It’s often said among politicians and political pundits that reform of the social security system is the "third rail" of American politics; touch it, and you die. Within academic circles of sociological research, the same principle applies to evidence that day care has detrimental effects on children. It’s understood that you simply "don’t go there" if you know what’s good for you.

Jay Belsky, one of the chief researchers for the recent child care study sponsored by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, has found this out first hand.

Belsky, now a sociology professor at the University of London and one of the world’s foremost experts on child development, is no stranger to controversy on the issue of day care. When just starting his career as a young researcher in the late 1970s, he had won praise and attention for work he did which seemed to show that children suffered no measurable detrimental effects from time in organized day care. Belsky began to be regarded as a day care champion, if only because advocates frequently cited his research to argue that care outside the home was perfectly all right for children.

Eight years later, a rising star in the field of child development research at Pennsylvania State University, he started to suspect that the story wasn’t all that simple. What he termed "a slow, steady trickle of evidence" had begun to convince him that long hours in day care, particularly for very young children, could be a risk factor for behavioral problems later on. As each negative indication came in, he was able to discover methodological reasons to dismiss the findings. But "it got to the point," he later said, "where I felt like a pretzel, twisting and turning, trying to explain these things away. By 1986, I said, ‘I can’t do this anymore.’"[1] Belsky published his tentative conclusions–one might more accurately say suggestions–in a relatively obscure newsletter under the headline "Infant Day Care: A Cause for Concern?" with the call for more research to be done on the matter. As a result of the controversy that ensued, Belsky won a reputation among his colleagues in the research community as an ideological opponent of day care, even to the extent of being shunned by peers at scientific meetings.

Although Belsky subsequently published various studies and findings that were, quite obviously, not the product of an ideologue with an axe to grind against day care, the reputation stuck. In the intensely ideological world of child care research, it was enough that he had even raised the question of the possibility of detrimental effects. To many of his colleagues, he stood convicted as an opponent of working mothers. Belsky quite reasonably objected to the characterization of his work, with the eminently plausible claim that he was simply going where the findings took him, just as any objective researcher should. But many of his fellow sociologists in the highly politicized field of child development research marked him down as one who couldn’t be trusted to stick to what author Kay Hymowitz calls the "new life script for American women," one which entails uninterrupted careers on the part of mothers and young children thriving in "quality" day care.[2]

Belsky had always been enormously uncomfortable with attempts by both sides in the political debate over child care policy to use sociological research to make their case, arguing that researchers had to be very careful about lending themselves and their work to people with political agendas.[3] In fact, this was happening all too frequently among his staunchly feminist colleagues in the sociology departments of American universities and at the head of academic journals, as Belsky himself could testify.

In 1999, to take just one example, a study was published in the prestigious American Psychological Association journal Developmental Psychology analyzing the effects of maternal employment on child development.[4] Immediately upon its publication, the findings received prominent coverage from all the major news media. The study found, it was reported, absolutely no detrimental effects on children resulting from their mothers’ employment outside the home. Typical of the coverage was a story on the CBS Evening News, which began "A new study shows children of women who work outside the home do just as well as those with stay-at-home moms."[5] None of the stories suggested anything other than that the study, a "comprehensive" and "multiyear" effort conducted by a meticulous and highly-qualified researcher, had definitively absolved day care.

The study’s author, Elizabeth Harvey, then an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, confirmed this impression in interviews with over fifty major news outlets, including CBS, NBC, the BBC, CNN, and the Boston Globe. Dr. Harvey did not seem at all worried about the possibility of the media seizing on her findings to promote an ideological agenda. "Working mothers have a lot of guilt," she told the Globe, adding her hope that the study would "alleviate some of that guilt."[6] In another interview, Harvey echoed the tone of the reports that her study had given day care a clean bill of health. "I found there was no difference between children whose mothers were employed versus children whose mothers were not employed during the first three years," she told the Associated Press. "Being employed is not going to harm the children in any way."[7]

