Modern "daycare" represents more than another way to mind the children.  It is more than a pragmatic response to changing economic conditions.  Rather, it is a vital component of a revolution in human affairs, where the collective, or the state, displaces the family in the most important of tasks.

I speak to you today as a historian of ideas, recognizing - in Richard Weaver's words - that ideas have consequences.  Indeed, ambitious human minds have dreamed over the millennia of a parental surrender of the task of child care, in favor of social parenting.  An early and remarkably complete vision of a society built on collective child rearing appears in Chapter 7 of Plato's great dialogue, The Republic.

"A great deal–no everything–hinges on whether or not [procreation and childrearing] happens in the right way," a student notes at the outset of this famous passage.  Another student reports that "the most difficult period" in a child's upbringing is the time "between birth and schooling." 

Moving beyond these insights, the teacher Socrates adds: "Friends share," which means that "all the women are to be shared among all the men.  And that the children are also to be shared, with no parent knowing which child is his, or the child knowing his parent."  Accordingly, the "children of good parents" shall go to the crèche, the collective nursery, where nurses "who live in a separate section of the community" shall care for them.  This will make child rearing "very easy for the wives of the guardians," the ruling class, for this "is only right and proper."  Meanwhile, the children born of "worse parents and any handicapped children of good parents" shall be left to die "in some secret and secluded spot," lest they taint the social order.[1]

Some commentators argue that Plato was not seriously advocating a collectivist society: it was more of a playful warning, an early and subtle dystopia.  Yet others see the powerful rationality of Plato's vision suggesting a mental exercise meant to be taken seriously.

We can be more certain that Friedrich Engels, Karl Marx, and Lenin had clear purpose in their advocacy of social parenting.  As the former two wrote in The Communist Manifesto [1848], "The Communist Revolution is the most radical rupture with traditional property relations; no wonder that its development also involves the most radical rupture with traditional ideas."  In the 1884 work, Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, Engels explained "that the first condition for the liberation of the wife is to bring the whole female sex back into public industry," which demanded in turn "the abolition of the monogamous family as the economic unit of society."  The practical architect of the Communist utopia, Lenin, spelled out in 1919 the implications of this demand.  Despite recent liberating legislation, a "real emancipation of women, real communism," would come only after a mass struggle to crush the so-called "petty domestic economy" of the family and to replace it with a "large-scale socialist economy."  Lenin pointed to "public dining rooms, day nurseries, [and] kindergartens" as the means to this socialist end and he complained that even the Bolshevik press did too little to praise collective child care centers:

It does not give [day care centers] enough publicity, does not describe in detail what saving in human labor,…. what emancipation of women from domestic slavery and what an improvement in sanitary conditions can be achieved with exemplary Communist labor for the whole of society.[2]

"Exemplary Communist labor":  an interesting phrase.

A more subtle and distinctly American case for the same socialist goal came from Lenin's contemporary, the feminist visionary Charlotte Perkins Gilman.  Her 1899 book Women and Economics built a non-Marxist case for the inevitability of collective child care: not through revolution, but rather as the consequence of social evolution in an industrial society.  Gilman noted that, even by her day, the new industrial economy had already radically altered the home.  Gone from urban households were the hundreds of productive tasks that had once defined the family economy.  Women's tasks in the home now numbered only three, she said: cooking; cleaning; and early childcare.  There was absolutely no reason, she continued, why these functions could not also be industrialized.  Regarding child care, she wrote: "It is in the training of children for this [modern] stage of human life that the private home has ceased to be sufficient, or the isolated, primitive, dependent woman capable."  Compared to the trained child care professional, the typical young mother was clumsy and inefficient, her home "a tangled heap of industries, low in their ungraded condition, and lower still because they are wholly personal." 

