Consumerism, Arbitrary Male Dominance and Daycare
E.T. Barker, M.D.
There are two powerful and dangerous social forces underlying the need for daycare: consumerism, and arbitrary male dominance. The former lures parents into believing that they need to be making more money rather than caring for their children. The latter drives women away from nurturing their children to gain emancipation via the marketplace.
The problem is that the necessity of shared and the inevitability of changing caregivers in any type of group daycare for infants and toddlers puts the development of their capacity for trust, empathy, and affection at risk.
No one sees this as a problem because these deficits don't show up clearly until adulthood, and even then they are not easily measurable like an intelligence quotient is. What is worse, their absence can actually be an asset in a consumer society which often rewards the opposite values.
But the capacities for trust, empathy, and affection are in fact the central core of what it means to be human, and are indispensable for adults to be able to form lasting, mutually satisfying co-operative relationships with others. In a world of decreasing size and increasing numbers of weapons of mass destruction it is dangerous for these qualities to become deficient.
What is needed is greater understanding of the pragmatic nature of the values of trust, empathy, and affection; a means of measuring the degree of their presence or absence in adults; more rapid progress in the elimination of arbitrary male dominance; and closer examination of the destructive aspects of consumerism.
Printed above is the abstract of a paper presented at the Fifth International Congress on Child Abuse and Neglect in Montreal, September 18th, 1984. The largest section of this paper sets out the reasons why infant daycare risks producing partial psychopaths. It was published in the journal Canadian Children: Journal of the Canadian Association for Young Children Winter/Spring 1984-1985.