In fact, her study showed nothing of the sort. The data Harvey relied on had been gleaned from the ongoing National Longitudinal Surveys first commissioned to study the workforce in the 1960s and no separate study had been conducted relating specifically to day care. Compared with the general population, the mothers used in her sample were twice as likely to be black or Hispanic and twice as likely to be single mothers, their family income was less than half the national norm, they were significantly younger, and they were significantly below average in intelligence.[8] The emotional assessment of the children was based primarily on what the mothers told government interviewers. As several commentators later noted, the children in the sample may already have been "at risk" for performing poorly on cognitive and behavioral tests because of emotional, social, and economic deprivation. If anything, they pointed out, a finding of "no difference" between the children of mothers who work and those of mothers who stay at home might indicate that some of the negative effects of maternal employment on children are diminished in a deprived family context. "If you set out to find nothing," David Murray of the Statistical Assessment Service opined, "this is a good way to do it."[9]

Perhaps one might think that the American Psychological Association, which originally ran Harvey’s study in their flagship journal, would be careful about how they advertised such ambiguous findings. On the contrary: the APA press release on the study opened with the equally unqualified statement, "A mother’s employment outside the home has no significant negative effect on her children."[11]

At the very time they had received Harvey’s submission, the same APA journal, Developmental Psychology, had rejected another study dealing with the effects of nonmaternal care, this one authored by Jay Belsky. The source for Belsky’s data was the continuing government-funded study of children in day care, conducted by academic researchers nationwide in coordination with the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD). Ironically, Carolyn Zahn-Waxler, Ph.D., then editor of Developmental Psychology, rejected Belsky’s article because of "the lack of assessment of type and quality of child care," a distinction Harvey’s data was clearly lacking, but which was completely accounted for in Belsky’s NICHD data. While Harvey’s shoddy work was trumpeted in major media reports across the nation, Belsky’s study, eventually published in the well-respected Psychology journal, got virtually no mention in the press. As Belsky said at the time, "There’s gatekeeping going on. The intelligentsia has decided that we don’t want mothers to feel bad about their decisions. So let’s give them the good news over and over again." He concluded that his colleagues in the research community were, in essence, carefully managing the coverage of the issue with willing cooperation from a day care-friendly media: "If [Harvey’s] study had shown the opposite–that children are harmed by day care–rest assured, it would have been dismissed with such dispatch that the media wouldn’t have covered it at all."[12]

Belsky’s disgust at the oppressive intellectual climate of American academia may very well have contributed to his decision to leave Pennsylvania State University for the greener pastures of the University of London in 2000 to take a position as the founding director of the Institute for the Study of Children, Families, and Social Issues at Birkbeck College. Here, at least, he could engage in objective work in the highly charged area of child care research without being shouted down by feminist colleagues determined to pursue a politically correct line.

But if Belsky had wished to avoid becoming embroiled in more controversy with his move to England, he was disabused of that notion in fairly short order when some of the results of the ongoing study conducted by NICHD were made public in the spring of 2001.

The government-sponsored study has been advertised as the largest and most comprehensive ever conducted of early child care and child development. Beginning in 1991, twenty-five researchers at ten U.S. universities–collectively known as the NICHD Early Child Care Research Network–have tracked 1,364 children, following both their development and their care arrangements from infancy. Although most of the subjects of the study will enter sixth grade in the fall of 2002, data have been analyzed only through the children’s first five years. The preliminary findings of the ongoing project, which has cost taxpayers $80 million thus far, have already yielded dozens of academic papers by the researchers connected with the study on subjects such as the relation of child care arrangements to maternal attachment and child behavior.

Some of the preliminary reports from the NICHD study were accepted for presentation at the annual meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development, which took place in April of 2001 in Minneapolis. The director of policy and communication for the meeting, Lauren Fasig, set up a press conference for reporters interested in the latest findings on April 18th, only to find that most of the researchers, still in transit to the meeting, were unavailable. But Fasig was able to secure the services of two of the principal researchers who were already in town: Dr. Sarah Friedman, scientific coordinator for the entire project, and Dr. Belsky, who had been one of the primary researchers from the project’s inception. It was decided that Belsky would present the findings related to quantity of nonmaternal child care, while Friedman would address the effects of quality differences in care.

The fortuitous accident of Belsky’s availability resulted in perhaps the first public glimpse into the ideological intolerance and institutional corruption that are pervasive in the strange world of child care research. Belsky’s presentation and the firestorm of controversy it set off serve as a perfect primer on the highly politicized state of sociological research on issues related to how we shall rear our children, the manipulation of a compliant media by feminist ideologues whose views on child care are at odds with those of most American parents, and the significant barriers to an open and honest discussion of day care and its effects on families and children.