Fortunately, Gilman continued, social evolution was ready to solve the problem.  "The lines of social relation today are mainly industrial," she wrote.  "Our individual lives, our social peace and progress depend more upon our economic relations than upon any other."  To advance social evolution to the next level, women must now enter "the higher specialization of labor," where paid work could grow in a widening range "till it approximates the divine spirit that cares for all the world."  The child care center would be a vital part of this heaven-on-earth.[3]

Certain American Progressives were inspired by "the Bolshevik success" in transforming Russia and agreed with Gilman that social evolution meant the complete industrialization of human life.  They constructed their own ideology of social parenting.  In his influential 1918 volume, A Social History of the American Family, the Progressive historian Arthur Calhoun underscored the imperative:

"The new view is that the higher and more obligatory relation is to society rather than to the family.  The family goes back to the age of savagery, while the state belongs to the age of civilization.  The modern individual is a world citizen, served by the world, and home interests can no longer be supreme."[4]

This view also drew on the arguments of the "Chicago School" of sociology, crafted by Joseph Folsom, Ernest Burgess, and William Ogburn.  They, too, looked to the relentless march of the industrial principle through social life, and chronicled the family's steady loss of function, as experts and specialists assumed ever more tasks.  It was logical and historically necessary, they held, for the care of infants and small children to pass through the same process.  Only "society" had the requisite expertise to develop properly "the personality of its children," they said.

These theories transformed the crèche or child care center in key professional circles from a limited service for troubled families into a desirable institution in each child's life.  Experimental child care centers appeared across the United States during the 1920's, many of them attached to universities.  Their importance was twofold.  First, by applying the new doctrine of social parenting to real children, these experimental centers laid the foundation for future expansion.  Second, they trained a new cadre of specialists and advocates who, some decades later, would successfully proselytize for collective child care.[5]

My longer paper then considers, in some detail, the case of Alva Myrdal, an early and influential member of this new cadre.  I will only give a brief summary of her story here.  This young Swedish Socialist came to the United States in 1929-30 to study progressive American child care methods.  She absorbed here these theories of social parenting.  Returning to Sweden, she devoted the 1930's to building a collectivized child care system in her land.  Such centers were more efficient and healthier for children when compared to home care, Myrdal said.  And women's liberation depended on day care, allowing freedom from dependence on men while still producing enough children to replace the population.  She enjoyed some political success, and turned ideas born in America into the better known "Swedish model" of day care. 

However, a reaction set in about 1940, when another vision of family life reasserted itself in Sweden.  Called maternalism, it held–in one analyst's words–that "women were to be liberated from the labor market rather than liberated to participate in it."  With roots in the Christian churches and the labor unions, this attitude saw Alva Myrdal's egalitarian feminism as part of the problem, not the solution.  Instead, true liberty meant enabling a family to maintain a mother at home giving her full-time care to the children.[6] 

This maternalism drove out Alva Myrdal's more radical formulation. Sweden settled into a remarkable period of traditional domesticity, encouraged by the maternalist worldview.  Feminist analysts now call the 1945-67 period "the era of the Swedish housewife."[7]  Public policy affirmed the full-time care of small children at home.  As late as 1965, only three percent of all Swedish preschool children were in some form of public day care; and even half of these were in family day care in private homes.[8] 

But Alva Myrdal gained a second chance in the late 1960's.  Radical change was sweeping through Europe: "Eurocommunism" on the march; Paris torn by New Left riots in 1968; Red Brigades terrorizing Italy and West Germany; and traditional Christian values–described by one analyst as "responsibility, sacrifice, altruism and the sanctity of long-term commitments"–these were rapidly giving way across the continent to a militant "secular individualism" focused on the desires of the self.[9]  Sweden, too, entered into what one feminist historian calls "The Red Years," 1967 to 1976.  At their core, she says, was a massive "gender turn" that would "radicalize" Swedish society.[10]

Alva Myrdal was again the key agent of change.  In the late 1960's, she chaired an important Commission on "Equality" for the Social Democratic Party.[11]  It concluded that no adult should be dependent on another adult.  Marriage should be stripped of all legal preferences.  Policies that favored the mother-at-home must also be scrapped.  Special priority, her report said, should be given to expanding state subsidies for child care.  This would grant "equality" to women in the workplace and, at the same time, condition the minds of small children for a more egalitarian, cooperative, socialized world.

