I open with a poster child as my primary exhibit. This is an Associated Press photograph of 5-year-old Paige Williams of Rochester, Minnesota, USA. This little girl can be held up as a product of one modern development strategy. She is clean and nicely clothed. She appears to be healthy and well-fed. In many respects, she would be the envy of hundreds of millions of children around the world who have none of these blessings. And yet, there is another side to Paige’s story, revealed in the caption: she stands with a dandelion bouquet, one “that she picked for her day care provider.” This relatively privileged little girl has everything...except for the daily care and presence of her mother and father. Instead, she is cared for in a center operating on industrial principles, with the children organized to gain maximum economic efficiency and with care provided by paid professionals. Indeed, it is a paid professional, not her father or mother, who will receive the bouquet of dandelions. This I call an irony of development.

This image encouraged me to go back to the beginning and to think more broadly about the question of development. Just what is development? And: Why do we seek it?

The United Nations has probably labored the hardest at defining this nebulous term. According to the United Nations’ Millennium Declaration of September 8, 2000:

We will spare no effort to free our fellow men, women, and children from the abject and dehumanizing conditions of extreme poverty, to which more than a billion of them are currently subjected. We are committed to making the right to development a reality for everyone and to freeing the entire human race from want.[1]

So development means, at least in part, the effort to free human beings from poverty and want. The Declaration to the Right of Development, approved by the U.N. General Assembly in 1986, is more explicit or complete in its preamble:

Recognizing that development is a comprehensive economic, social, cultural, and political process, which aims at the constant improvement of the well-being of the entire population and of all individuals on the basis of their active, free, and meaningful participation in development and in the fair distribution of benefits resulting therefrom, [and]

Considering that under the provisions of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights everyone is entitled to a social and international order in which the rights and freedoms set forth in that Declaration can be fully realized....[2]

The juxtaposition of these two paragraphs is important, I think. Here we see development defined as a sweeping process aimed at the constant improvement of the well-being of the entire population, clearly including children. And we are also told that the development process is to be judged by the degree to which it achieves the rights and freedoms found in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

So, relative to the family, what are those rights and freedoms?

Article 12:

No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home, or correspondence....

Article 16:

(1) Men and women of full age, without any limitation due to race, nationality, or religion, have the right to marry and found a family. They are entitled to equal rights as to marriage, during marriage, and after its dissolution.

(2) Marriage shall be entered into only with the free and full consent of the intending spouses.

(3) The family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society and is entitled to protection by society and the State.

Article 23:

(3) Everyone who works has the right to just and favorable remuneration ensuring for himself and his family an existence worthy of human dignity and supplemented, if necessary, by other means of social protection.

This is, I note, the principle of The Family Wage.

Article 25:

(1) Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family....

(2) Motherhood and childhood are entitled to special care and assistance. All children, whether born in or out of wedlock, shall enjoy the same protection, and

Article 26:

(3) Parents have a prior right to choose the kind of education that shall be given to their children.[3]

Please note that these rights focus on family autonomy, family protection, and family well-being. In particular, I am struck by Article 25, which declares that “Motherhood and childhood are entitled to special care and assistance.” Nowhere do I see here a right to quality day care. To the contrary, the thrust of the Universal Declaration in this and other articles clearly aims at protecting the family from full immersion into industrial organization. It subordinates certain aspects of economic life to the needs of children and families, because it is strong families that form character, which is the true engine of economic development.

In the developed world of the European Union and North America, we rarely ask today what are the ideal conditions for child development. Most people no longer want to know the answer, fearing embarrassment over their own choices. Instead, our usual search today is for the bare minimum. Given our other modern priorities, what can we do to get by with the children? What is the least that they need? A fine example of this modern mindset is the book, The Irreducible Needs of Children, co-authored by the eminent pediatrician T. Berry Brazelton of Harvard University and by the leading child psychologist Stanley I. Greenspan of George Washington University.[4]

What are these “irreducible needs” that each child must have so that the child’s brain, personality, and emotions develop properly? According to Drs. Brazelton and Greenspan, they are:

1. The Need for Ongoing Nurturing Relationships.
   —which must be provided by one, or at most, two adults who are deeply attached to, even crazy about, the child.

2. The Need for Physical Protection, Safety, and Regulation.

3. The Need for Experiences Tailored to Individual Differences.
   —which requires regular, one-on-one interaction between caregiver and child.

4. The Need for Developmentally Appropriate Experiences.
   —which again requires specially tailored, one-on-one interaction, an emotional dialogue that fosters a sense of self, logic, communication skills, and purposefulness.

5. The Need for Limit Setting, Structure, and Expectations, and

6. The Need for Stable, Supportive Communities and Cultural Continuity.
   —this again mandates an unbroken relationship between the child and the one or two adults providing care and supervision.

