Home Alone America
By Mary Eberstadt
Substitutes, argues that while life is better today for most adults, many children are worse off, due to a decline in parental devotion. Here, from a recent interview by TAE editor Karlyn Bowman, Eberstadt summarizes her arguments in her own words:
Quite apart from the long-term behavioral consequences of day care, quite apart from what it is or isn't doing to children's cognitive abilities, there is the issue of what day care is doing emotionally to that baby or toddler when he is at his most unknowing and vulnerable. We avoid that question because it is a heartrending one. Yet it ought to be at the center of the debate.
The mommy wars have been about what women want--their choices, their aspirations--not about what children need. There is an influential movement within feminism that celebrates separating parents from children, especially mothers from young children. The separationists argue that women are better mothers because they are out of the house, or that children are better off being socialized in day care. Two decades of rhetoric in favor of the separationist experiment have overruled the plain evidence of our senses.
Do mothers have to work? Of course many do. My mother worked, because my parents were divorced. Many mothers have to work because of divorce or family needs or simply to make ends meet. But there is a difference between having to use institutional care and celebrating it. The long-running celebration of parent-child separation has had the effect of desensitizing adults to just how much babies and toddlers need. If you dismiss the bad news, you get into the habit of not listening to the signals of those too young to talk.
Down the road we pay a price. When most people think about this problem they think about sensational events such as Columbine, tragic expressions of children and teenagers run amok. But what may be more troubling are the more common pathologies now being reported by day care workers, teachers, and other professionals who are around kids a lot. They are seeing more behavioral problems among children of all ages. Kids are not seeing enough of their parents, and reactions ranging from fury to listlessness are the result.
There are other kinds of fallout from absent parents. Our obesity problem, for instance, is linked to AWOL parents in two ways. Not having an adult on the premises after school makes exercise less likely. Most baby boomers look back with nostalgia to the time they spent outside after school. But what made that possible was an informal network of mothers at home who kept an eye on things and allowed kids to play outdoors. Now there aren't enough adults at home in many neighborhoods to allow similar freedom. And parental absence also means that lots of kids sit at home or in an after-hours care program overeating. Those after-school programs abound in snacks. They use snacks for behavior management.
That today's children are stressed by parental separation shows up in rising levels of emotional and mental distress. Childhood depression and anxieties, and of course ADD/ADHD, are reported at much higher rates. Is the rise in these disorders real, or is it a function of the redefinition of these problems? I believe the answer is both, and that both are connected to the absent-parent home.
First, there is a real increase in the number of children registering mental disorders because they have more to be unhappy about. There are clear links between divorce, absent parents, and childhood unhappiness.
The rise in diagnoses has also come about because these problems have been redefined in more expansive ways. Some of what would have been considered normal childhood behavior--squirming, being moody--is now pathologized. Adults who are around children less and less lose touch with what is normal among youngsters, and find the behavior of their kids more problematic and in need of adjusting through medication. One chapter in my book analyzes in detail the questions raised by today's unprecedented levels of psychotropic-drug prescriptions for kids.
I also have a chapter about why today's rather bleak teen music resonates so strongly with many of the young. I started thinking about this one day when I was flipping through radio stations in the car while waiting for my kids. I heard the lyrics from a rap song in which a boy describes watching his little sister color a picture of a nuclear family: Mother, father, sister, brother. He sings: "wish I could be the daddy neither one of us had." I actually cried. The singer turned out to be Eminem, the best-selling rap/rock star hated by many adults.
This made me curious, so I started listening to contemporary teen music, and sure enough almost any best-selling band of the last ten years is singing about dysfunctional families--above all fathers who walked out. If yesterday's rock was the music of abandon, today's rock and rap is the music of abandonment.
It started with Kurt Cobain of Nirvana and Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam, both of whom professed astonishment at how fervently they were embraced for singing about their own troubled childhoods. Today Nickelback, Papa Roach, Pink, Good Charlotte, Blink 182, Everclear and Korn, to name a few, all sing about parental dereliction. Black rappers also sing about how much they hated their fathers for never being there, how much they simultaneously adored but also resented their mothers for not holding a husband at home.
Eminem sings repeatedly about what it is like to be abandoned. His narrative taunts the parents of America, saying in effect: You created this situation. Your children love me because I speak the truth about you. That's one reason why parents hate Eminem's message. It is hard for them to swallow.
There is much less fun in today's contemporary music than in the rock of yesteryear. What's taken the place of fun is a primal rage--intergenerational rage against today's failure to nurture.
The fallout of absentee parenting is visible in lots of other places as well. Kids are contracting a lot of really awful sexually transmitted diseases, for instance. What is making that possible is that they are not being supervised the way teens used to be. Who is more likely to have sex--a kid who comes home from school to an adult on the premises, or a kid who enters an empty home with a girlfriend?
Another little sign of problems in some families is the dramatic growth of specialty boarding schools. These institutions have experienced a ten-fold increase in the past dozen years. They are not schools in the traditional sense, but holding pens for very troubled, screwed-up kids, and several of these schools are located outside the United States.
The people on the ground at these schools agree that the problem is mostly checked-out parents. All agree that's why these schools have grown so explosively. Desperate dual income or divorced parents who have the money (some of these schools cost $80,000 a year) are increasingly resorting to these institutions to handle their out-of-control kids. Many of these children are in the middle of nasty custody battles, and they have no other place to go. Many of these kids are truants who grew up unsupervised to a considerable degree.
Lest this all sound hopeless, let me note that there are some encouraging signs of social changes that will reduce the suffering and sadness of under-parented children. There is an apparent dip in the divorce rate. There has also been a slight reduction in mothers working full time. The children affected by these emerging trends will be better off.
Parent-child separation, especially mother-child separation, runs counter to human nature. Many young mothers today are looking for ways to avoid extended splits from their young children--more than mothers in the ideologically charged feminist generation than preceded them did. Putting the facts out about the costs of our separationist experiment is one other possible way to change minds. That's part of why I wrote my book.
Mary Eberstadt is author of Home-Alone America: The Hidden Toll of Day Care, Behavioral Drugs, and Other Parent Substitutes.
The Music of Abandonment
Teenage anger against absentee parents shows up in today's pop culture, as this extract from Eberstadt's chapter on music and broken homes suggests:
"There is no escaping the fact that today's songs are musically and lyrically unlike any before. What distinguishes them most clearly is the fixation on having been abandoned personally by the adults supposedly in charge, with consequences ranging from bitterness to rage to bad, sick, and violent behavior.
And therein lies a painful truth about an advantage that many teenagers of yesterday enjoyed but their own children often do not. Baby boomers and their music rebelled against parents because they were parents--nurturing, attentive, and overly present (as those teenagers often saw it) authority figures. Today's teenagers and their music rebel against parents because they are not parents--not nurturing, not attentive, and often not even there."
This difference in generational experience may not lend itself to statistical measure, but it is as real as the platinum and gold records that continue to capture it. What those records show compared to yesteryear rock is emotional downward mobility. Surely if some of the current generation of teenagers and young adults had been better taken care of, then the likes of Kurt Cobain, Eminem, Tupac Shakur, and certain other parental nightmares would have been mere footnotes to recent music history rather than rulers of it.