In 1972, a new Prime Minister came to power, Olof Palme.  Alva Myrdal joined his Cabinet.  Clearly under her sway, Palme addressed the women of the Party that year, declaring an end to the maternalist order.  "In this society," he said, "it is only natural for both parents to work."  Importantly, he added that "[i]n this society…the care of future generations is… naturally the responsibility of us all."[12]

A true social revolution began.  New policies made employment nearly mandatory for all women in their 20's and 30's.  Surviving traditional homes would pay dearly through crushing marginal taxes on the single earner.  Small children moved massively into now heavily subsidized day care: 460,400 held places in 1995, compared to only 23,400 three decades earlier, a staggering twenty-fold increase.

The feminist analyst Yvone Hirdman powerfully and correctly gauges the sweep of change here.  She notes that women's work in this new Swedish order took on a peculiar quality.  In the fields of agriculture and forestry, the number of working women actually declined, while in private industry it grew only modestly.    However, in the service sector (heavily governmental in nature), their number rose three-fold, from 269,000 in 1950 to 819,000 by 1990; in the education and health care sectors (exclusively governmental), the number of working women rose nearly four fold, from 282,000 to slightly over 1 million by 1990. 

In short, she reports, "family politics" had been used as a lever to achieve something "truly revolutionary":  the shriveling of private life and a massive expansion of the state sector as a means of securing the socialist goal of "economic democracy."  Pointing specifically to the experience of Alva Myrdal, Hirdman adds triumphantly:

New ideas of gender replaced old-fashioned ideas about the couple.  We witness [here] the birth of the androgynous individual (and I speak about the explicit ideal) and the death of the provider and his housewife.  We thus witness old ideas popping up, ideas that had been buried for decades–but ideas that very quickly found their advocates and became developed: people, men and women, eager to speak the new tongue of gender.[13]

This, I suggest, is what the child care debate is actually about.  The core issue is not really over choice, nor is it specifically about the welfare of children, nor the needs of families, nor the course of change in an industrial age.  The core issue is a conflict of worldviews.  On one side is a family-centric worldview that accepts the innate roles of men as fathers and women as mothers and that tries to build a social, economic, and political order that will best nurture children.  On the other side is a quest for an abstract and androgynous equality bonded to socialism, a vision that willingly uses political power to crush the "natural difference" of men and women and the "natural institution" of the family home; and one that openly turns children into objects of experimentation and engineering.

The American Story has been remarkably the same, but with the advance of the day care agenda here partially masked by a politically-charged sociology.

The details are fairly clear.  American "maternalists" active in the Democratic Party gained control of the Federal Women's and Children's Bureaus during the 1930's and took prominent places in shaping the New Deal.  They repudiated experimental child care work.  Fiercely opposed to day care, they sought a "family wage" for fathers, social insurance (such as widow's and homemakers pensions) for mothers, and fulltime maternal care for smaller children.  Even during World War II, they labored successfully to hold most mothers of young children in their homes and to keep new Federal day care centers for the children of defense workers limited and temporary: they were all torn down after the War.  The American "marriage boom" and "baby boom" of the 1945-65 era were, in many respects, their legacy.[14]

In late 1968, though, equity feminists won control of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.  They used Federal power to dismantle the American version of the "family wage" and to elevate day care into a civil rights issue.  The 1970's were devoted to building the American day care regime.  In 1973, the U.S. actually came within a hair's breadth of creating a massive Federal "child development" entitlement that would probably have surpassed even that of "Red" Sweden.  Congress approved the measure over the objections of conservatives.  Senator James Buckley of New York, for example, warned that the bill would make the Federal government the "arbiter of child-rearing practices in the United States…producing a race of docile automatons."  Fortunately, President Richard Nixon vetoed the measure, which the Senate sustained.  This meant that American day care advocates would have to rely instead on means-tested day care subsidies for small children on welfare and generous universal tax credits for wealthier families and corporations that used or provided social parenting.  But in practice, these almost proved sufficient.  The Dependent Care Tax Credit created incentives for collectivized care among the relatively well off.  Soaring day care subsidies for the working poor form the price paid for so-called "welfare reform."  The primary beneficiary in both cases was the social parenting regime.

Even the most radical consequence reported by Hirdman for Sweden had its American parallel: the socialization of private or home life.  The large majority of jobs that American women moved into after 1965 have fallen into but a few categories: government employment; public education; welfare services; health care; and child care.  Tasks that had been done before by families in their own homes–primary health care, infant, toddler, and after-school care, maternal nursing, and so on–were turned over instead to the collective, the state.  Feminist analysts proudly report that American women now work for government, rather than for their own families: "public patriarchy," they call it.  Higher taxes, which fell with particular force on remaining one-income homes with children, have paid the cost.[15]  Achieved incrementally and–excepting 1973–with few open ideological clashes, it might be called The Swedish model via The American Plan.

