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...
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.
A lack of historical and cultural context is perhaps one of the most damming critiques of this book. For centuries, children have been subject to a variety of practices that differed from the usual nuclear norm. In some societies, children are raised by the village. In other societies, families are very large, and childhood is short, as they are expected to work from a young age. The children of the wealthy, long before feminism was accepted have been raised by nannies or sent off to boarding schools. Even children raised at home will eventually have to venture out into the world, away from their mother's apron strings, and simply because a mother stays at home does not mean that she is the ideal, nurturing being Robertson envisions. Furthermore, what about fathers and their role in nurturing and sustaining their children in a supportive fashion? Robertson assumes that there is an easy choice between day care or nothing, the traditional one-salary American family and the complete institutionalization of childcare, while for many working families, care may be a combination of love from two parents, grandparents, older siblings, friends, as well as day care.
Works Cited
Robertson, Brian C. (2003) Day Care Deception: What the Child Care Establishment Isn't Telling Us. New York: Encounter.