At the Minneapolis press conference, Friedman reported that the study found children in high-quality care received a cognitive advantage in language and memory skills over those not in high-quality care (not, as news stories later maintained, over those in parental care)–a finding that might almost seem to be true by definition. But Friedman’s emphasis on this finding was in keeping with the tone of previous NICHD reports touting the advantages of high-quality day care, along with recommendations of greater government investment to make that high-quality care more pervasive and more available.

What followed, however, was not in keeping with the official script. In his presentation, Belsky pointed out the significant correlation between behavioral problems–primarily "aggressive" behavior associated with such qualities as "gets in lots of fights," "cruelty," "explosive behavior," "talking too much," "argues a lot," and "demands a lot of attention"–and longer hours in nonmaternal child care. Specifically, researchers found that children in extended hours of care (defined as more than 30 hours per week) were almost three times more likely to exhibit these behavioral problems than children with minimal time in nonmaternal care (less than 10 hours per week). Belsky noted that this increased risk of behavior problems (17 percent of children in extended hours of nonmaternal care were rated "aggressive" compared with only 6 percent in the group with minimal time in care) could not be attributed to maternal depression, poverty, or poor-quality care. This was extremely significant, because all had been used to explain away disparities in previous research; the NICHD study controlled for each of these factors. "There is a constant dose-response relationship between time in care and problem behavior," Belsky explained, "especially those involving aggressive behavior."

In fact, previous studies over the past twenty years had pointed to similar negative effects of mother-absence on child development, but much of this information had been buried away in obscure academic journals. Media coverage of previous research on the topic, aided and abetted by researchers themselves, had always emphasized the lack of any basis for the belief that spending long hours away from mothers who work is in any way harmful to children. So the new findings Belsky was announcing–the first time a large, highly-publicized, and government-sponsored study had pointed to anything negative about nonmaternal care–were bound to make some waves.

They did. The clinching moment came when Belsky was asked by a reporter about the implications of the findings. "If more time in all sorts of [child-care] arrangements is predicting disconcerting outcomes," he offered, "then if you want to reduce the probability of those outcomes, you reduce the time in care. Extend parental leave and part-time work."

According to observers, a look of abject horror passed over Friedman’s face. "On behalf of fathers or mothers?" she interjected.

"On behalf of parents and families," Belsky shot back.

"NICHD is not willing to get into policy recommendations," responded Friedman, contradicting the NICHD’s consistent push for investment in higher quality day care. "There are other possibilities that can be entertained," she continued, clearly flustered. "Yes, it’s a quick solution–more hours [in child care] is associated with more problems. The easy solution is to cut the number of hours, but that may have implications for the family that may not be beneficial for the development of the children in terms of economics."

Initially, this was the tack taken by Belsky’s critics in the stories that immediately followed the release of the findings. In an interview right after the press conference, Friedman amplified on this theme by saying that cutting back work hours in order to reduce the hours of child care would likely be unadvisable since the loss of family income and the resulting decline in socioeconomic status would have detrimental effects on children’s development. Other day care advocates quickly picked up on the theme. "One out of three children whose mothers work would be poor if they didn’t work," claimed Helen Blank of the Washington Children’s Defense Fund. "Women work for a complex set of reasons. We had national [welfare reform] policy in 1996 that required low-income-level women to work. Many women are working to pay the mortgage or health insurance." But such claims implicitly granted the validity of the finding that more hours in nonmaternal care were, in fact, correlated with behavior problems. That would not do, because it did not fit with the script of fulfilled working mothers pursuing their careers with their happy, thriving children in the hands of competent, qualified day care professionals. As a result, Belsky’s critics quickly changed their strategy to one of attacking both the accuracy of his explanation of the study’s findings and his integrity as a researcher.

Actually, an objective observer might conclude that Belsky’s comments at the press conference were rather cautious, given the evidence. He did not, for example, draw attention to the fact that the correlation found between the amount of time spent in nonmaternal care was just as statistically significant as the two other risk factors for child development already widely acknowledged: poverty and parental quality. In other words, the number of hours spent in day care–regardless of the quality–has now been found to be as significant a predictor of negative effects as any other risk factor yet found, including material deprivation and abusive or uncaring parents. In addition, he suggested two ideas, extended parental leave and flexible work hours, which have long been part of the feminist agenda for "workplace equality." Belsky was also careful not to overstate his conclusions. "I’m not saying they are the super, hyper violent types," he specified. "These kids are more likely to be bullying kids....we are not talking of psychopaths and kids who get guns and blow away other kids."

