Infant Daughter Is No Pea-Brain in a Pod : Child care: Working mother endures “expert” criticism but finds her offspring developing just fine, thank you.
Well, wonder of wonders. The child has made it through her first year, and her brain appears to be developing quite well, thank you.
She points; she babbles; she lurches around on two feet. She picks up her toy phone, throws the receiver over her shoulder and inquires, “Eh?”
All this despite the fact that her mother works.
Penelope Leach, do you hear me? The baby’s neurons have been stimulated.
Esteemed authors of the Carnegie report, are you listening? Her synapses are activated.
Young women, take heart. Steel yourself against the flood tide of information about the deleterious effects of day care. It’s not that it’s false. But it’s not the whole truth. And it emphatically does not mean that if you dare to retain your employment after procreating, your offspring will be condemned to idiocy.
Phew. These first 12 months have been a minefield like no other, and I’ve already been through this baby thing several times before.
There are always the issues of nursing and weaning and why doesn’t she play peek-a-boo when the baby down the street does? And there always has loomed the great dilemma of when to return to work, and how much and what kind of day care is to be entrusted with the thing you love most.
But I don’t recall ever hearing quite this desperate a drumbeat of impending danger and imminent doom for the children of working mothers. The fretting about whether they’re safe, whether they’re fed, whether they’re being calmed and comforted on cue--that’s always been there. But I don’t ever remember having to worry about the size of the cerebellum.
I’m not sure who started this--science, I suppose--but the Carnegie Corp.’s latest report, “Starting Points: Meeting the Needs of Our Youngest Children,” certainly brought it to the fore. And a similar salvo by Penelope Leach (Britain’s Dr. Spock) in the New York Times Sunday Magazine a while back certainly clinched it.
Both injected the day-care debate with new advances in molecular biology and neurology that show an infant’s earliest interactions determine how many brain cells they will have for the rest of their lives. If the stimulation isn’t sufficient and correct, the cells are literally pared from the infants’ brains.
If you look very closely, if you read carefully and fully, what Leach and the Carnegie folks are really saying is that we need more generous parental-leave policies in this country and better-funded, higher-quality day care. And in that they are, of course, right.
But given the myriad stresses that afflict today’s working mothers, given our acute sensitivities to these matters, the underlying message is: Go home.
More than a few women I know have been plunged yet again into a crisis of self-doubt and self-blame; more than a few are talking about quitting their jobs.
I haven’t gone that far, although I have somehow managed to fixate on one Carnegie statistic--that 53% of women return to work within one year of a child’s birth. That’s about half. Only half? I thought I, routinely back at my desk within a few months of childbirth, had more company than that. I thought I had safety in numbers.
But what was I thinking? What have I done? Does that other half know something I don’t? Am I raising a pea-brain after all?
In the midst of the reports and the research and the question marks, along comes the first birthday, a most poignant milestone for mother and child. There have been so many times during the past year when I thought I’d never make it. But I’m here. And so is my baby’s brain.
The kid combs her own hair. She methodically places macaroni on a spoon. She wrestles her brothers and her sister and in so doing has acquired that all-important survival skill, the fake cry.
No one taught her these things. No one took it upon themselves to deliberately activate her synapses. She watched. She engaged. She learned. She was loved and nurtured and “stimulated” naturally, spontaneously, even during those times when I wasn’t around.
Wonder of wonders, her mother works and her neurons multiplied.
