Separated At Birth
Home-Alone America: The Hidden Toll of Day Care, Behavioral Drugs, and Other
Parent Substitutes
by Mary Eberstadt
Sentinel, 2005
(218 pages, $25.95, hardcover)
reviewed by W. Bradford Wilcox
The United States is engaged in a massive experiment with its children, according to Mary Eberstadt.
This “separationist experiment” is designed to see how well American children fare without much attention from one or both of their parents. This experiment is largely driven by adult needs and concerns—the desire for professional accomplishment, material success, individual fulfillment, or some combination thereof—and is manifested in such diverse phenomena as children relegated to day care 30 hours a week or more, children left home alone after school, and children growing up in families without fathers.
The bottom line, according to Eberstadt—one of our nation’s most gifted and incisive observers of American family life—is that American children are not getting the attention, affection, and direction they need from their mothers and fathers.
Children Pay
The price that children pay for the separationist experiment is high, including the emotional and medical trauma experienced by infants and toddlers who spend 30 hours or more per week in day care, high rates of teenage sex and obesity, and the “pharmaceutical outsourcing of childhood”—namely, the surge in the prescription of psychotropic drugs for children who are not getting enough love, time, and discipline from their parents.
Take the toll associated with day care. Eberstadt points out that children in day care are much more likely to get sick than children raised at home, both because they have contact with a lot of other children and because they are less likely to be breastfed, which offers children important immunological benefits. As a report from the American Academy of Pediatrics pointed out, children who spend lots of time in day care are more likely to suffer from ear infections, the common cold, gastro-intestinal problems, eye infections, and a range of other medical maladies.
More fundamental, however, is the emotional toll that day care takes on small children. Psychological studies suggest that children who spend more than 30 hours a week in day care are significantly more likely to be aggressive with their peers and parents. They are also more likely to display elevated levels of the hormone cortisol, a key indicator of psychological stress. So, long spells in day care are making all too many American children sick, both emotionally and physically.
Likewise, because so many teenagers are left home alone after school by working mothers or absent fathers, adolescents are getting into a lot more trouble than they once did. One indication that children do not receive enough supervision at home is that almost 70 percent of teens have sex by age 18; another indication is that the United States now sees an epidemic of sexually transmitted disease (STD) engulfing its young adults.
In 2000, almost half of the 18.9 million new cases of STDs were among young people between the ages of 15 and 24. These diseases carry significant long-term health consequences for young adults, especially girls; that is, young men and women who are sexually active outside of marriage face much higher rates of anal cancer and hepatitis B than young adults who are chaste, and girls suffer higher rates of infertility, complications during pregnancy and delivery, and cervical cancer as well.
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