His restraint won Belsky no credit, however, as the forces of the child care establishment in both the media and the research community went into full "damage control" mode, attacking not only Belsky’s interpretations but his integrity, as well. In the vivid words of author Kay Hymowitz, they reacted to "any suggestion that young children might suffer from long hours away from their mothers the way they’d greet a Taliban pronouncement that women would no longer be allowed to drive or exchange money."[13] With a mixture of ad hominem, distortion, and outright falsehoods, the day care establishment set out to convince parents that none of the NICHD findings related to the time children spend in day care had any real significance whatsoever.

One theme frequently resorted to was that the negative connotations associated with "aggressive" behavior were unwarranted and that the category itself was entirely arbitrary–or that "aggressive" could actually be interpreted positively.

"Is it possible that kids are born aggressive, defiant, raring to talk too much at the first opportunity?" asked Salon magazine’s Jennifer Foote Sweeney, one of Belsky’s more aggressive–and reckless–journalistic critics. "There is absolutely no indication that those people have a basis for calling something aggressive; the definition of aggressive behavior is completely nebulous," she claimed on one news program.[14]

"There’s no evidence to suggest that an aggressive kindergartner will grow up to be a bully," editorialized the Philadelphia Inquirer. "In fact, she might just become a CEO…Also largely overlooked was the good news that children in high-quality day care are academically advanced…Make that a smart, articulate CEO."[15]

"Should we even be worried at all?" wondered Time magazine. "The researchers noted that almost all the ‘aggressive’ toddlers were well within the range of normal behavior for four-year-olds. And what about that adjective, anyway? Is a vice not sometimes a form of virtue? Cruelty never is, but arguing back? Is that being defiant–or spunky and independent? ‘Demanding attention’ could be a natural and healthy skill to develop if you are in a room with 16 other kids."[16]

Belsky’s colleagues gave credence to such a positive interpretation. "You could have just as easily called it self-assertion," remarked Harvard professor Kathleen McCartney, one of the principal investigators on the NICHD study. "Kids who’ve spent time in day care certainly learn how to cope socially, and they’re certainly much more sturdy little interactors" than those who haven’t, University of Chicago professor Janellen Hutenlocher told the Chicago Tribune. Even NICHD director Duane Alexander, facing intense pressure from his researchers to spin the coverage back in a day care-friendly direction, added to the "aggressiveness is good" spin: "Kids push their way in line. They try to get toys from other kids. This is not necessarily pathological."

"When you use a catchy word like aggression, it’s very worrisome," chimed in Sarah Friedman. "There are words that mean one thing to the scientist who is working on the problem and mean something else in everyday language."

Perhaps most parents would agree that "cruelty," "getting in fights," and "explosive behavior"–three of the measurements used by caregivers to rate children’s behavior–would properly be termed aggressive. More to the point, it was not an adjective devised by Belsky, but a clinical term devised by the researchers themselves to indicate disruptive and disobedient, not simply independent and assertive, behavior. The fact that such behavior may not be "pathological" is hardly reassuring.

A related line of attack centered on the contention that the aggressive behavior recorded among the children with more hours in nonmaternal care was in the "normal" range and, hence, not noteworthy. "These behaviors are distributed at the same level in the general population," research team member Susan B. Campbell of the University of Pittsburgh told an interviewer. "These children are completely typical."

"The level of aggression they’re talking about is completely normal," echoed Salon’s Sweeney, who even went to the extent of claiming that it was the children not judged aggressive who were abnormal. "Children in less child care or no child care are showing much lower levels of aggression that are not considered normal...apparently [they] don’t have skills for dealing with other children. They show an abnormally low percentage of aggression in this study."

Dr. Alvin Poussaint, an associate dean at Harvard Medical School, contended that the truly relevant finding of the study was that "83 percent of the children who were in some type of day care did not have these aggressive problems." Belsky’s co-researcher Kathleen McCartney made the same argument: "when this measure has been administered to the population at large, 17 percent of all kindergartners" score in the aggressive range, she told a reporter. "I’m not saying we should brush these findings away, but it’s totally inaccurate to embrace them and say that child care poses anything of a risk." [my emphasis]

Betty Holcomb, a former editor of Working Mother magazine whose credentials include penning the objective scientific tome Not Guilty: The Good News for Working Mothers, joined the choir of voices protesting that the children in question were perfectly "normal": "They had a result which showed that kids in child care behaved pretty much like any normal bunch of kids." Yale University’s prominent child development expert Edward Zigler argued similarly that "in the normal population of children, that 17 percent is what you find all the time. All those behaviors are within the normal range. This is not clinical pathology we’re talking about."

