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Notes on
Books by
CHILD CARE? WHO CARES?
“Train
up a child in the way he should go: and
when he is old, he will not depart from it” (Proverbs 22:6).
Caring for children ever characterizes healthy cultures.
Even “primitive” cultures invested much in rearing the coming
generation—as evident in an Iroquois tradition that encouraged folks to
consider the next seven generations when charting tribal policies.
If you want to make a “good society” you need to rear “good
kids.” Robert Coles, long-time
Harvard professor and highly-regarded authority on children, says:
“Good children are boys and girls who in the first place have learned
to take seriously the very notion, the desirability, of goodness—a living up
to the Golden Rule, a respect for others, a commitment of mind, heart, soul to
one’s family, neighborhood, nation—and have also learned that the issue of
goodness is not an abstract one, but rather a concrete, expressive one:
how to turn the rhetoric of goodness into action, moments that affirm the
presence of goodness in a particular life lived” (The
Moral Intelligence of Children).
Given such
ancient wisdom, given the need most everyone acknowledges that we need to rear
“good” children, their conditions—as documented in several recent
studies—should concern us all. Robert
M. Shaw, M.D., a child and family psychiatrist who once taught at the Albert
Einstein College of Medicine, now directs the Family Institute of Berkeley,
The book’s lengthy subtitle encapsulates its message, and Shaw writes
with a deep sense of outrage at the ways parents, for the past 30 years, have
failed their kids. He claims the
killings at
The big problem, as James Dobson indicated long ago, is parents’
failure to discipline their children. In
truth, “No!” is a good word! Kids
need boundaries, limits, restrictions. They
actually welcome “limits on when they go to bed, when they do their homework,
when they watch TV, what they eat, who they play with.
And they thrive in tightly managed environments” (p. 129).
Permissive parenting is poor parenting!
“When parents let a child run wild, they are in fact abandoning him”
(p. 147). Without careful guidance,
Shaw says, children fail to develop into caring, sensitive adults.
But because they spend so much time away from their kids, today’s
parents internalize a great deal of guilt and are overly-anxious to
please rather than direct their offspring. They
even try to be friends with their youngsters, consulting rather than correcting
them. Whenever a mom or dad tells a
child “Let’s go” and appends an “OK?”
there’s a problem! Adults,
not children, must make such decisions.
Parents have
also allowed themselves to be brainwashed by “the parenting gurus who preach
child-centric theories, asserting: ‘Never
let your baby cry,’ ‘He’ll use the potty when he’s ready,’
‘Discipline is disrespectful,’ ‘The child’s feelings should come
first’” (p. 15). And when
ill-disciplined kids get out of control, there’s always Ritalin and Prozac,
which doubled in usage within a single decade.
All sorts of verbal evasions proliferate like crab grass!
Kids are called “difficult,” “oppositional,”
“high-maintenance,” etc. In
fact, they’re just spoiled! Rather
than dealing with the real issues, the “experts” have simplistically
prescribed a singular cure: self-esteem!
Whatever’s wrong, self-esteem will correct it!
Bumper stickers and awards ceremonies, incessant praise and mandatory
applause, all seek to make children “feel good” about themselves.
A sense of “self-esteem,” it’s said, develops when kids enjoy
incessant approval. Nonsense! says
Shaw. The self-esteem peddled by
“pop psychologists is nothing less than self-worship, narcissism,” and it
sizably contributes to the many problems youngsters struggle with.
Real self-esteem, on the other hand, is a by-product of authentic
accomplishments. Actually scoring a
touchdown—not getting praised for trying—gives one self-esteem.
Just do something worthwhile, something good, and forget the smiley
faces.
Doing things
means viewing less TV. Watching
too much, and thinking about it too little, proves toxic to youngsters.
Most kids are mostly unsupervised as they weekly absorb anywhere from
20-50 hours of programming, much of it whetting appetites for consumption, sex,
and violence. Consequently, they
read less and learn less, have fewer friends and like their parents less.
They also are much more discontented with things in general.
Shaw urges parents to monitor and control their children’s TV time.
The medium—like computers and music—has much to offer.
But we need to choose what’s right and protect our kids from what’s
wrong.
What children most need isn’t more TV or awards or drugs but, rather,
more parental care. As John Locke
observed, centuries ago, “Parents wonder why the streams are bitter, when they
themselves have poisoned the fountain.”
Especially in the early years, a baby needs a mother’s arms and words.
“She alone has that unique instinctual drive that prepares her to
engage in a developmental dance with her newborn” (p. 26).
Without what Shaw calls “motherese” during a baby’s first two
years, his cognitive and emotional development suffers.
“This incredible relationship between mother and child is absolutely
unique, the single most sacred thing in our culture” (p. 34).
And yet, amazingly enough, this “sacred thing” has been ruthlessly
assailed and ridiculed, rejected by powerful elites in this country.
Those who have urged women to pursue full-time careers—feminists of all
shades who have urged women to ignore their own inner promptings—have created
a world profoundly hostile to children’s wellbeing.
Truth to tell, institutionalized childcare is mainly defended by those
who place parents’ concerns above children’s.
Considerable dishonesty pervades the social sciences, where studies are
hyped or ignored in accord with their support of working mothers and day
schools. Two parents, both pursuing
careers full-time, Shaw insists, can hardly
provide “the optimum environment for raising children” (p. 80).
He writes with deep conviction, for his life has been spent dealing with
“anguished parents and their children, and I can tell you this much is true:
at least one of the parents has to make raising the children the top
priority” (82). Anything
less puts kids in harm’s way. There’s
much harm, for example, in childcare. The
more time a child spends in childcare facilities the less closely he will bond
with his mother—and the more behavioral problems he will have thereafter.
