Mothering matters
Just because it can't make you gay or autistic or give you ADHD doesn't make it pointless
I’m off twitter for Lent, but even here in the quiet glades of substack I couldn’t escape notice of this month’s furor around public mom enemy number one: Erica Komisar, who is stoking the worst fears of the girlboss class by claiming that mothering makes a difference. Specifically, what seems to have twisted so many pairs of knickers is her insistence that sending infants off for eight hours a day to be cared for by a rotating cast of strangers is bad for them. To say this sentiment rocked the boat would be an understatement — generating a discourse tsunami would be a more appropriate summary. This is the kind of teapot hurricane that breaks containment of extremely online circles and spills over onto normies lacking any memetic armor to defend themselves.
The reactions and counterreactions have been coming in treacle thick ever since she opened her mouth. There are too many to count (I’ve noticed a half dozen over the last couple days just browsing substack desultorily), but here’s one that struck me as sane and reasoned from the debunking genre:
My loyalties here are split. On the one hand, I’m a radical hereditarian: on any trait you might care to name, I probably believe that it’s primarily genetically determined, and the data probably backs me up. The environmentalists of the past tended to blame every issue kids might have on mothering, problems running the gamut from homosexuality to autism to sadism.
Back in the 1950s, some punk named Bruno Bettelheim, a prominent psychoanalyst, began to advocate for the "refrigerator mother" theory of autism. He suggested that autism was caused by mothers who were emotionally cold and unresponsive to their children, thereby creating a "psychic wall" around them, leading to social and developmental difficulties.
(Today’s blank slate environmentalists are much more enlightened: we know it’s not the mothers’ fault, it’s school funding and invisible systemic forces, or in some cases media representation.)
But on the other hand: even hereditarians know that hitting yourself in the head with a hammer is an intervention that makes a difference. It’s very obviously true that mothering does something, and that handing your infant children off to be raised by a rotating cast of low-wage third-world strangers probably leaves some kind of mark. I’ll stop short of the illustrious Ms. Komisar in claiming that it causes ADHD, which it probably does not. But I have no problem whatsoever believing it does something, and whatever it does is probably not good.
People tend to forget just how radically novel daycare is as an institution. The first commercial daycare in the US, KinderCare, opened its first location in 1969, just 55 years ago.
As recently as 1975, only 2 in 5 mothers with children under the age of six worked in any capacity.
Today, two thirds of mothers are back at work before the kid turns a year old.
Whatever you think of this arrangement, it’s hard to argue that it’s natural. What Komisar gets right, and I don’t think anyone can argue convincingly to the contrary, is that babies need their mothers. Moreover, they need their mothers specifically, not just care in general. A mother’s love and attention is not substitutable for the care of just any person, no matter how well known and loving they are. And let’s be honest: the daycare workers earning $14 an hour to raise other women’s infants are neither elite human capital nor a loving grandmother. They are the wire monkeys to whom infants must reluctantly cling to get some milk.
You can find plenty of quantifiable claims about the alleged harms that daycare causes, such as in the article below.
For babies under 1, the science is clear: “daycare likely damages cognitive skills and children’s later behavior at school is even worse. There is no boost to social skills.” The two factors that lessen the ill effects of daycare, according to research, are: 1) the age the child enters daycare, the older the better. 2) high socioeconomic status can offset negative impacts.
Here as well I remain mutely skeptical, except to note that anyone not controlling for “high socioeconomic status” in their study on daycare outcomes deserves to have their tenure revoked following immediate defenestration. But I’m just not that interested in the particular quantifiable harms or benefits said to accrue to the day-cared. I have eyes, and children of my own. It’s impossible to believe that it doesn’t leave a mark. An infant’s desperate need for its mother, her own overpowering emotional and even physical reaction to the same, are impossible to deny or write off.
And every customer of daycare knows it leaves a mark, they just try to convince themselves it’s minimal or even positive. There is a reason that the branding of daycare as “education” dates to the very beginning: corporate daycare centers always refer to their services as preschool or learning centers, never something as dreary and utilitarian as actual “child care”. Mothers are so desperately guilty about abandoning their infants to strangers they will contort themselves into any cognitive knot to justify it. My wife and I have even known mothers — high socioeconomic status ones no less — who have told us with a straight face that they trust the daycare workers with their kids more than their own instincts. After all, they’re professionals.
Cope. All of it’s so much cope. I understand why it’s attractive or even necessary for the mothers involved, but I needn’t pretend to agree here in the privacy of anonymous online discourse.
What I know for sure is that more data will not end this debate. At the end of the day, every bloodless chart of alleged differences in childhood outcomes, even when researchers attempt to control for genetic confounders (they never ever control for genetic confounders), crumples in the face of an infant’s forlorn wail for its mother who is absent. Mothers and infants can both feel, plain as day, how wrong it is to separate them for hours at a time. Mothers might manage to tearfully tamp down these feelings for the sake of a laptop job, and infants may end up fine in the end after all, but the pain still happens. It is real. And it matters.
I’ll end with an analogy. It’s common in my part of twitter to decry private schooling as an expensive folly, because all the research demonstrates that it makes no difference in standardized test scores or lifetime earnings. And this is true. But suppose that I proposed to separate your child at the door to the schoolhouse every morning and briskly slap them across the face, just once. Do you imagine it would make a difference in standardized test scores or lifetime earnings? And would you allow me to do it?
“daycare likely damages cognitive skills"
Just like younger siblings are often slightly dumber?
Because they get ill more often at crucial developmental stages.
Right on, it’s laughable the expectations people have of daycare “education.” It takes one on one attention to teach at that age, which can’t be achieved in a daycare setting. Most teachers are either young women who move on quickly or checked out older women, but it would be hard to ever pay enough to workers who face constant infections and a monotonous routine.
My kids may be outliers but they loved daycare until they were school aged (although I do feel really bad about some of the places they were at when they were young). But even when they loved it, its exhausting for kids to have a commute, (basically) a day job, and only a few hours of family time in a day. The idea that we should subsidize this practice instead of just giving money to mothers makes little sense.