Here’s the most delightful sentence you’ll read all month: “[T]here is no comprehensive plan to recognize, define, and invest in the full breadth of the workforce within child care centers.”
Well, that was the case. No longer.
The Bipartisan Policy Center (BPC), a Swamp thing spawned by four of the worst men ever to “serve” in the U.S. Senate (two Republicans, two Democrats, natch), has filled the gap, with “Top-Down, Bottom-Up: Building a State Child Care Center Workforce.” The 83-page document is stuffed with wonky observations and detailed recommendations. It wants state governments to take the “key” role in “advancing the child care workforce.” Crafting “sound policies with measurable goals” is essential, as is the cultivation of “career pathways and workforce infrastructure.”
BPC laments that today, “public funding for child care comes through a blend of federal, state, and local dollars.” That’s a revenue ruckus “ill-equipped to support a competent and stable workforce.” Even worse, the tens of taxpayer billions of bucks annually shoveled toward daycare are “not substantial enough to create large-scale change.” So “direct grants to child care programs for quality improvements,” “shared services for child care programs,” “categorical eligibility for the child care workforce to access subsidies for their own children,” “stabilization grants,” and boosted “wages and benefits for child care directors, teachers, and support staff” are needed.
“Top-Down, Bottom-Up” is an ambitious attempt to professionalize an “industry” that literally shapes the future of the United States. (After all, over “two-thirds of the nation’s children have all available parents in the workforce.”) There’s a pesky problem with the report, though. Nowhere does it explore the voluminous research demonstrating how daycare is destructive for children.
Nearly a quarter-century ago, The Washington Post reported that “the largest and most authoritative study of child care” concluded that the “more hours that toddlers spend in child care, the more likely they are to turn out aggressive, disobedient and defiant by the time they are in kindergarten.” Subsequent research hasn’t offered hope. As Joy Pullmann, executive editor of The Federalist (and mother of six) recently summarized, “Daycare environments create chronic stress in small children that on average results in worse health, mental well-being, and behavior well into adulthood — and likely their entire lives.”
Erica Komisar, “a clinical social worker, psychoanalyst, parent coach and author” with “30 years of experience in private practice” is a gutsy debunker of daycare deceit. During a podcast appearance in 2022, she noted that time away from mother in the earliest years is particularly baleful:
We assume, as a society, that children are born resilient, they’re born strong, they’re capable of dealing with stress at a very young age. We basically project onto them our adult-like resilience. And that’s just inaccurate because … infants are born incredibly neurologically fragile and need a great deal of us, in the first three years, to provide them with a sense of safety, security, consistency and the ability to sooth them from moment to moment is what lays down that foundation.
Not only is a mother at home best for the mental health of our nation’s children, thus costing us less down the road, but it also benefits us … in other ways. If mothers stay home when their children are young, and receive familial support and societal respect for doing so, this would liberate our government from a massive spending crisis in this arena. As a nation, we simply cannot, financially or practically, accommodate every family that would rather use daycare than stay home with their children in the early years. Nor should we want to.
Evidently, Eli Lilly, Charles Schwab, Abbott Laboratories, Wells Fargo, Delta Air Lines, Apple, Chevron, BlackRock, CVS Health, and Amazon disagree. The companies donate to BPC. As does Bill Gates. And Eric Schmidt and the Zuckerbergs. Old money forks over the loot, too — Rockefeller, Ford, Hilton, Alfred P. Sloan, W. K. Kellogg, Arthur Vining Davis, Annie E. Casey. Members of the center’s “President’s Council” include Olympia Snowe, Norm Augustine, Charlie Cook, Elizabeth Dole, and Frank Keating.
BPC avers that “child care” is “an essential service crucial to our nation’s economic viability.” That’s one way of looking at it. Here’s another: Daycare is an appalling form of abuse that all civilized societies wisely eschew, in favor of raising children in stable, two-parent families with mothers who proudly accept the challenges of home and hearth.
It doesn’t get more establishment than the Bipartisan Policy Center. “Top-Down, Bottom-Up” is the organization’s manifesto for separating more children from their mothers.
Institutionalized Child Care was the most dismal part of my Childhood. Fortunately, it didn't last that long. My family finally realized that having my Mom work was not going to offset the expense and misery that Child Care initiated! Take care of your children, home school (if you have to) and be responsible for your Pets, as well!!
It's not fair to put all the blame on working moms. Without daycare the nation would have more kids in poverty, more families on welfare, more latch-key kids, and even more families with fewer kids, depressing birthrates further. Your emphasis is on the mother's proper care for her fragile infants under 3 yrs, with which I agree. And it's harmful to have BPC involved so early in caring for the nation's babies.
Summertime daycare for school-aged kids definitely has its place. Even though my brothers and I couldn't wait for Dad to pick us up from daycare, I wouldn't bash all daycare. We survived, and even learned to get along with the other kids,
As a bookend, many of your concerns are echoed by adult children refusing to care for their own parents, leaving that totally up to government-funded skilled nursing facilities, with the same inadequate workforce. Failure to care properly for our parents seems to be an even more widespread and looming generational breakdown.