Our children have taken dance lessons since they were four
years old at the local private dance studio, which gives me the
opportunity to observe many young children and how they respond
in class. At one time, the studio had difficulty finding a
permanent instructor for the very youngest students, the three
to five year olds. This had a disastrous effect on the program,
because every time a temporary teacher left and a new one took
over, most of the children--and by this I mean, nine out of
10--were so upset that their mothers stopped bringing them. Some
of the children would cry and beg not to go into the studio;
some went in but refused to participate with a new teacher. "Why
is this so upsetting?" I pondered. "Why do they miss the
previous teacher so much? She was merely a stranger at 45
minutes once a week."
Contemplating this phenomenon reminded me of Mrs. McGinty, a
babysitter we had when we were very young. She rarely came to
mind us, my mother being at home, yet we all loved her. One day
when Mrs. McGinty couldn’t come and another little, gray-haired
lady appeared in her place, I cried bitterly, begging for her. I
was inconsolable, even when my mother arranged for her to come
the next week. I sobbed all through that next visit. No picnic,
no games, no amount of Mrs. McGinty’s sweetness and light could
make things right again.
Adults use the catch-all phrase that change is upsetting to
young children in such situations, but I’ve come to understand
the child’s response as more significant. After all, my family
has moved four times in the past 10 years and our children
haven’t found these more significant changes in the least
upsetting. Mrs. McGinty’s absence didn’t merely unsettle me; I
was not being cranky that day. I believe I felt betrayed because
I had been abandoned, and I think these young dancers felt that
way, too. To children--say eight and under, but maybe
older--anyone who steps in to mind them or teach them is taking
on mom’s or dad’s role and becomes a surrogate parent. For this
surrogate to then not return is, of course, traumatic.
This observation has consequences far beyond dance studios
and babysitting services. Not only does it predict disruption
for families who can provide little continuity in whom looks
after the children, it predicts trouble for those who provide
even what we might today consider the normal level of
continuity, what my sometimes correspondent Valerie Moon calls
"serial parenting."
In a speech she gave to an association of child care workers,
Valerie coined the term serial parenting. She is referring to
the employment of multiple babysitters, after school programs,
and electronic wizardry to maintain our children until we show
up after work, that is "our society’s new habit of having
children and then farming them out to be raised." "Although
almost everybody has someplace they have to be," she told her
day care worker audience, "in our society being with the child
is rarely that place--it’s as if the child is a hot potato who
keeps getting passed around."[1]
Consider this: if being abandoned by one very-part-time
surrogate mother/dance teacher is traumatic, what is it to be
abandoned by a whole succession of surrogate mothers? And what
is it to be abandoned by mom, the Real Thing, when forced to go
to day care and school?
Am I waxing nostalgic for that Ozzie and Harriet, Leave It
to Beaver sort of life of a by-gone age? Well, yes, in a
way, but not for nostalgia’s sake. My concerns are based in
child psychology and human nature and are aligned with experts
in the field, although not completely.
One of the most important articles on children in our society
ever penned is Karl Zinsmeister’s "The Problem with Day
Care."[2] That this article is not known by heart by every
mother in this country is a scandal of profound proportions. In
it, Zinsmeister relates the experience of William and Wendy
Dreskin who owned a high quality day care facility in the San
Francisco area. In their book, The Day Care Decision, the
Dreskins wrote:
"For two years we watched day care children respond to the
stresses of ten hours a day of separation from their parents
with tears, anger, withdrawal, or profound sadness," the
Dreskins write, "and we found, to our dismay, that nothing in
our affection and caring for these children would erase this
sense of loss and abandonment." They found themselves in a
dilemma: "The problem was not with our facility… It was with a
problem inherent in day care itself, a problem that hung like a
dark storm over ‘good’ and ‘bad’ day care centers alike. The
children were too young to be spending so much time away from
their parents. They were like young birds being forced out of
the nest and abandoned by their parents before they could fly,
their wings undeveloped, unready to carry them into the world."
" We were so distressed by our observations," the Dreskins
conclude, "that we closed the center."
Zinsmeister goes on to report that nearly all experts on
child development agree that it is harmful for children under
three to be separated from their mothers, but my question is
what is this magic that occurs on a child’s third birthday? Do
four and five year olds really take playing the role of hot
potato in stride? Do 12 and 13 year olds? Likely, age three is
an arbitrary cut off correlating with pre-school enrollment
rather than having true developmental significance, for clearly
children of all ages need close contact with their parents,
though the nature of that contact changes as children grow.
Serial parenting interferes with necessary parental involvement
at all ages, with teens often the most short changed of all.
John Taylor Gatto, who taught preteens, not toddlers,
writes:
Just beneath the veneer of superficial good manners, these
[children from comfortable families on the Upper West Side of
Manhattan] were a group of angry kids, furious I think at the
shallow waste of time academic schooling had become, furious at
their parents for their dereliction from family life, their
historic role as father and mother replaced by an endless string
of surrogate parents in the form of private television sets,
phones, computers, closets full of games and toys, and private
lessons in music, art, dancing, singing and anything imaginable.