However, this regime of social parenting is beginning to reveal deep contradictions.  To begin with, there is mounting evidence that, despite the claims of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, child care may be one human activity that cannot be successfully industrialized.  The psychological evidence is overwhelming that children in extended day care–even very good day care–are on average more aggressive, less sociable, and less emotionally secure: traits that, ironically, undo the key "social parenting" goal of enhanced human cooperation.  A few years ago, psychologist Stanley Greenspan of George Washington University summarized the six forms of true social development that every child needs for his or her intelligence to develop properly.  Two of the six, Greenspan reports, are impossible to achieve in any day care center, while the other four can emerge only in the very best of them.[16] Once issues of human capital formation are factored in, the day care center ceases to be efficient.

Second, social parenting is in the end dehumanizing.  Over the hundreds of human generations, every successful human community in every corner of the globe rested on the family as the cell of society.[17]  The Communists in Russia were the first to experiment with society-wide collective child-rearing.  The resulting social and economic disaster brought on by this perverse attempt at social engineering showed the dangers and costs of manipulating human nature.  Characteristically, the advocates of social parenting still talk positively about "defamilization" as their core project, one including "the right not to care" for others, including one's own children (phrases borrowed from the feminist analyst, Jane Lewis.)

Third, contra Alva Myrdal, the risks posed to infant and child health by day care are not going away.  True, massive regimens of antibiotics for all the children involved make the short-term situation often tolerable.  But children in day care still are at nearly 100 percent greater risk for contracting life-threatening diseases such as hemophilus influenza and meningitis.  They are four and a half times more likely than home-cared children to contract infections and nearly three times as likely to need hospitalization.  Day care children are significantly more at risk of contracting upper respiratory tract infections, gastrointestinal disorders, ear infections, salmonella, herpes simplex, rubella, hepatitis A & B, scabies, dwarf tapeworm, pinworms and diarrhea. And antibiotics are a fading asset; virulent new strains of disease resistant to these drugs now find their way into the centers.[18]  These extra costs are socialized, as well, through higher insurance premiums and Medicaid expenses.  

Fourth, day care proves in practice to rest on a kind of class exploitation.  As Plato honestly foresaw, the modern child care regime commonly involves wealthier two-income families using tax subsidies to place their children in child care centers staffed by low-wage female workers.  Like 18^th Century French wetnurses and 19^th Century English nannies, 21^st Century American child care workers are commonly the relatively poor, distorting their own lives to serve their "betters."

Finally, also contra Alva Myrdal, social parenting built into the welfare state has not solved Sweden's–or Europe's–population problem. Indeed, demographer Heather Joshi points to the inherent futility of the Myrdal scheme by noting that so-called "women-friendly policies" such as day care are now advanced in Europe to increase fertility while the very same policies are advanced (with far more success) in the Third World to decrease fertility.[19]

True, matters have not gone quite so far in America.  Despite being largely ignored by American policymakers, many American parents still make the sacrifices needed to care for their own children at home.  Thirty percent of families with three-to-five year old children and making between $20,000 and $30,000 still give their children full-time care, forgoing a second income for the sake of their children.  Among families with younger children, the figure is higher still.  Opinion surveys repeatedly show that the large majority of young parents want to provide their children with full time care; economic pressures and the clear Federal preference for social parenting get in the way.  Even so, the last few years have witnessed the return of young mothers - and fathers - home: a development noted two weeks ago even by The New York Times Magazine.  According to a CBS News Poll, a full 74 percent of Americans endorse the idea of extending the existing "dependent care tax credit," now available only to parents using purchased day care, to young families caring for their children at home.[20]  Here is a potent issue just waiting for its champions.

These facts testify to the resilience of Americans in the face of social engineering and Federal tax penalties, and to the love of family and children as a defining quality of the American spirit.  It is past time for American policymakers to reverse their puzzling course and to give young families real affirmation and real choices.

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