Science Stumbles in the Sandbox
Might we have the whole thing backward?
I’m speaking of the running flap over day care. As I understand it, behavioral statisticians seem to have found a slightly higher percentage of children coming out of day care who are assertive and show defiance. That is, compared to kids who did not go to day care centers.
We are told this is an awful thing.
One of the lead researchers in this $80-million boondoggle, a man grinding away on his social ax, tells us that working parents should cut back on the number of hours that the kids are forced into these caldrons of “behavioral problems.”
I’d laugh the whole thing off as just another waste of tax dollars except that some people are taking him and this research seriously. They are, it seems, actually worried sick about our kids.
That’s the trouble with research these days. Too often, we suspend common sense in the face of what passes as science. We have, I’m afraid, enslaved ourselves to the idea that there are deeper truths that research can dig out of what is plain as day.
This is particularly true in the slipperiest of all sciences, the behavioral sciences.
What is plain as day is this: Whatever this research shows--and now half the people involved are running from it like a stink bomb dropped in the boys’ bathroom--it’s no cause for alarm. Except, perhaps, for scientists in other fields who do honest work and worry that they’re going to get smeared in the backlash.
First off, is aggressive or assertive behavior necessarily bad? Not always. The opposite of assertive is, meek. I’d be a lot more worried if day care was breaking the spirits of our kids.
Secondly, when you look at the statistics in this bit of witch-doctoring, you’ll see that the facts are far less compelling than the presumed conclusions. Some tiny fraction of kindergartners who had been in day care were more assertive and “troublesome” than those who spent most of their time with their mothers.
But do we have a shred of evidence that it will matter on how these kids turn out? To the contrary, these same researchers arrived at the wholly obvious conclusion that family interactions were more important in shaping a child’s behavior than how many hours were spent in day care.
How about a refund of our $80 million, please?
Let’s step back. If we are seriously worried about aggressive, assertive or defiant behavior in our children, why not devote attention to the conspicuous, not the dubious. For instance, our national obsession with team sports.
On America’s fields of play, aggressive behavior is glorified. Intimidation is considered an attribute. Fouls--that is, rule-breaking--are a integral part of strategy. When players “clear the benches” for fistfights, it’s a highlight, not a moment of shame.
Maybe we should worry more about taking kids to the playoffs than taking them to day care. How would an $80-million study of that go down?
The problem with this day care study is that it’s both too narrow and too broad to provide us with anything worthwhile to think about.
Too narrow because the nature of our children cannot be discerned from some discreet, eight-hour interval of their weekdays. I’ve come across “families” that had no business presuming to raise children. And so have you. It didn’t matter whether there was a stay-at-home parent, a single parent with a job, two parents who worked, three hamsters or a goldfish--there are gifted parents and troubled ones and a good many who struggle in the middle.
The study is too broad because it generalizes about day care. The premise seems to be that day care is an economic contrivance forced on us when Ozzie couldn’t pay the bills and Harriet had to go to work instead of stay home where she belonged. The fact is, children have been raised in social collectives in all kinds of cultures for countless thousands of years. Day care is, in fact, entirely and wholly, yawn, “normal,” and comes in many forms.
I don’t claim to be an expert on the delivery of day care, but I’ll wager that the problems, to the extent there are problems, are staggeringly obvious. It’s difficult work. We do not grant those who do it the social standing and rewards equal to the nobility of the task.
What will I wager? I’ll wager the next $80-million installment of this ongoing nonsense. Spend the money figuring out how to make day care work for working parents. Think of that old common-sense saying, you get what you pay for.
Except, sometimes, with science.
Albert Einstein once postulated that the chief purpose of science was to “reduce superstition by encouraging people to view things in terms of cause and effect.” I don’t think he meant for wild-eyed research to supplant our own good judgment.
