Robertson, Brian C. (2003) Day

Robertson, Brian C. (2003) Day Care Deception: What the Child Care Establishment Isn't Telling Us. New York: Encounter.

What is turning America's children into murderers and psychopaths?

Brian C. Robertson's Day Care Deception: What the Child Care Establishment Isn't Telling Us (2003) implicitly asks this question at the beginning of his text, by opening his book about day care not with images of a child care facility, but with a high school shooting. Robertson has a simple answer to the complex questions that arose after the flurry of national self-examination that arose after the shootings at Columbine High School, in the nation's heartland. Robertson blames the institutionalization of day care as a norm within the American cultural fabric for the increased violence in society and the alienation of modern youth.

According to Robertson, daycare disturbs the mother-child bond, despite some studies that suggest that day care makes children more independent at an earlier age. What positive studies do exist, Robertson says, are the result of the feminist academic establishment, and what is construed as independence is in fact the seeds of bullying, social estrangement, and ultimately violence. Day care is a failed, recent social experiment gone horribly wrong and must be faced and addressed, before another generation of children are destroyed.

Despite the fact that millions of parents send their children off to day care every day, either out of necessity, because of choice, or even a desire to socialize the children early on in the boy or girl's education, mothers and fathers often experience acute anxiety about the decision. It is this anxiety that Robertson plays upon, over and over again in his book. Day care damages children's fragile psyches, and there is no way that it can be as 'good' as bonding with one's parents, even though working parents may spend time with their children outside of day care. In Robertson's portrayal, parents who use day care use such facilities as the primary means to care for their children, and spend little time socializing their children or instilling moral values in their children, because they are too busy working. And worse yet, the government subsidizes day care, says Robertson, even though this is often to encourage lower-income and welfare parents to be able to work, as part of a conservative ideological agenda of welfare reform. Robertson points out that lower-income parents would often prefer to stay home with their children to support his thesis, but does not consider that this may have less to do with the fact that the lower class has less exposure to the feminist agenda, and more to do with the fact that the types of work open to low-income laborers are simply less fulfilling, intellectually, and financially rewarding than jobs that offer more professional mobility.

Throughout his text, Robertson, despite his caustic words towards liberals, purports to be a dispassionate account of the day care industry -- yet his account it is anything but drained of ideological partisanship. Repeatedly Robertson asserts that children become cognitively and academically stunted because of day care, without taking into consideration the multiple environmental and genetic factors that can enhance or inhibit a child's development. The author stresses that the wealthy, rather than the poor use day care facilities, as the families most likely to use center-based day care are those earning $75,000 a year, as if this were an exorbitant sum in modern America, for a two-parent household with multiple children (122). The implication is that women should feel guilty, for putting material goods over their childhood's normative development, and worst of all, putting their own personal desires over the needs of their family, which ought to come first.

Over and over, Robertson uses faulty causation to justify his thesis about the evils of day care. The shootings at Columbine? Killers in the Columbine shooting were raised in two income families! Day care must be the cause Columbine, he says, is proof that day care is a moral evil, and the moral examination afterwards was a confirmation of subconscious American beliefs that something has gone "horribly wrong" in the ethical fabric of the nation because of feminism and day care (20).

Although he says his book is not an attack on feminists, feminists become the villains in his book. In Robertson's view, feminists are a monolithic ideological block. He speaks about feminists in broad, sweeping terms: "Feminist advocates of the working mother model of social organization claimed that the quantity of time," was irrelevant to the child's upbringing, he sneers (30). To say that quality rather than quantity time is important when discussing childrearing practices, however, is far different than saying that quantity is irrelevant, or that working mothers have no concern for the amount of hours they spend away from young children. Feminists surely have a wide variety of views on the matter, and some feminists support flexible work time arrangements as well as day care.

Robertson shows his ideological again orientation when he says: "the media elites will not take on feminists," despite the fact that numerous media exposes on sensationalist talk shows have been the norm for many decades (40). "Editors and broadcast journalists" of the "pliant media" are themselves "dependent upon day care" and thus have no objectivity on the issue, according to Robertson (96). Does this mean that only a man can report on day care, or a childless woman has objectivity upon the issue? That seems to be the obvious, logical extension of this 'theory' of the liberal media's conspiracy of silence upon the subject of day care.

Robertson says that feminist ideology has denied the principles of attachment theory, a developmental psychology theory of the need to create a mother-child bond that is usually applied to infants, which Robertson applies to older children. For example, one researcher noted that "the categories used to assess children at home," who had less social exposure to other children than children who had experienced day care meant that the two groups of children's different cultural experiences resulted in different behavior patterns (70). Instead, Robertson rather hysterically asserts that this means children raised in day care have "completely different characters," than children raised in so-called normal environments (70). Again, Robertson makes a peculiar analogy, saying that this is exactly like liberal education theorists complaining about discriminatory biases in standardized tests. Robertson implies that there is only one correct route of childhood development, despite the variety of cultural practices in communities across the world, in bringing children to maturity, and in the different expectations of what constitutes necessary life skills.