Schlessinger Doesn’T Allow For Other Points Of View

It was, I suppose, inevitable that people, journalists included, would ask me what I think about the position on children and day care that radio talk-show host Laura Schlessinger puts forth in her latest book, “Parenthood by Proxy.” Invariably, they also want to know what I think of her. Actually, I cannot answer the first question without answering the second, so …

Concerning Schlessinger, her May performance on “The Larry King Show” confirmed my existing impression: to wit, she has great difficulty even entertaining the notion that a different point of view might have merit.

A thin line separates righteousness from self-righteousness, and she violates the distinction on frequent occasions. That having been said, I am aware that a good number of people find her verbal style refreshing, so the above perception is obviously a matter of this particular beholder.

Schlessinger and I are both social conservatives; therefore, where social issues are concerned, we agree more than we disagree. But we disagree on some subjects, and day care is one of them.

As my regular readers know, I make no bones about the fact that day care and at-home care by a loving, responsible parent are horses of entirely different colors. Therefore, the outcomes for any given child are not going to be the same, and I am convinced that the outcome is better in the latter instance, especially during the first three years of life.

I’ve yet to meet a day-care or preschool director who disagrees with that. But I don’t think this is a make-it-or-break-it matter. I don’t think, and I’ve seen no good scientific evidence to contradict this view, that a child of tender years who is cared for by responsible people in a quality day-care setting is at significant risk for problems of any sort.

How a parent chooses a day-care center is the critical issue. Unfortunately, all too many parents choose on the basis of convenience and cost. That is the problem, not day care itself.

Schlessinger thinks anyone who has a child and then puts him or her in a day-care center is self-centered, is putting material values ahead of the needs of the child. That’s no doubt true of some people, but many if not most parents who put their children in day care are doing so in order to secure better futures for those same kids, to make sure they can, when the time comes, do such things as pay for orthodontics and send them to college.

That’s realism, not materialism.

As for being self-centered, many of these parents overcompensate for the time they spend away from their children by putting them at the center of attention in the evenings and on weekends. In so doing, they unwittingly create child-centered families that are not ultimately in the best interests of either their children or themselves.

In such a setting, it’s the child who is likely to become self-centered. These are not parents, in other words, who put their kids down on the list of priorities. If anything, they tend to err in the opposite direction.

The matter of children and day care is far more complex than Schlessinger makes it out to be. She is right to raise the issue, but wrong to portray her opinion as the final word on the subject. For a “helping” professional, Schlessinger’s unbending dogmatism as regards to this subject is decidedly unhelpful.