Sue Gerhardt on Why Love Matters (Daycare Revisited)

The whole ballgame depends on the soundness of Gerhardt’s empirical claim that even what we think of as high quality day care is necessarily bad for children. That is likely to be overlooked in the discussion because people already have opinions about her policy recommendations (e.g., that there should be more government support for parental leave), and will jump right to talking about those recommendations and whether they favor or oppose them on grounds unrelated to Gerhardt’s. But if Gerhardt’s empirical claim is wrong — and candidly it strikes me as nearly 100% crankery — she has nothing to contribute to the discussion.

By way of analogy, suppose that I wrote a book in which I said that I very strongly felt that wheat and corn flour cause cancer and that for that reason we should cut back on subsidies to wheat and corn farmers and encourage people to eat more fruit. I can imagine that people could talk for hours about those policy recommendations even though my underlying empirical claim — that wheat and corn flour cause cancer — is utter crap, and really I’ve done nothing but confuse the debate.

I’m sure it’s beyond the reach of more than 75% of the world’s population.

David — she is (deliberately?) evasive about timelines. The UK government just introduced 9 months; she has not complained, but my sense is that she wants more — 12 months? 24 months? Her book is mainly about the first 2 years of life, which she sees I think as the crucial period (whihc isn’t to say that nothing can be done valuably after that, just that getting it right in those 2 years is important).

akali — there are all sorts of reasons for thinking that even highly qualified carers will bne less attuned to the needs of a baby, and less motivated to act on those needs, than someone who loves the baby and shares most of its life, no? Anyway, before dismissing it as crankery, look at the evidence (which is compelling, as she presents it, but certainly not decisive, you have to use your judgment).

But for policy purposes I don’t see why anything much turns on the isue of the effects of really high quality day care, because, as I say, its not something that is on the US agenda; most daycare is far from that (really high quality would require highly qualified carers who cared for the same baby day-in-day-out, and didn’t move jobs frequently; veryr few day care centers have sufficiently low employee turnover to count). Changing this is not anywhere near anyone’s policy agenda, especially for the children of poor parents.

jroth: I kept thinking about large families, too, when reading the book. “4 kids under 4 is not uncommon”? It isn’t exactly common, either. Again, if the ratio is the same, there are still reasons to expect the person who loves the kids to do a better job. But there might be (child-centered) reasons to discourage people from having 4 kids in 4 years, too.

lizardbreath — “harmful” is always relative to a baseline, right, and I’m not sure that either she or I use the term. The question is what’s the best way of making it very likely that children avoid certain bad outcomes. Should social policy give people strong incentives to spend the early years of their children’s lives at work, while the kids are in daycare, or should it give them incentives to spend that time largely with their children; or should it perhaps not try to tilt them one way or the other. US tax policy gives very strong incentives to keep them in daycare, and the divorce regime partiocularly gives women incentives to stay in the labour force. The US labour market is also especially unforgiving for people who want flexibility; parents who want to share childcare among themselves, or want to use a mix of childcare and staying at home.

She doesn’t talk much about nannies, because nannies are simply not part of the policy debate. I’ve been a nanny, myself, though only for a while. One nanny for six years sounds great, to me. 6 nannies in six years, even if they are each great nannies, not so good. Love and continuity intertwine.

You’d really need controlled experiments to settle these points. Is that possible? Has anyone been sharp enough to spot “natural” experiments? Or will it degenerate into one camp which believes in daycare (because it suits their lives) and another which disapproves?

The problem with a lot of the studies on daycare is that they concentrate on the effects of fulltime daycare from a very early age. This isn’t actually a common situation, at least in the UK. There was a similar claim made recently in the UK about the harmful effects of daycare. In one of the article discussing this, (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-2036862.html), Steve Bidulph said that only about 5% of British parents were ‘slammers’, having children in day care full-time from under 6 months. Another 35% were ‘sliders, putting children in daycare part-time after age 2. 60% of parents didn’t use nurseries at all.

