The hearth defended

Home-Alone America: The Hidden Toll of Day Care, Wonder Drugs, and Other Parent Substitutes, by Mary Eberstadt (Sentinel, 288 pp., $25.95)

IT's one of history's oldest questions: "What's a mother to do?" And, in this provocative new book, Mary Eberstadt of the Hoover Institution offers a simple and straightforward answer: stay home with the children. She has concluded that most of the problems of today's youngsters--from biting toddlers to depressed middle-schoolers to out-of-control teenagers--can be blamed on out-of-the-house moms and absentee dads. "Divorce and dual income, dual income and divorce," she writes. "The refrain hums like a mantra through the literature" of dysfunctional youth.

When a female author writes a book criticizing mothers for not being focused enough on their children--and, perhaps, being too focused on their careers--she must explain how she herself managed to accomplish her writing without shortchanging her brood. In her introduction, Eberstadt does so, at considerable length:

   I am an at-home mother of four whose
   "fieldwork" consists mostly of fifteen
   years or so spent around sandboxes,
   schools, carpools, baseball games, and the
   like and whose intellectual work is conducted
   by fits and starts and at odd hours
   in the basement, one wall over from the
   washing machine and another removed
   from the Nintendo set-up. I haven't had a
   "real" office in more than twelve years.
   Until very recently motherhood also
   meant that I did very little writing apart
   from the occasional essay or review.
   Today things are different. Three of my
   children are at school all day long and the
   youngest is on the verge of it, so there is
   more time for reading and writing than
   there has been for most of the last fifteen
   years. I have a part-time paid baby sitter
   who is upstairs while I am down, a husband
   who often works at home, and older
   children who also help with the youngest
   one. Thus the "how" of the book.

Oh, dear. Would any father, even the most devoted, writing a book about America's children ever have to explain his work habits so exhaustively? The fact that Eberstadt is so compelled confirms how intense the decades-old moms-at-home-vs.-moms-at-work debate remains--and how controversial Eberstadt's challenging book could turn out to be. Sheila Wellington, former head of Catalyst, an organization that supports professional women, and now a professor at NYU's Stern School of Business, told me, "I still spend much of my time talking about the work-and-home balance. That's what my female MBA students still want to hear about."

Yet Eberstadt's focus, she makes clear, is not on mothers and how their career choices affect them, but rather on how these choices affect their children. The book is not about the search for balance by today's women--a subject we read about ad nauseam in women's magazines--but rather about how lonely, unsupervised, and unbalanced millions of our children's lives have become. Eberstadt says the goal of her book is to "put children and adolescents front and center [and] to ask what the empirical and extra-empirical record shows so far about this relatively new and unknown world in which many parents, children, and siblings spend many or most of their waking hours apart."

If you are a working mom and don't want to feel guilty, stop now. Eberstadt is very effective in making her case that as "more and more children have spent considerably less time in the company of their parents ... the fundamental measures of their well being" have scandalously declined. For example, in the first anecdote in the book's first chapter--about day care, which children now attend while still in their diapers--she sympathetically describes a sick toddler, who should be home in bed, spending all day at a daycare center plaintively calling for his mommy. Child-care workers report that parents who are unable or unwilling to miss a day at work often dose such youngsters with Tylenol to bring down their fevers before dropping them off at day care. Eberstadt also describes angry two- and three-year-olds who act out their aggression, and wonders about the mental state of "babies and toddlers who take up biting as a habit."

The author notes the callousness of some of day care's defenders, such as feminist writers Susan Faludi and Susan Chira, who acknowledge that very small children may get sick more often because of the time they spend away from home but contend that they "are hardier when they are older." Eberstadt comments that "the real trouble with day care is twofold ... It increases the likelihood that kids will be unhappy, and the chronic rationalization of that unhappiness renders adults less sensitive to children's needs." Point taken.

Eberstadt documents other harmful effects of today's parents' lack of involvement in their children's well-being. In her chapter on "Why Dick and Jane Are Fat," she maintains it is not the oversized portions, the increase of sweets in our diets, or the lack of exercise that is to blame for our supersized kids: "Today's child fat problem is largely the result of adults not being there to supervise what kids eat." That may be a considerable oversimplification, but one cringes with guilt when she cites some telling examples of how missing parents bribe kids with food: "Mom won't be there for dinner so why don't you treat yourself to pizza and those horrible cinnamon things you like." Or "Sorry I missed your game/play/assembly this morning. How about an ice cream to celebrate?" I doubt there is a working mother who hasn't tried that maneuver.