OUTSOURCING OUR CHILDREN: F. Carolyn Graglia reviews Mary Eberstadt

...Our society, in particular the media and academia, wholeheartedly endorsed this feminist ideology, and homemakers were consistently disparaged and their social and economic security were fatally undermined by the enactment in all 50 states of no-fault divorce laws that warned mothers it was unsafe to devote themselves to raising children. The result was an unprecedented influx of mothers into the workplace so that, by 1985, the majority of mothers with children under six were working outside the home. ...

This social experiment is, of course, the mother-child separation required by the feminist notion that a woman's personal fulfillment requires her energetic participation in the workplace. Eberstadt calls defenders of this conceit "separationists": those who believe that women's freedom to work in the paid marketplace justifies separation from their children, and who refuse to consider whether the children and adolescents left behind by the adult exodus have suffered. She challenges a society, which only seems concerned with making it easier and cheaper for women to "combine work and family," to consider how small children actually experience being in daycare all day. She makes the very sensible point that the daycare debate is never about what it feels like for the infant and children in day care, but always about what the outcomes are in terms of personality development and cognitive ability. "The daycare proof," separationists believe, "is in the achievement pudding." Separationists, however, are often not around children, who, in their lives, have been made "someone else's problem."

We have long known that being in day-care centers increases illnesses among children, but Eberstadt analyzes this problem from the child's, not the adult's, perspective. What must it be like for a sick child, dosed with Tylenol to disguise an illness before being dropped off at the center? "Anyone actually charged with the care of little children," she observes, "knows that a sick baby or toddler is a uniquely pitiful thing, in part because such a child is too young to understand why." Through the eyes of children, Eberstadt details the numerous areas in which their lives have worsened during the period when increasing numbers of mothers left the home, and she establishes the connections between parental absence and children's present afflictions. ...

The goal of Eberstadt's book is to convince some women who have a choice to raise their children at home and some parents to stay together for the sake of their children. If the number of women at home increases and the number of absent fathers decreases, their own children will have fewer problems and society will improve: elementary school classes, which suffer from the large number of children whose stay in day care has made them belligerent and aggressive, will become more manageable for teachers and less stressful for students. If more mothers are around the neighborhood in the daytime and more fathers are there to play ball at night, it may improve the lives of even the children in the neighborhood with absent parents.

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