What made these kids most angry was the way the school and the
home had conspired to make their lives insignificant.[3]
The School Conundrum: Is Separating School and State
Enough?
Libertarians like to talk about the free market solutions
that will spring up once government schools are put out of
business. There would be an explosion of choices spanning all
teaching methodologies and espousing every world view. I am
confident of the virtues to come from free market education, so
much so that I choose to volunteer in the movement to separate
school and state.[4] Yet despite the anticipation of a glorious
free market triumph, I am not completely optimistic. I don’t
foresee the abandonment of full-time, institutional schooling
and the serial parenting that has risen around it, a prodigious
hurdle barring true education reform. Why? Because child rearing
is not an activity that should be hired out. The relationship
between mother and child is not economic; it is deeply personal.
Simply put, the division of labor cannot be applied to matters
of the heart. Just as I would not hire a surrogate wife to fill
my place in my husband’s bed, nor hire a surrogate sister or
brother to console a sister in need, I could never hire a
surrogate mother to raise my children. And central to the
raising of children is their education.
The true nature of education is not, or at least not solely,
the development of intellect. It is the development of
character, which is why it can never be reduced to the mere
transmittal of information from teacher to student. Whether the
experts admit it or not, and regardless of our opinions as
parents, all education results in the student being immersed in
the teacher’s philosophy (or religion, or world view). Education
is a shared experience for the student and teacher in what is
implicitly their search for truth, wisdom and virtue. Our
culture’s deepest tragedy is that a thing so vital, so intimate,
and so spiritual as the education of our children has been left
to hired hands, however well meaning, and predominantly
government agents and electronic gadgets, at that.
This radical experiment of institutionalizing children--all
day and on a mass scale--although from the beginning monstrous,
has taken on grotesque proportions in recent years. Was our
generation not the first to have our very worth as human beings
defined by our academic achievements and reduced to a numeric
score by ETS? Is it not in just the past 40 years that the term
"drop out" has become synonymous with "criminal in training"?
And have we not as parents dogged our children with schooling,
not only by day but also by night, on weekends and during
vacations by demanding greater homework loads at ever-younger
ages? Despite research showing that early academics and
institutionalized schooling are detrimental to children’s
ability to learn--we can only guess at the affect on their
ability to love, to be secure and to find happiness--education
institutions from state to state can be heard constantly beating
the drum to "get ‘em while they’re young": start DARE at fifth
grade; extend Head Start to the middle class; lower the
compulsory school age; begin the homosexual tolerance lessons in
kindergarten, institute mandatory pre-school, and on and on.
Why parents seriously consider any of these proposals is
beyond comprehension. Perversely, the typical parental response
is, "Take ‘em while they’re young," even and maybe especially
among the upper middle class. In well-to-do neighborhoods where
the financial wherewithal exists for mom to be home for her
children, it is a minority that eschews pre-school these days,
and a smaller minority still that says no to kindergarten. "Got
to get him into the right pre-school if we want little Johnny to
go to Harvard." There is no opposing force of any weight on the
education/political scene demanding the abolition, or even the
delay, of institutionalization, or the attenuation of serial
parenting, despite the rise of such free market phenomena as
homeschooling, Mom’s Clubs and periodicals catering to
stay-at-home mothers. Yes, even in homeschool circles, few
question institutional schooling for other people’s children.
This is not to say that a math tutor or a co-op class puts
children in imminent danger, or that teachers other than parents
can’t offer valuable insights and experiences. Rather, it is the
daylong institutionalization of children of all ages that must
be condemned. Through daylong institutional schooling, America’s
parents have rendered themselves utterly impotent. Having farmed
out the rearing of our children, we are not parents at all, but
boarding house proprietors, providing little more than room and,
if the children are lucky, three squares a day. We are in danger
of becoming, wholly unwittingly, the next Spartan race with our
children this country’s first generation to be raised not by
parents, or even part time parents, but by a procession of
strangers. The wide acceptance of serial parenting is a Gordian
knot that free market education alone cannot cut. Liberating
education from the dead hand of government is a laudable goal,
but is nevertheless only one of many stepping stones on our way
to abandoning the institutional school and attaining
intellectual freedom for our children.
Notes
1. "What Do We Want for Our Children?" Unpublished speech by
Valerie Moon.
2. "The Problem with Day Care," by Karl Zinsmeister. The
American Enterprise, May-June 1998
http://www.theamericanenterprise.org/taemj98m.htm
3. "A Curriculum beyond Money," by John Taylor Gatto. The
LINK, vol. 5, no. 3.
4. The Alliance for the Separation of School and State,
559/292-1776,
http://www.sepschool.org.
Cathy Cuthbert is the editor of The School Liberator,
an email newsletter published by the Alliance for the Separation
of School and State. She is also a wife and homeschool mother
living in California.
