Over the last few decades, a cacophony of voices has been advising us about working mothers versus stay-at-home mothers, and the varied effects either choice has on children. There is research showing that babies who spend too much time in day care show signs of aggressiveness later. There are books warning us about women who rise to the tops of their careers, only to abandon their jobs—and their future financial security—for the "mommy track." There are movies and TV shows—Little Children, Desperate Housewives—depicting women living in the regretful aftermath of those decisions. These voices, always conflicting, often threatening, have been rising up and up and up, until finally it has begun to feel as if parents stand in the eye of a storm, opinions and thoughts and provocations lashing down like punishments.
Thankfully, a familiar voice has recently chimed in—one as intelligent as it is reasonable, and strong enough to cut right through the racket. It belongs to Penelope Leach, the British psychologist and author whose practical parenting guide, Your Baby & Child: From Birth to Age Five (Knopf), has sold more than 2 million copies since first being published in 1977. Now Leach has written a new book, Child Care Today: Getting It Right for Everyone (Knopf), which explores the ways in which we are failing and, in some cases, succeeding in providing nonparental care for children throughout the world. By stepping back to take a global look at parental-leave policies and publicly funded child-care opportunities, Leach powerfully illustrates how certain countries (such as Sweden) have better policies than others (England, say), and that no one handles these matters worse than the United States.
She offers a combination of explanations for why child care has recently become such a fraught issue in parts of Europe and, more acutely, in America. These days, our "social capital"—the phrase Leach uses to describe parents' resources for community and familial support—has all but disappeared. (A few reasons why: Grandparents are retiring later, parents are less likely to know their neighbors, and extended-family households are no longer the norm.) Meanwhile, the cost of nannies and preschools has grown increasingly prohibitive, particularly in countries like the U.S. and England, where the financial responsibility for care rests almost exclusively with parents.
But the primary reason we are in a child-care crisis, as Leach sees it, is that we can't stop looking backward, still so ferociously engaged are we in our out-of-date competition about whether mothers should work or not. "Since nonparental child care is an integral part of modern life, discussing whether it is bad for children is no more useful than discussing whether we would all be better off without television or the Internet. It's the wrong question," she writes. "Proposing a blanket indictment of child care invites, almost forces, people to line up as pro or anti and distracts from the real issue, which is 'How can we make any part of children's lives that they spend in child care good for them?'"
In an effort to make clear just how far we are from offering children the support they need and deserve, Leach explores the dismal facts of U.S. policy, most vividly in a revealing chart that details the number of weeks various countries, from France to Norway to Portugal, allow in job-protected paid leave. The range encompasses everything from a moderate 14 weeks (Japan and Germany) to a whopping 68 weeks (Sweden)—oh, but wait, who is that way at the very bottom? The United States: zero.
Leach suggests the apparently novel idea—at least to us here in America—that it's possible to make staying at home with children and continuing to work equal priorities. In fact, as much as she is in favor of parents taking time off for their children, she also understands the importance of maintaining a career. "Wage-earning women tend to have a higher level of satisfaction with their lives and lifestyles," she points out—not to mention they also fare better on mental-health assessments. And yet Leach emphasizes that children who receive high-quality care—ideally, a one-on-one relationship—in their early years have repeatedly proven to have better cognitive development, more advanced speech and understanding of language, and more sophisticated social skills than those whose care has been less adequate.
There is also a financial advantage to offering better care to children: Economists across the political spectrum have found that children who are raised with proper attention do better in school and, later, in the workplace. They are "less likely to use welfare programs or get involved with the criminal justice systems," Leach points out, "so along with contributing more to society, they cost society less."
This kind of emotionally unadorned insight has made Leach a controversial figure in the past. She has been criticized by some working mothers for her recommendation that children not be placed in group care until at least 18 months, and for having suggested on other occasions that it's not suitable for children under 3 years old. But Leach is not chastising working mothers for not looking after their babies; she is chastising the system for not offering these women better choices. (She herself was a working mother until her youngest child was hospitalized with meningitis at age 2.)
Furthermore, she does not believe that a young baby need be only with her parent, but simply feels that children should receive attentive care, whether from a grandparent or a nanny or at a small family-care center with a high ratio of caregivers to children. "Every time the adult who is caring for [a baby] notices her sounds, facial expressions, and body language and answers her ... the foundation of that baby's future self-esteem and self-confidence ... is strengthened," Leach writes. At the same time, she is quick to reassure: "Even when a child is in child care for many hours and her mother, as well as her father, work 50-hour weeks, she will ... be far more intensely and lastingly influenced by [her parents] than by her other caregivers."
Leach is not the first to illustrate the drastic differences between America and Europe when it comes to supporting parents. Judith Warner, for one, made similar points in her 2005 book, Perfect Madness (Riverhead). But Leach's new treatise is as broad and prescriptive as Betty Friedan's 1963 classic, The Feminine Mystique (Norton)—it is a rallying cry that overburdened parents need as crucially today as housewives needed Friedan's in the '60s. And Leach's timing couldn't be better: Child Care Today comes out just as the Obama administration takes its place. The new president and first lady have both spoken publicly and frequently about their concerns for working parents and family needs. Perhaps, then, as Friedan did in her day, Leach will spur the change we've longed for but have been too caught up in the past to accomplish.
