alone. The lack of parental involvement in the lives of their kids results in a great variety of social ills – overweight kids, teenage suicide, depression.
When Eberstadt wasn’t enraging me by bringing up the outlying and sensationalist examples of Dahmer and Kleibold or by making vast causal errors (more tomorrow), she did make some excellent points.
In the last thirty years, there has been a vast increase in working mothers. In 2000, 64% of mothers with children under six worked. That is a huge change in our society which has had both good and bad repercussions. It is worth studying and analyzing.
On the good side, more women are financially secure and able to leave abusive relationships and achieve independence. The greater the wealth of the mother, the more secure the child. Women not cut out for home life have other options.
On the bad side, at home mothers did (and do) provide vast unpaid services for their children and the community that can't be replicated or purchased.
Eberstadt focuses solely on the negative. She's a writer for the National Review and has an ax to grind.
In the course of the book, she makes some excellent points. Parents will monitor their child's TV viewing and food consumption more closely than hired caretakers. It was a good thing when kids could play outside after school with other children while mothers supervised. Kids who spend long hours in daycare may have low level depression that researchers have missed (more likely after 40+ hours in substandard daycare and with no attention from stressed out parents).
However, Eberstadt makes grander claims about the impact of working parents on society that made me slam my head against my desk. For example, she finds a correlation between the rise in the number of autistic children and the rise of women at work. Daycare does not cause autism.
(That elusive devil -- causality. Tomorrow.)