The Brave New World of Childcare
Charles N. Siegel
Imagine how sorry people would have been in 1906, or 1946, for a
family that was so poor that one parent could not afford to take off a few years from work to raise the kids before they started school. That was rare four decades ago; now that we are so much wealthier as a nation, it is prevalent.
Nobody looking at economic history a few decades ago -- with all the predictions of a "post-scarcity" society and of leisure time created by labour-saving technology -- would have considered it "inevitable", as we do today, that in the 21st century parents would have to work so hard that they would not be able to take care of their own children.
In fact, the great civilizing advance of the early 20th century was limiting the working week to 40 hours; today, with both spouses working full time to make ends meet, the typical family works 80 hours a week. While most of us have two cars, a VCR, and a kitchen full of appliances, few of us have time left for raising children.
Given this reality, the pervasive worry about "the family in crisis" and the demand, especially among liberals, for a "universal child care system" should come as no surprise. But before we enter Aldous Huxley's Brave New World and send an entire generation of children off to day care centers, we need to reflect a little more deeply on what such a radical departure in child-rearing practices would mean for the family and society...
Social Limits to Growth
Most public pronouncements about child care are not based on critical thought about whether our compulsion for economic growth has spun out of control. Although we are now coming to grips with the ecological limits to growth, we still haven't grasped that there are also moral and psychological costs of economic expansion - social limits to growth as well as ecological ones.
Instead, the policy experts take our usual, busy, "pragmatic" approach of accommodating the growth mentality: If the statistical studies show mounting child care "needs" because both parents must work, then the obvious solution is to spend billions to "provide" child care services.
The same sort of thinking was used to build our urban freeway system during the 1950's, and 1960's, Automobile traffic was becoming more and more congested every year; traffic engineers gathered the statistics, projected future traffic volumes, and used this objective methodology to determine the "needs" for new roads. The federal government then came up with the funding mechanisms that would accommodate those "needs".
By the end of the 1960's, however, it became clear that this huge program of freeway construction had sliced up the cities and had encouraged a form of suburban development that paved over the countryside, polluted the air and made cities less livable. In fact, it had become clear that the solution to automobile congestion had accelerated the trends that the traffic engineers had built the freeways to relieve, leaving the commuter no alternative to the jammed byways of the modern metropolis. As Ivan Illich pointed out, this is the key dynamic of industrial civilization: experts define a "need" in such a way as to standardize and monopolize the solution to be provided, thus creating a new and unprecedented dependence to which other alternatives have been foreclosed.
Liberal proposals on child care policy are based on exactly the same logic of "blind progress". Liberal policy-makers produce extensive studies to prove that the supply of child care centers is not keeping up with the demand. And, without thinking, they conclude that government should invest billions to meet the projected child care needs - subsidies that will stimulate demand. While they cite the evidence that both parents in families with pre-school children find it necessary to work, liberal child care advocates rarely quote the surveys that show two-thirds of those families would rather care for their own children if that were economically possible. Thus, alternatives such as tax credits, which would subsidize parents staying home, are foregone in favour of the "provision" of universal child care facilities as the ultimate solution to the family crises...
...Bit by bit, without ever looking at the big picture, the experts trained in our "Schools of Social Welfare" seem to be taking us straight to Brave New World. They look at isolated social problems, such as working parents with pre-school children, or teenagers who hang out on the streets after school, then propose some "service" as a solution to each. They seem to try to avoid thinking about the inevitable final result of their logic: a society where all the adults are at nine-to-five jobs and where all the children are at day-care centers, schools, or after-school programs all day, every day..
Excerpted and reprinted with permission from a much longer article which appeared in the New Perspectives Quarterly, Winter 1990, pages 34-35. A househusband until his child was seven years old, Siegel currently writes computer software texts from his home. He is also the author of the forthcoming book, Children of the System.