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Shaw’s contentions are buttressed by Brian C. Robertson’s Day Care
Deception: What The Child Care
Establishment Isn’t Telling Us (
Basic to Robertson’s case
is “attachment theory,” best represented by the noted psychologist John
Bowlby and popularized by Benjamin Spock, who urged moms to stay home with their
children as much as possible until they were at least four years old.
To separate a child from his mother was widely understood to endanger the
child’s well-being. During the
past 30 years, however, vigorous critics have denied attachment’s import.
Though no evidence supported their case, the critics basically silenced
(through intimidation) the attachment theorists.
Consequently, Dr. Spock’s 1992 edition of Baby
and Child Care says nothing about the need for any infant-mother attachment
and even encourages parents to elevate self-fulfillment over concern for
children. Explaining his radical
about-face on this issue, Spock said that too many women “pounced” on him
and blamed him for making them feel “guilty.”
Convinced they would work whether he approved or not—and unable to
withstand feminist wrath—he says: “I
just tossed it. It’s a cowardly
thing that I did; I just tossed it in subsequent editions” (p. 73).
Spock represents the almost universal capitulation of elite academic and
media “authorities” on childcare. They
deny the data Roberson presents which is, indeed, alarming.
It’s evident that professors and journalists care much more for their
agenda than the truth. In Bernard
Goldberg’s lengthy experience as a journalist, he witnessed the success of
feminists, who “are the pressure group that the media elites (and their wives
and friends) are most aligned with.” Consequently,
“
The same holds for professors in elite universities.
Despite a great deal of preening about “academic freedom” and
fearlessly pursuing the truth, no tolerance is granted
“research” suggesting children suffer when deprived of their
parents’ presence. Like Social
Security for politicians, daycare for children is the “third rail” for
academics—touch it and you die! Professors
hoping to be published, to get tenure, to enjoy advancement and prestige in
their profession, simply cannot challenge feminist orthodoxies.
Indeed, Dr. Louise Silverstein, in the American
Psychologist, urged her colleagues to “’refuse to undertake any more
research that looks for the negative consequences of other-than-mother
care’” (p. 103). One of the few
who dared to do so is a highly regarded scholar, Jay Belsky, who initially
defended (in the ‘70s and ‘80s) the notion that children fared well in
daycare facilities. In time,
however, mounting evidence prodded him to reverse himself.
Suddenly, he found himself attacked as an enemy of working women—indeed
of women in general! Publishing his
research proved difficult. He was
“shunned at scientific meetings” (p. 43).
He’d become an outcast, a nobody! Consequently,
he’s accepted an appointment in
What the professors and journalists refuse to report, however, should be
reported. For children increasingly
suffer as a result of parental deprivation.
On a purely physical level it’s clear that children in day care
institutions are far more likely to be sick than their counterparts at home.
One epidemiologist actually called day care centers “the open sewers of
the twentieth century” (p. 87). Chronic
inner ear infections, diarrhea, dysentery, jaundice, hepatitis A all thrive when
small children are mixed together, and “high quality” centers are as
disease-ridden as their less esteemed rivals.
Harder document, of course, is the soul-suffering endured by young
children. Kids now spend more time
alone, more time with TV, less time eating meals at home, less time talking with
adults. They’re more likely to
demonstrate anti-social behavior and less likely to internalize solid ethical
principles.
These problems are fully understood by
Senators Hillary Clinton and Edward Kennedy and Christopher Dodd set the
tax policies and national agenda to comply with the radical feminist agenda.
Though few parents want what Clinton et al. seek to dictate, they are
subjects of the welfare state and struggle to cope with its policies.
It’s a daunting struggle, but Robertson provides data and perspectives
with which to resist it.
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Though rather
unwieldy (640 pp.) and repetitious at times, William D. Gairdner’s The War Against the
Family:
A Parent Speaks Out on the Political, Economic, and Social Policies That
Threaten Us All (Toronto:
Stoddart Publishing Co., c. 1992) gives us a Canadian parent’s
perspective on a variety of issues. A
graduate of
Let me focus on only one of his major themes:
the doleful impact of the Welfare State, the deleterious effect of all
utopian schemes that propose to improve upon the natural order of things.
As he writes in his Preface, this book “shows how the political,
economic and social/moral troubles that play themselves out in the nation at
large inevitably trickle down to alter our most private lives and dreams; how
any democracy based on freedom and privacy will strangle itself if it drifts
toward, or is manoeuvred into, a belief in collectivism of any kind” (p. ix).
To the extent socialism triumphs, Gairdner argues, the family suffers.
This is
graphically evident in
Social, as well as economic decay, also marks
The Swedish Welfare State, Gairdner insists, has delivered a lethal blow
to the family. But, to the
enlightened elitists in
One of the great reversals needed involves education, to which Gairdner
devotes several chapters. State-controlled
education—one of the goals listed in The
Communist Manifesto—illustrates the damage children suffer when subjected
to a centrally-planned, bureaucratic system.
Amazingly, Americans in
The public school movement, strongly championed by “reformers” like
the Fabians in
“History will surely show,” says Gairdner, “that one of the tragic
links in the long chain of Western decline was the surrender by families, to the
nation State, of control over their children’s education.
As Yale historian John Demos has aptly argued, the school is one of the
institutions responsible for the long-term ‘erosion of function’ of the
family. And Stanford’s Kingsley
Davis writes that ‘one of the main functions [of the school system] appears to
be to alienate offspring from their parents” (p. 208).
But we need not abandon our young to the state! To
reverse the harm being done to our kids, Gairdner urges us to support private
schools, vouchers, anything possible to take back some of the power from the
omnivorous state. And, perhaps,
there is headway being made in the