I’m wondering what studies like this will do for policy. I mentioned earlier that many policies put in place to allow parents to stay home in those first crucial years of life are not used by men, meaning that we are back to putting the burden of childrearing on women. I like Sue’s idea of thinking a bit more radically, but I’m not optimistic that we can get off this tragectory we’re on that continues to devalue the work of caring for people (the very young and the very old). I think it’s going to take a sea change at the governmental level, but also in many, many industries.

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 think many men will have kids if someone else will look after them and they don’t have to sacrifice their careers, but also wouldn’t find not having kids all that terrible. Whereas women are more more eager to have them, and more willing to make sacrifices by opting out of employment. So I’m not sure getting men and women equally committed to childcare is all that possible. I think many men would only choose kids given that someone else does the dirty work.

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.

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’m looking forward to reading the book to find out more about Gerhardt’s research and methodology. I’ve got too many questions for a blog comment.

Meanwhile, even if it is true that “one to one” attention is best for infants and small children, even with fulltime stay-at-home parenting, only first offspring or siblings with unusually long spacing will ever experience that one-to-one attention. It sounds very much as if Gerhardt is setting up a picture of utopian (in the original sense) child-rearing practices and then talking about how daycare in particular (oh, yes, and much stay-at-home care too, but not as loudly) cannot possibly live up to the ideal.

It’s clear that (in the US at least) conditions of work for most families should be rearranged to be less hostile to children. But even now, one of the unnoticed benefits of feminism is that it’s not considered perfectly reasonable for a mother to hate her children for destroying all of her hopes and ambitions. A small step, but a step.

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.