The real choices for mothers like myself are more subtle. I would count as somewhere between a slammer and a slider – my child has had part-time daycare since six months or so, in a nursery which I knew had low staff turnover. I think the benefits to myself (and thus indirectly to my child) justified this and so far it seems to have worked OK for her. Just saying daycare is bad and your child should have as little of it as possible (which is what the experts tend to end up saying, whatever their initial qualifiers) is pretty unhelpful to anyone who doesn’t want or can’t afford to be a full-time parent for four years or more. (I calculated this is what it would mean if you took seriously Steve Biddulph’s ideas about how little time you should ideally spend away from your child.)

“and feminists have not reason to want them to be screwed up”

This is, to put it mildly, not intuitively obvious. If being screwed up really does “lay the groundwork to produce the workaholics of the future labour force.”, and feminists, despite occasional rhetoric about choice, only respect women who pursue a career working outside the home, then perhaps they DO have reason to want them screwed up.

Right, Brett. The same argument goes through (and with about as much plausibility) if you replace “feminist” with “evil capitalist class” — obviously the capitalists want to produce workaholics, and so despite occasional rhetoric about choice, it’s in their long-term interest to lobby to have the cost of daycare reduced.

This article talks about some of the issues and doesn’t come down strongly against daycare. This review of twin studies suggests that cortisol level differences are highly heritable (about 63%)while acknowloging the effects of adverse childhood experiences.

Daycare has been around for a long time so you would expect if it was turning people into Romanian orphans we would know by now. You would think that for evolutionary reasons, kids would be pretty robust to most reasonable levels of treatment. The other thing that effects some studies of daycare is that parents are more likly to stay at home with easy babies and send babies that are a pain in the ass to daycare. High cortisol level babies tend to be fussy and cry alot .

A couple of comments prompted by comments.

First, while Gerhardt’s account implies a good deal of sound advice about what to do with your baby/child when you are with it and what to take into account when making decisions about what to do about childcare decisions, it is not a “how to” book. Nor does it (at least on my reading) imply or evince any disapproval of people who decide to return to work early, and use daycare. She seems to understand that lots of people face circumstances which make returning to work and using full time daycare earlier thanshe thinks ideal the best choice. The thing is to change the conditions which put people in that situation.

Second, she does not seem at all to support the kind of narcissistic and isolated kind of familial situation which clew might have in mind. It is quite consistent with the idea that parents should be the main carers in the first couple of years that more people than just the parents should be involved in a child’s life, and should be involved in ways that are long term and emotionally intimate. I agree with clew about this, even when the parents are NOT narcissistic!

The post quotes Gerhardt as saying

Babies looked after by people who are not ‘in love’ with them are often socialised into emotional life, with corresponding biochemical pathways in the brain, without the responsiveness and sensitivity that produce emotional confidence and competence.

This claim is particularly interesting to me because it fits very well with something that my mother suggested to me and I have since found to be fairly consistently true: That if you look into the background of the most “emotionally confident and competent” people, you will find that their parents just adored them (but in ways that allowed them some independence, etc). And that, by the same logic, many insecure or neurotic people had less beneficial parenting. This doesn’t require the extremity of abuse or anything like that – I’ve certainly observed it in families where the parents had a clear favorite among their children, however hard they tried to be fair and not express favoritism.

My point being, I think there’s something to Gerhardt’s claim. I just don’t think the down side of it is remotely restricted to paid caregivers.

Well, I suppose I owe my career and my future life to Swedish paternity laws, since I stayed home to look after my son from the time he was about three months old until he was three and started some limited daycare, while his mother went back to work. And I thought — still think — that this was a marvellously civilised arrangement. But at the risk of starting a new row, I don’t think I was nearly as good at being a mother as a woman would hav been. I loved him, and cared for him and nourished his personality and all that. But I couldn’t do the mindless chatter bit at all. I don’t think I was as good a help with development as I should have been. Still, I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.

cs — thanks, that seems right to me. I won’t amend it here, but will avoid such a weak argument in future. No, sorry, I’ll avoid that weak argument in future, I’m sure I’ll make others equally weak.