Of course, Belsky had never claimed that it was, but that has no bearing on the importance of the finding. As Belsky later pointed out, it was known by the researchers that when compared with the 16 percent of children with behavioral problems in the population at large, the study sample had significantly fewer minorities, single parents, and lower income families–the very families that are already known to account for a disproportionate number of children rated "aggressive." Not only that, but the point of breaking down the study sample by time spent in day care was to measure the quantitative effects of nonmaternal care; since the general population at large includes large numbers of children who spend extensive hours in day care, the comparison is meaningless.

The notion that the group of children in question was showing a "normal rate of aggression" seemed a deliberate misreading of the study; all the children rated "aggressive" in the study showed an abnormal degree of aggressive, disobedient behavior. To call that behavior "within the normal range" is clearly misleading. Moreover, since observational tests only pick up on the most serious problems–ones that already manifest themselves in behavior–even slight differences are always acknowledged as significant. This is particularly true when they correlate in a "dose-response" fashion to some individual factor, as was the case in this study with regard to numbers of hours in day care. If a substantial percentage of children in day care are exhibiting behavioral problems, many others may be in trouble–just under the surface, perhaps, but still significant. This is a well-known limitation of empirical research related to behavior, and it is why measurable differences are usually important (especially when one group is three times as likely as another to exhibit a certain behavior). Inferring that 83 percent of children with more hours in day care are doing "just fine" is completely baseless.

Finally, as Belsky later wrote, the dismissive contention that the aggression was "within the normal range" was rather a double standard in light of some of the investigators’ previous findings. "Why have the NICHD study investigators never made it clear that the large majority of children experiencing poor-quality care function ‘in the normal range’? Why, in fact, when the study found, as it did two years ago, that low-quality care was related to more problem behavior when children were two and three years of age, was there no talk of aggression ‘in the normal range’? And why is it when higher levels of aggression and disobedience are found to be related to experiences like growing up in poverty or being reared by a depressed mother, that no one ever talks about aggression ‘in the normal range’ as they so cavalierly do now when the issue is the depth of childcare experience?" In an interview in the wake of the controversy, Belsky answered his own question. "Quality of care matters," he agreed, "and so does quantity. The latter part seems to be an intolerable truth."

Some of the contentions of Belsky’s critics flatly contradicted the fact that the study plainly controlled for child care quality, sensitivity of the mother, poverty, and exposure to other children. "Maternal sensitivity is the strongest predictor of behavior problems in children," said his fellow researcher, Harvard professor Kathleen McCartney. "This effect between hours in care and behavior problems is reduced when we control for maternal sensitivity." Incredibly, some argued that the high percentage of children rated "aggressive" in the group with longer hours in day care was meaningless because quality of care was not accounted for. Dr. Zigler of Yale, called "the godfather of child-care research in the United States" by the Washington Post, contended that quality was not even part of the study. "That was the piece of that report that was most upsetting to me, because it flies in the face of the evidence," he stated. "Quality does matter. We have study after study proving that." In case anyone might have missed his endorsement of quality day care outside the home, he went on to take a gratuitous swipe at care in the home. "People make the mistake of thinking that home is always great. Home for many kids is no bargain. We have a million abused children, mostly by their parents."

Altogether, it was a rather amazing display, a blatant instance of coordinated denial of some inconvenient facts on the part of people whose professional reputation as researchers depends on an appearance of clinical objectivity. But the most blatant thing of all was the double standard applied to the findings and the inferences Belsky made regarding time in day care in contrast to the past practice of the NICHD investigators. Suddenly new criteria were created out of whole cloth. Fellow researchers objected that no conclusions could be drawn about quantity of day care because cause and effect could not be proven and that Belsky had overstepped professional bounds in making policy recommendations.

"Belsky is a doomsayer who is dismissive of positive findings," Sweeney asserted in Salon. His comments regarding reducing time in day care were labeled "a 1950s-style attack" on women by Peggy Orenstein in the Los Angeles Times. Boston University journalism professor Caryl Rivers accused Belsky of having an anti-day care agenda, fostering "mass hysteria" in the media about fictional dangers. Even some of Belsky’s fellow researchers on the NICHD study were livid about his supposed indiscretion. "By not qualifying this, we scared families," argued the child care network’s lead statistician, Margaret Burchinal. "The public was unnecessarily alarmed," agreed co-investigator Dr. McCartney, "but there’s really no cause for concern."

