Home Alone America - Review Part 1

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.)

Comments

[Another Damned Medievalist]

Hey -- I was home alone at night in charge of two younger sibs -- one in diapers -- when I was 12. I think it's made me bossy and did nothing to stop my procrastinating, but I think my sisters and I are not all that dysfunctional ...

[Russell Arben Fox]

ADM makes a good point--does Eberstadt factor in family size when talking about kids left at home alone? I am assuming most of the teenagers left to "fend for themselves" which she mentions are presumed to be kids without much responsibility. But what if what you have is a situation wherein the teenager has work obligations or younger siblings which demand their attention?

Also, it's important to note how your previous post, on middle-class debt, factors into this as well. (Given Eberstadt's agenda, I'll be suprised to hear if she does.) The greater the number of fixed costs which families are or at least feel obliged to take on, the more something has to give; the whole economic point of daycare, at least for two-parent families, has always been to generate enough income to somehow get slightly ahead of ever-increasing daily costs. The social environment and communal values of families isn't reducible to their economic concerns, but isn't wholly separable from them either.

[laura 11d]

Yeah, all those problems exist in her book. It's a real mess. I'll get to it tonight. L.

[Rebecca]

I was just talking with the head of counselling services at the mid-ranked liberal arts college where I teach about how the problem with our students is that their parents are overinvolved in their lives and they are incapable of acting independently. This is an issue at colleges nationwide. How do the constant complaints about overinvolved parents (at schools, in sports, etc.) mesh with Eberstadt's analysis?

[Ancarett]

Ooo, I'm glad you're doing the review. If I had run across that gem about daycare as a cause of autism, I'd have had a hissy fit. That concept has about as much merit as the infamous "refrigerator mom" theory of the 60s, which held that autism was caused by uncaring mothers.

[laura 11d]

Rebecca - No, she doesn't answer those criticisms about overinvolved parents.

But I don't think that the answer to overinvolved parents is necessarily daycare. The answer is for parents to take a chill pill. You can be involved without being overinvolved or non-involved.

Also, I have to wonder if it's easier for school administrators to have non-involved parents. Far less criticism, I'm sure.

[harry]

Does she give actual figure on any of this stuff? Does she cite serious scholarly studies of the effects on children of being women entering the workforce? As I mentioned before this would be a devil to study, but you haven't said anything that makes it sound as if she has anything more than anecdote.

Also, and I know this isn't fair, I will only read it if you specifically say that I, knowing what you do about my interests, should do so. Well?

[harry]

IN Class and Schools Richard Rothstein talks a litle bit about schools and overinvolved parents, and says, specifically, that some schools have a hard time retaining teachers because they are repelled by the high demands placed on them by overinvolved parents. It sounds as if these are very high demands, and not always educationally sound ones (e.g. proxy grade-grubbing, which a lot of teachers I know have to deal with).

[laura 11d]

Harry, Should you read this book? No, not a fair question. I don't know. It raises some interesting questions and has some good points. But the book did cause a lot of head banging on my desk. Read it, but only if you wear a helmet.

If I was teaching a class on the subject, i might assign a chapter of it. It does sum up the conservative argument well, and it would certainly lead to good debate amongst students.

[Dr. Manhattan]

Did I read your post correctly? Does she really try to posit a link between working mothers and autism?

[Rebecca]

No, obviously the solution to overinvolved parents is not daycare. But if her argument is that "The lack of parental involvement in the lives of their kids results in a great variety of social ills – overweight kids, teenage suicide, depression," that is, that parental UNinvolvement is causing many of our current social problems, then it seems worth considering the fact that many people feel parental OVERinvolvement is causing a lot of problems. They may not be the same problems, but it's still an interesting dichotomy...

[laura 11d]

Absolutely, Rebecca, it is an interesting dichotomy. She sort of responds to those arguments. She calls all the articles and experts who argue that parents are overinvolved and that children are better raised in daycare as the "separatists."

Dr. Manhattan, Eberstadt doesn't quite say that daycare causes autism, but she does say that it is "curious" that features of autism include a history of digestive disorders and these disorders are found less in breast-fed children. Kids are in daycare are less likely to be breast fed, so she feels that she's found some sort of connection. Also, she says that autism may be triggered by viruses and there are a lot more viruses at daycare.

Her whole mental health chapter is insane, so to speak. The only point that was interesting was that kids who are more antsy than other kids, but still perfectly normal, might be unnecessarily given drugs because it makes it easier for daycare providers.

[Elizabeth]

Nice review -- thanks.

I thought I'd pick up on the discussion of responsibilities of older children.

First, I've heard an interesting argument (from Cynthia Harrison at GWU) that if you look at the course of the 20th century what the movement of married women into the workforce really did was free up teenagers to stay in school rather than work to contribute to the family income.

Second, there's a pretty detailed literature on the effects of welfare-to-work programs on the children of recipients. And the big surprise has been that it's almost impossible to find any impacts -- good or bad -- of mandatory work requirements on young children. But there has been a fairly consistent pattern of small negative effects on the teenage children of recipients. And the two main hypotheses to explain this are teenagers getting into trouble because of lack of supervision, and their having more home responsibilities (especially caring for younger siblings).

[Richard Bellamy]

I'd like to hear a little more about the "Daycare causes autism" argument.

While obviously false, I could certainly see the initial plausibility of a more limited "daycare exacerbates the most common manifestations of aspergers syndrome" argument.

[emily]

<<

Um, how would that argument run?? I'd think, actually, that a daycare environment might have benefits for kids w/AS ITO enforced daily socialization. Or did you mean that a lax environment might leave the door open to all-stimming-all-the-time?

[laura 11d]

Sorry, Richard, I can't help you with more details, because she doesn't offer much more than what I said.

[David]

"...vast unpaid services..." is the only benefit you can come up with? Please.

[Zigi Goldberg]

Here's the URL of a website that agrees with Mary Eberstadt regarding daycares:

www.daycaresdontcare.org

The "Daycares Don't Care" website has a lot of information on the problems with day care, similar to Chapter 1 of Eberstadt's book, Home-Alone America.