Kieran, when you devise a reducto, try to be sure it actually IS absurd.

Which other things are being left equal in the survey that resulted in these conclusions? In particular, the thing that would interest me would be the “critical carer churn-rate” — babies may very well profit from nurturing relationships measured in weeks rather than afternoons, but I have actually sketched — in collaboration with the countess-elect von Bladet, of course — plans to move to Zweden precisely to take advantage of their very excellent “dagis” system of daycare and especially its early availability.

(I talk at least as much ambient drivel as the countess-elect, although admittedly in different conversational genres, so I would cheerfully attempt to counter-exemplify Andrew Brown’s remarks.)

Well I think there are two problems here.

First of all, our economic system simply doesn’t value “women’s work” very much. Look at how teachers are paid, and daycare providers, nannies, etc., and the still-persistent stereotype that stay-at-home parents “don’t work”. A more cooperative, less competitive, alternative economy can go a long way to solving this, and I’ll cite the work of international banker Bernard Leitaer (“The Future of Money”) and welfare-reformer Edgar Cahn (“No More Throw-Away People”). We are destroying ourselves as a society by monetising cooperative work using a competitive money system– a good deal of the “growth” in the economy is people now paying for services they once got or provided through barter or social obligation. I believe this is actively destroying the fabric of society.

Secondly, men need to step up and do more of this stuff. It’s utter bullshit ins 2006 to leave it to the women to do all this stuff. I’ve been a full-time stay-at-home dad for 4 years now, and was doing it part-time for a year before that. It is, by far, the most grueling, difficult work I’ve ever done. However, it has been the most rewarding I’ve ever done, by far. Fate caught me in a massive layoff several months after becoming a father– such is the luck of kids born during the dot-bomb. Women are still paid less than men, and therefore are less likely to be laid off, and since my wife’s job was safe and steady, she kept it, and I became Mr. Mom. It has not been easy. We have cut back our lifestyle dramatically, but come out of it much stronger in every possible way. This has been our Walden. I recommend it highly.

I agree, feminists should not be defending women who place their kids into daycare, they should be attacking men who claim that raising kids is women’s work. We may not have the hundreds of millions of years experience that women have in this area, but goddammit we can do it just as well as they do. Anyway, that’s what they’ve said to us for a generation as they’ve demanded the right to become plumbers, police officers, soldiers, and CEO’s, and it is a symmetrical process. Moreover, for the sake of our kids’ mental and emotional health, it *has* to be symmetrical– I don’t feel that dumping kids into daycare is an option, and, gentlemen, it’s time to step up. Sure it’s brutally hard work, but we CAN do it. We HAVE to do it. I’m heartened to find that at least some of the experts agree.

So, does Gerhardt make the claim that all daycare is bad in the first two years or that only bad daycare is bad?

I’m glad that you reviewed this book, Harry. I wouldn’t go so far as to condemn all daycare. My niece is one and seems to be quite nicely. (Her folks are also exceptionally involved.) I think that a lot of academics have their kids in nice campus set ups and forget that all daycare isn’t like that. I had my kid in a bad daycare for a few years. I don’t think he was permanently scarred, because he was only in part time. Even my mom said that being ignored for a short time never hurt anybody. But the kids who were there for 12 hours a day were sad, sad bunnies. There weren’t abused or anything, but they weren’t happy. I often wondered if being sad for that long had some long term effect.

It’s too bad that talking about bad daycare is such a taboo topic, because it’s a real problem. Either we have to invest money into fixing it, or we have to give up on daycare and enable people to watch their own kids. But that would cost money, too. Problems, problems.

anon brings up a good point: the nuclear small (average 2-kid) family is an historical anomaly. Grandparents, older siblings, aunts and uncles, even “family friends” tended to have a larger role in child-rearing in times past and in other cultures. We’ve simultaneously attempted to saddle parents (and mothers in particular) with sole responsibility for raising children while stripping them of the support systems offered by extended family. The replacement, an admixture of “experts” and underpaid, under-skilled caregivers, is both more costly and less likely, IMHO, to yield a good outcome.