"He is more extreme in his views than the rest of us," fellow NICHD researcher Martha Cox of the University of North Carolina said in yet another of the slew of interviews given by investigators attempting to spin Belsky’s comments into irrelevance. "We hoped the researchers would present this in as factual a way as possible without excessive interpretation," complained NICHD director Alexander. "It was totally blown out of proportion...The investigators themselves were not in agreement as to what the interpretation was. Basically, it was not yet ready for prime time." As a result of the complaints he received from the other researchers, director Alexander charged the steering committee of NICHD to develop a policy that "as a minimum" ensures a paper has been peer reviewed "before we do any oral presentations in the future."

But as Belsky pointed out, just two years before NICHD researchers had shared findings generally favorable to day care, research that had not been published or peer reviewed before being announced to the press. An official NICHD press release titled "Higher Quality Care Related to Less Problem Behavior" made not only a strong case for causation, but made clear policy recommendations, as well. As far as proving cause and effect, that is impossible by definition in sociological research, but the "dose-response" relationship Belsky pointed to is about as close as you can get.

Some of the critical comments of fellow investigators were unintentionally revealing. "We don’t agree with him on his interpretation," colleague Sarah Friedman insisted, characterizing Belsky’s comments as "completely unprofessional" to the online magazine Salon. Even if he differed from views of the rest of the group, she said, "I thought that since he was invited to represent the story, he would represent the party line."

To get a better grasp of the "party line" Friedman alluded to, one need only look at the way Friedman and other NICHD researchers represented previous research in 1997. That year, the study group reported two major findings: that children in higher quality care showed slightly larger cognitive and linguistic gains than children in poor quality care; and that the more time children spent in day care the less affection they showed for their mothers–and their mothers showed for them–at 36 months. Here’s the lead of the official press release: "New research...indicates that the quality of child care for very young children does matter for their cognitive development and their use of language...In addition, quality child care in the early years...can also lead to better mother-child interaction, the study finds." Pages later, buried at the end, the other major finding is alluded to dismissively: "Researchers found that the amount of non-maternal child care was weakly associated with less sensitive and engaged mother-child interaction."

In another paper from the same year NICHD researchers even implied that women who put their children in day care were psychologically robust and those who did not were mentally ill. Mothers who returned to work between 3 and 5 months after their baby was born were rated "higher on measures of extroversion and agreeableness" and were more likely to use day care. Mothers reluctant to leave their babies were judged to be suffering from "separation anxiety" and were more likely to depend on relative care. It appears as though a technique formerly identified with totalitarian regimes like the Soviet Union-identifying opponents of the reigning ideology as insane–is alive and well in the field of sociology.

In unguarded moments, some child development experts have all but admitted that feminist ideology trumps any objective quest for truth when it comes to day care. The study’s lead statistician, Margaret Burchinal, acknowledged to the Los Angeles Times that she and other researchers had set out to confirm their pro-day care biases.[17] Several years ago, another of Belsky’s prestigious colleagues, Dr. Allison Clarke-Stewart of the University of California, acknowledged to a reporter that the research on day care is affected by a hope for benevolent results–i.e., by a desire of researchers to adhere to the party line. "I wanted to find out that child care was good," she said. "I’m a working mother, but that’s not the only reason. It made common sense to me."[18] At least Clarke-Stewart can be credited with a degree of self-awareness. A 1989 paper she authored even found a way to put a positive spin on the disobedience of kids in day care: "They are not willing to comply with adults’ arbitrary rules."[19]

The idea that Belsky had drawn unwarranted conclusions from the newest study’s findings might have sounded less hypocritical had his critics refrained from blatantly spinning the findings themselves and voicing their own conclusions, most without a scintilla of evidence. "It’s good to be skeptical when you read about alarming findings," advised Dr. McCartney, "and to wait for the follow-up stories," presumably like the one she was being quoted in. "As a parent," Friedman suggested helpfully, "I would probably look at my child and ask, ‘Is my child OK?’ If my child seems all right to me, I wouldn’t worry." The message parents take from the study should not be that "mothers should stay home" asserted Judsen Culbreth, editor-in-chief of Scholastic Parent and Child Magazine. "It should be that parents need to find quality care and parents need to find quality time to be with their kids."

