The St. John Fisher Catholic Bookstore





Home \| Search \| About Us \| Privacy \| Shipping Policy \| My Account \| My Cart

Book Review: Day Care Deception: What the Child Care Establishment Isn't Telling Us

Day Care Deception: What the Child Care Establishment Isn't Telling Us
by Brian C. Robertson
San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2003
Hardcover, 222 pages (including endnotes and an index)
$25.95

Reviewed by Sean P. Dailey

(Click the image to order this book from our store)

Brian Robertson’s book is subtitled “What the Child Care Establishment isn’t Telling Us,” but it could just as easily be subtitled, “What’s Wrong with the World.” Or, it could be made an addendum to G.K. Chesterton’s landmark book of that name, which chronicled modern attacks on the family in all their various and insidious forms. Perhaps not even Chesterton could have foreseen day care, but then again maybe he could have. His What’s Wrong with the World is about how feminism, Big Government, Big Business, and various “expert” establishments, such as the education establishment, conspire to undermine the family. Day Care Deception is about how feminism, Big Government, Big Business and various “expert” establishments, such as the education establishment, conspire to undermine the family. Some things never change.

The assertion that day care undermines the family may sound odd to some, even offensive. Day care frees the mother up to work! It lets parents provide even more for their children! It lets a woman fulfill her potential! The children benefit because they begin early childhood development! These are just some of the objections—and the nicer ones at that—you’ll meet with if you dare to come down against day care.

To say that Robertson has a lot of evidence to support his thesis is an understatement. In fact, his book opens with a chapter-length analysis of the lives of Eric Harris and Dylan Clebold, the Columbine killers. No, Robertson does not say that day care turns children into murdering psychopaths, but the stories of these two illustrate how the alienation and nihilism instilled in children when their parents allow them to be raised by strangers—as well as the lack of parental supervision when they grow older, stemming from both parents having jobs—can lead to all sorts of antisocial behavior. For instance, the United States has both the highest child homicide rate and the highest child suicide rate in the industrialized world, Robertson writes, with children born in the 1970s being three times more likely to commit suicide than people of the same age group who were born in the 1950s. He cites studies that point to a link between absentee parents and sexual activity among adolescents, with teenagers having after-school sex parties in homes empty of adults still at work; or having carnal encounters after midnight, when kids can sneak out of their homes “without waking their exhausted parents.”

Day Care Deception is full of such information, but none of that would be any good if Robertson’s writing didn’t draw the reader in. There are ample footnotes (a necessity in a book like this), but Robertson avoids scholarly jargon, writing in an easy-to-read style that for all I know may have been tailor-made for weary dual-income parents (this book is really written for them). What I like about the book is that it avoids being strident or judgmental. In fact, Robertson goes so far as to acknowledge that “some parents in difficult circumstances—particularly single mothers—have no choice but to use commercial day care services.” But he also makes it clear that such cases are the exception, not the norm. Or at least they shouldn’t be the norm.

Robertson begins with a brief history of how the modern concept of institutionalized day care came to be. The first federally funded day care centers were established to watch the children of female defense workers during World War II. That program ended with the end of the war. Following that, federal programs such as Aide to Dependent Children were established to help single mothers care for their children in the home, rather than forcing them to find work. But as time went on, the idea of government-subsidized day care gained more popularity, particularly among feminists. This attitude was helped by such federal programs as Head Start, which fostered “the gradual acceptance of government intervention in the care and education of preschool children.” But the methodology of how unwed mothers received benefits—the more children they had, the more money they got—didn’t help matters. The stereotype of the “welfare queen” was a consistent and understandable rallying cry for many people who were tired of subsidizing immorality.

Here, Robertson expresses a hard truth: the Republican Party, to which many of these same people gravitate, only made matters worse. The GOP was unwilling to oppose the expansion day care partly for fear of being branded anti-woman, but also because, while rank-and-file Republicans opposed day care, it was popular with the party’s corporate supporters, who, as Chesterton wrote about so well decades ago, have always worked with feminists to undermine the family.

This “political schizophrenia” resulted in conservatives backing all sorts of programs that forced mothers to work and put their children in day care; and even conservative hero Newt Gingrich proposed taking children from mothers unable to care for them and putting them in orphanages. So much for family values. But, as Robertson rightly points out, the problem with the welfare culture “was not the nonworking mothers, but the absence of working fathers.” Yes, the welfare system as then structured encouraged out-of-wedlock births among poor women. But, “if policymakers had been more concerned with the family breakdown at the core of the welfare culture, they could have focused on job training and placement for fathers rather than for mothers of young children.”

Robertson’s seven chapters take the reader through the whole day care culture: its lies and fallacies, and mostly its dangers for children. But along with all the bad news, he offers encouragement and advice to parents, on how they can “take back parenting.” It is a worthy read, with a message parents, so caught up in the erroneous belief that they can’t make it on just one income, can’t afford to ignore.

Sean P. Dailey is editor-in-chief of Gilbert Magazine, a literary journal devoted to the thought and writings of English Catholic writer G.K. Chesterton.

Bookmark Us