In an earlier book with a related list, Dr. Greenspan was quite outspoken. By their very nature, he said, day-care centers—even very good ones—cannot meet four of these six irreducible needs; namely, numbers 1, 3, 4, and 6.[5] In this new book, which is partly structured as a dialogue between the two authors, Dr. Brazelton counters “that there is a large portion of the [American] population right now who can’t take full-time care of their infants.” Even so, Dr. Greenspan replies:

Current research and my own clinical observations suggest that most day-care centers do not provide high-quality care... [T]he current ratios of four babies per care giver in the first year and six in the second year, coupled with high staff turnover, minimum wages, insufficient training, and the expectable change of care givers each year, make it difficult to provide high-quality, ongoing, nurturing care in those early years.[6]

Dr. Brazelton goes on to argue that perhaps babies can make multiple attachments that are meaningful. He explains: “I visited a day-care center recently at a time when all the mothers were there. After a while, only one mother was left and all the children gravitated to her. I turned to the very talented day-care people there and said, ‘They really seem to desert you, don’t they?’ They said, ‘When there’s a mother here, we don’t even exist.’” Dr. Brazelton suggests that the presence of a child’s own mother was not too important; “it just has to be a mother.”

To which Dr. Greenspan replies:

That’s not so great. In a number of day-care centers, when the children are mobile, I see a lot of emotionally hungry children. Children come up to any new adult and hang on. Some of that reaching out for any mother is simply reaching out to anyone who will give them attention.[7]

The children of the developed West, I suggest, are increasingly not emotionally healthy. The real needs of these children are subordinated to other adult priorities. Their human capital is damaged. The core problem, as I see it, is that the industrialization process has limits that we now fail to acknowledge. What works for the production of automobiles and light bulbs does not work for the production of emotionally healthy children. The quest for efficiency and the reliance on a refined division of labor fails in the day-care center.

The health statistics alone reveal a systemic problem. Children in day care are at nearly 100 percent increased risk for contracting serious, 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 three-and-a-half times as likely to need hospitalization. Children in group care are also much more at risk of contracting upper respiratory tract infections, gastrointestinal disorders, mycobaterium tuberculosis, salmonella, Herpes simplex, rubella, hepatitus A & B, scabbies, dwarf tapeworm, pinworm, and diarrhea. Only a few years ago the American medical journal Pediatrics Annals published a special issue on day-care diseases; the lead editorial had the title “Day Care, Day Care: May Day! May Day!”—the universal signal for distress.[8] Disease is sometimes nature’s way of telling us that some aspect of our social behavior is out of order.

Quality is not the issue here; the system simply doesn’t add up. It cannot meet the real needs of children for full development. The English journalist G.K. Chesterton saw the problem, with great clarity, eighty-four years ago:

If people cannot mind their own business, it cannot possibly be more economical to pay them to mind each other’s business; and still less to mind each others babies....The whole [scheme] really rests on a plutocratic illusion of an infinite supply of servants....Ultimately, we are arguing that a woman should not be a mother to her own baby, but a nursemaid to somebody else’s baby. But it will not work, even on paper. We cannot all live by taking in each other’s washing, especially in the form of pinafores.[9]

All the same, it is true that the push to reorganize parent-child relations on the industrial principle dominates in the developed Western world. It can be called the contemporary Western child development model: both parents in the full-time workforce; the children in socialized, collective care. The Swedish Social Democrats call it “the priority of the workline.” This says it well; the needs of children come second. This approach has special strength in the European Union. Even in the United States, though, current public policy aims at the same end.

Well, perhaps this was inevitable? Perhaps it is the necessary consequence of capitalism’s inner workings? Perhaps once a people commits itself to economic development, the necessary result is the atomization of the human family and the weakening of the home?

I do not believe this is true. Belief in such historical inevitability is the great Marxist lie. We do have...and we do make...choices, as individuals and as nations. And there are alternate models of development with very different effects on the family.

Indeed, one such alternate model guided the United States for about 75 years, from 1890 to 1965. My time does not allow me to give you a detailed account of this model. I only want to introduce it to you, as a different method of reconciling economic growth and family life, and as one that worked during the period of America’s transformation from a backwater nation to the greatest economic power in the world.