"Hours in care, itself, couldn’t possibly explain it," Dr. Friedman insisted, evidence notwithstanding. "It’s what happens in those hours, or perhaps, what happens at home at the end of the day."

According to his attackers, Belsky was completely out of line in suggesting that parents might consider reducing their use of day care, since institutionalized care is an unalterable fact of modern life. "Child care is a reality in our society for many parents," said Matthew Melmed, a pro-day care lobbyist. "It isn’t a question of whether there’s going to be day care," claimed Dr. Huttenlocher of the University of Chicago, "because people’s lives today require it. The question is one of how good day care is going to be."

"Our job isn’t to dissuade mothers from using child care by sending up these horror stories," Dr. Zigler contended in the Christian Science Monitor. "Our real task is to do a public education campaign with parents to get quality care."

For those who have been following the research on day care with a critical eye, nothing in this episode–neither the negative findings nor the ideologically-driven reaction–was particularly new. What was different this time around was the media attention given to the public squabbling among sociologists about the meaning of the findings. To the extent that the episode served to highlight the extent to which political correctness has taken over the whole discipline of sociology and to undermine its pretense to scientific objectivity in the public mind, it may have been all to the good. On the other hand, it’s virtually certain that NICHD will do everything in their power to prevent a repeat performance of this embarrassing episode–even if that means imposing new restrictions on researchers and the release of information to the press. And the media is not likely to balk too much at the new rules, considering the fact that most journalists covering the issue have precisely the same concern. "Do the press want to inappropriately worry the public and lose credibility as a consequence?" asks Ellen Ruppel Shell, codirector of Boston University’s science journalism program and a correspondent for Atlantic Monthly. "Because that’s what happened."

What Shell is referring to, of course, is the credibility of the "party line" that day care is good for children and requires more public investment. Anything that detracts from an apparently unified "scientific" front bent on convincing the public of these assertions is regarded as a threat to the "credibility" of the "new life script for American women." The director of the continuing NICHD child care study, Duane Alexander, has admitted as much. Credibility "is a serious concern," he says, since the study makes a "major impact on [the understanding of] child development and on what public policies ought to be."

By their own testimony, a large number of the leading lights in the field of day care research are dedicated, first and foremost, to promoting the feminist script. It is unlikely that they will allow any more departures from the partyline in the future. In fact soon after the contentious battle between Belsky and his feminist phalanx of attackers, Alexander announced new restrictive policies at the NICHD designed to prevent future controversies from arising. "There were distortions in the presentations and in the press," he contended, promising that "in the future, the group is going to be a lot more careful about how they report their results."

At a May 2001 meeting of the steering committee of the child care study, Alexander put that promise into action by passing new rules preventing any oral presentations of findings to the media before research has been "peer reviewed." Several journalists and journalism professors have objected to the new restrictions on information, despite their own ideological predilections. "[The restrictions are] not altogether a bad thing," says Professor Shell. "We don’t want gadfly social scientists to just put out things. But it has a chilling effect on getting information out to the public. It’s putting us in the position of being policed by other professions, and that really diminishes our freedom and our professionalism. It’s the information they want us to know." And without a sense of irony, she adds "We [could] become conduits for ideologues."

It seems highly unlikely that complaints about the new restrictions on access to research information will have any effect on NICHD policy, however. This is particularly the case when those complaints would have to come from journalists covering the day care beat, a group no less committed to promoting the feminist script than the researchers themselves. It also seems a safe bet that NICHD researchers will help prevent any breaches of protocol (read "outbreaks of candor") in the future. Indeed, they seem to be circling the wagons in support of Alexander’s new restrictions. "We cannot take a risk like that again," says Friedman bluntly. "Reporters will not know about the study until papers are in press. This is probably the policy that we will adopt." Charles A. Nelson, the University of Minnesota professor of child psychology who served as chair of the SRCD conference, agrees. "To have a press conference elevates early research to a level [to which it] should not be elevated," he says. "The stakes are too high, the policy implications are too great. Science should be cool and objective."

Jay Belsky has his own view about whether day care research is conducted in a "cool and objective" fashion. In the wake of this latest round of the so-called "mommy wars," Belsky was even more candid than usual. "I’ve come to believe that too much of social science research, especially as it gets disseminated, is ideology masquerading as science."

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