PS For a counter-point you may want to review Jerome Kagan’s “Three Seductive Ideas”, where he criticises the view that the first 2 years of a child’s life are somehow more fundamentally formative.

I think that the problem with the whole daycare debate is that what’s good for kids isn’t necessarily good for women and visa versa. Sometimes the interests of the kids and the parents line up nicely; sometimes they don’t. It might be good for kids to be raised at home full time by a parent, but it might not be good for the woman to be bored and underappreciated at home.

But shouldn’t we be interested in what goes on in daycare? I haven’t read this book, so I can’t defend the author. But maybe she makes some good claims. Maybe she has done some interesting research and makes distinctions between good and bad daycare. Just because her findings will be inconvenient and even disturbing, it doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t hear them.

If her points are valid, then we have to come up with some new political remedies and to question the all work all the time mentality.

I will also point out that there have been studies done on Sweden and Norway’s leave system to show that men are less likely to take advantage of it. In the US, men taking more responsibility for parenting would require a cultural shift of monumental proportions. As somebody said above, call me when that happens.

Some of the comments certainly make me think I haven’t represented the book as well as I could have. It is no part of Gerhardt’s mission to blame people for the choices they make, and I think she recognizes the important point that Laura makes, that what is best for the child and what is best for the parent may not coincide. Most of the book concerns what is actually going on inside the kid (as far as we can discern), and in the course of it she says a lot of sensible things, which are valuable whether you use daycare or not, about how we should treat our children when we are with them; a great deal of which, for me, articulated what I already knew but couldn’t have articulated. Her main policy objective is to get more paid parental leave and more support for mental health care(of parents and children), and yes, she particularly thinks that full time daycare is not the best thing, at least for under-2s, and that policy should reflect this judgement. At present policy in the US is pro-daycare and strongly against parental leave (subsidizing one but not the other, for instance).

Now I’m speaking as me, not as her, because I don’t quite know what to attribute to her, although full time daycare for the under-2s is not the best thing, it might well be good enough. Laura’s point cuts both ways; we shouldn’t just assume that what is best for the parent is best for the child.

Also, it may be right that an economy that faciliated more flexible hours (and in which we worked fewer hours) would result in fewer women staying home full time, and more staying home part time; that’s a good point, and makes sense to me. It might also facilitate the cultural revolution that would be needed for men to do a great deal more childrearing. As I said in the original post, the all-work-all-the-time program does not facilitate that; it ensures that women do most childcaring, just women who are paid to do it.

Great to see so much discussion of Why Love Matters, the themes are familiar since in the UK many have responded to the political questions it raises re daycare rather than to the science it presents. My aim was for people to know more about how a baby’s brain develops, and to understand that it develops interactively- so that we can make informed decisions about the kind of early caregiving we provide. There is still a lack of awareness that very early development is largely about EMOTIONAL development.
(By the way, Joe O., the paper on cortisol you quote doesn’t deal with neonates, it is looking at twin studies in general which to me is quite meaningless. The stress response which produces cortisol is set up in the first 6 months or so, and if that period of life is over-stressed,the stress response will be “set” to over-react or under-react. Unless you compare neonates you are simply comparing environmental influences.)
If we want to provide our children with good emotional foundations, in the form of a balanced stress response and good development of the pre-frontal cortex and other areas of the emotional brain, we have to think about what THEY need in the period when these emotion systems are developing. I think that infants need relationships that keep them in a reasonably stress-free state, with people who respond positively to them as potential, emerging personalities and pay attention to who they are becoming over time. In theory very expensive daycare with key workers who take care of “their” babies, who are paid well enough to stay over a period of years, and love their job enough to turn up when they have a hangover, etc, could provide a baby with the essentials. But in practice studies have found that daycare workers do have high turnover, and have in the past been reluctant to get involved emotionally with their charges. Many nurseries have a harsh ethos, urging premature independence. Some studies have found that children in daycare are stressed (have high cortisol) even when they appear to have adjusted.
On the other hand, there are studies that show that if a child has established a secure attachment to their parent before they attend daycare, that relationship will not be affected by attending daycare. Daycare has the worst effects on children who are not secure (in attachment terms) in their own families.
But attachment security takes time to develop, most of the first year, so it still brings us back to parental care for at least the first year unless things are not good at home.
As Harry suggests, my conclusion from years of study is that daycare is not the best place for babies and toddlers, but has real benefits for children from the age of about 2 or 3.
I do see myself as a feminist, but I think we have to recognise that it is time for a rethink of our attitudes to work and childcare. I agree with Ingrid that we don’t just want women to have the option to join the man’s world, we need something more radical where caring for children (and each other) is given more value. I personally think that for one individual, man or woman, to be stuck at home 24/7 with a small baby drives many people crazy and is not what humans were designed for..our ancestors brought up children in small groups. So I am much more interested in solutions that involve fathers in childcare, and the local community too, and give women and men a balance between adult participation and caring for their own small child.