This approach, or system of social-political organization, has sometimes been labelled Social Feminism; a better label, though, is Maternalism. Its advocates refused to surrender home and family to the industrial model; and they crafted American social policies with this principle in mind. Who were they? What did they believe? Here’s a sampling of their ideas:

From Julia Lathrop, appointed in 1912 as the first chief of The Children’s Bureau in the U.S. Department of Labor (indeed, she was the first woman to head a federal agency):

A decent income, self-respectingly earned by the father, is the beginning of wisdom, the only fair division of labor between the father and the mother of young children, and the strongest safeguard against a high infant mortality rate.[10]

And:

The first and simplest duty of women [in public life] is to safeguard the lives of mothers and babies.[11]

From this latter principle, Julia Lathrop organized a great campaign called “Baby Saving,” which successfully reduced maternal and infant mortality, promoted breastfeeding, and secured passage of the Sheppard-Towner Act. This was the first federal welfare entitlement of any kind; importantly, it improved the health and education of American mothers.[12]

Also from Julia Lathrop:

The power to maintain a decent family living standard is the primary essential of child welfare. This means a living wage and wholesome working life for the men, a good and skillful mother at home to keep the house and comfort all within it. Society can afford no less and can afford no exceptions. This is a universal need.[13]

She endorses here the principles of The Family Wage and the special protection of motherhood and childhood.

Another Maternalist was Frances Perkins, the first woman to hold a Cabinet Post in the U.S., serving as Secretary of Labor for President Franklin D. Roosevelt from 1933 to 1945:

I have seen the factory invading and breaking down the home....The poor people have a right to their homes the same as the rich, and we should not be allowed to enslave them to a form of industry which refuses them not only their liberty, but the wage which they ought to have in return for the labor they perform.[14]

Other Maternalist leaders included Mary Anderson, who headed the Women’s Bureau of the U.S. Department of Labor under Franklin Roosevelt. Like all Maternalists, she was a fierce foe of day care:

Day care is a stop gap, not a solution to anything.[15]

Another principle of Maternalism was to provide Mothers’ Pensions to those women raising children alone. This statement comes from Grace Abbott, who succeeded Julia Lathrop as chief of the U.S. Children’s Bureau:

The whole idea of [a] mother’s pension is that it should be enough to care for the children adequately, to keep the mother at home, and thus to give some security in the home.[16]

This protection of the mother-child bond extended even into wartime. As the defense factories clamored for female workers after America’s entry into World War II, the Maternalists continued to argue for the priority of family bonds. As the U.S. Children’s Bureau declared in 1942:

The first responsibility of women with young children, in war as in peace, is to give suitable care in their own home to their children.[17]

There was more than naïve sentimentality behind the Maternalist position. These advocates believed that the health of any nation ultimately rested on the health and autonomy of its families. None said it better than Molly Dewson, one of the architects of the U.S. Social Security system during the 1930’s:

[W]hen you begin to help the family to attain some security, you are at the same time beginning to erect a National structure for the same purpose. Through the well-being of the family, we create the well-being of The Nation. Through our constructive contributions to the one, we help the other to flourish.[18]

In sum, the Maternalist principles included family autonomy, the promotion of marriage, the protection of the family from industrial intrusion, the provision of a living family wage, and the special protection of motherhood and childhood. Do these principles sound familiar? They should, for these are the family principles also found in The Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

And this is no coincidence. Remember that the architect of this Declaration was The Commission on Human Rights, established by The United Nations in 1946. And the chair of this Commission during the entire drafting process was none other than Eleanor Roosevelt, wife and recent widow of Franklin Roosevelt and herself a Maternalist. Like the others already cited, Mrs. Roosevelt spent her early adult years working in the Settlement Houses of New York and Chicago, where she encouraged the strengthening of immigrant American families. She was a close friend and the political ally and patron of Frances Perkins, Mary Anderson, Grace Abbott, and Molly Dewson. And her own writing embraced Maternalist principles. She stood behind the goals of a living wage for fathers, the special protection of motherhood and childhood, and the building of strong homes.[19]

Maternalism disappeared as a guiding public philosophy in the U.S. during the late 1960’s. How and why that happened are important questions to ask, but complete answers will have to be provided at another time. In brief, most Western nations—including the U.S.—went through a revolution in values during the mid-1960’s. This revolution included: a decided turn toward secularism at the expense of religious values in public life; a devaluation of children, seen most dramatically in the legalization of abortion; a diminished commitment to the natural institution of the family, replaced by a focus on the needs of the individual; and rejection of the virtues of duty and obligation, embracing instead the goal of self-fulfillment. Maternalism simply could not survive this revolution in values. All the same, I repeat: this was not inevitable; it was the consequence of choices made, by individuals and by nations.

A corollary is that the development model now maintained and advocated by most Western nations is not the only option. Indeed, relative to family life and children’s health and welfare, it is clearly a lesser choice. We Americans are now trying to find our way out of the muddle and family troubles that we have imposed on ourselves. My advice to the leaders of developing nations is to avoid the dominant Western model; look elsewhere, even to the past, for ways to have both wealth creation and vital families. Look elsewhere to construct family policies that are in true harmony with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Endnotes