I got a chance to hunker down with the new issue of National Affairs over the weekend. (I was on a commuter train full of drunk, sunburned Millennials, going from the Jersey Shore to New York City on a Sunday night. This is, I think, the optimal setting in which to consume National Affairs.)
The show-stopper piece is George Will’s phenomenal essay on the limits of majority rule. Will is the premiere columnist of the last 40 years—there is no other writer, on either team, who comes close. But getting to read him in long-form is a rare delicacy, and his piece is everything you’d hope:
It gets even better from there. As the kids on my train might have said, it is “teh hotness.” (Sic.)
Another stand-out from the issue is Alan Jacobs’ essay on renewing the American university. His recommendations are humane and thoughtful, wise and sensible. Which is why I fear that no university, anywhere in America, will take them to heart.
But amidst these and other fine essays, the editors from National Affairs have buried a grenade. A very live grenade. It’s piece by Carrie Lukas and Steven Rhoads which argues that daycare may not be all that great for children.
If you’ve ever glimpsed even a newsreel from the mommy wars, you’ll understand how incendiary this topic is.
The nub of Lukas’ and Rhoads’ essay is that “the available research suggests that heavy use of commercial daycare leads to some poor outcomes for many children.”
Now, before we throw-down, it’s important to understand that Lukas and Rhoads carefully qualify just about everything in their piece: They acknowledge disparities in the study data; they note that negative effects of daycare are often counterbalanced by some positive effects; they highlight that the type (institutional versus small group) and intensity (full-time versus part-time) of daycare makes a difference; that it matters how early children are put into daycare; that some groups of children respond better to daycare than others. And a whole lot more.
As such, the authors are reticent to offer many absolute conclusions. But one take-away that becomes clear from their survey of the literature is that even the act of studying the effects of daycare is fraught with political pressures.
Daycare is one of those subjects—like the downstream effects of divorce, or same-sex marriage—around which there is an invisible force field that warns researchers that they investigate at their own peril. Society has made its choice on these subjects and anyone who discovers evidence that this choice might be sub-optimal—or even that it comes with unintended consequences—is playing with fire.
Another of their conclusions is that the effects of daycare really ought to be studied more rigorously and more openly, because they have serious public policy consequences.
But the biggest take-away is that when America finally does decide to do something to help working families (which we should, for all sorts of reasons) it will be important not to create a one-size-fits-all solution. Some groups of children might benefit from early daycare. Some might do better if a parent has the ability to stay home with them for an extra six months. As Lukas and Rhoads note, “A better policy would help parents in a broader way, providing financial help regardless of families’ child-care choices.”
Imagine that.