Laura,

right, I think that’s important, and as someone pointed out much further up, most of the evidence about these things concerns i) large amounts of daycare and, perhaps more complicatedly, ii) the risks of extremely bad outcomes (severe depression, being a psycho-killer… oh, no, not that one). So it is hard to make judgments about middling amounts of daycare and the relationship to middling outcomes. Its all about probabilities and costs, and for parents as well as children.

I haven’t read the book, but I bet the author’s recommended childrearing practices match what has been recognized by other sources in the US as the current white middle-class child-rearing practice of choice (that was not a great sentence). Basically, the infant gets lots of physical and verbal attention, is carried rather than pushed in a stroller, is included in adult activities, is constantly read to and played with, etc…. I have seen (second hand) some evidence that suggest that this does a better job of developing the brain and also is the reason middle-class white kids start school with an advantage over their poorer counterparts.

Any child-rearing strategy is a cultural phenomenon and has cultural implications. Some people talk about this as a better way to raise a child–and it may well be–but you have to remember that we are judging this by end results which usually mean favorable educational results. We raise kids this way, they do better in school, schools we have designed to get certain kinds of results.

I’m not sure how this parenting style came about. it is a recent development. I think “experts” like Dr. Spock had something to do with it, as has later brain research. Anyway, white middle-class parents have been especially receptive to certain kinds of recommendations, and I think it is becasue they believe it will improve their child’s school performance. Not always consciously, maybe. But the rational behind all the recommendations are usually intellectual and academic. Read to your kid so your kid will be a better reader. Explain to your kid what you are doing through out the day so that they will make multiple synaptic connections and therefor develope better critical thinking skill. Or whatever. And this makes sense because how well you do in school in our society, especially for the middle-class, determines to a huge extent how will you will do in adult life.

Anyway, I have no real point, I just think it’s interesting and beneficial to think about child-rearing practices from a cultural standpoint. How did these strategies come about? What is the ideal adult these strategies are supposed to create? And the fact that this current child-rearing strategy is being more and more promoted is a cultural phenomnon in and of itself and worth of being examined.

Jake. I disagree: cohort studies are what you do when you can’t do controlled experiments; they are always second best.

Thanks, Sue, for expanding on harry’s post. I’m looking forward to reading your book to learn more about specifics of your study. I think we need new solutions to properly care for children and to enable parents to provide care without losing their marbles in the solitude of a home.

You wrote: “So I am much more interested in solutions that involve fathers in childcare, and the local community too, and give women and men a balance between adult participation and caring for their own small child.”

Do you write about policy and politics in this book?

I’ve just started to read the book. For what it’s worth, I absolutely love it so far, and I’m so thankful to Harry for bringing it to attention just as I’m getting ready to be a father for the first time.