Alone (at home) again, naturaly

"Home-Alone America: The Hidden Toll of Day Care, Behavioral Drugs, and Other Parent Substitutes" whose jacket photograph shows Mom leaving for work in her power suit and pumps as Junior clings desperately to her ankle. That seems to label the book as another one hitting working mothers, blaming them for the ills of society and condemning them for putting their happiness above that of their children.

According to Mary Eberstadt the author of the book that focuses on conservative viewpoints. "This isn’t a finger-pointing book," she said. "It’s not a blaming book. It’s an attempt to deliver what I know to be an out-of-the-box examination of a serious social question. That question is, why do kids today have serious problems that their parents’ generation and their grandparents’ generation did not?"  She presents disturbing statistics about the growth in the use of psychiatric drugs to treat attention deficit disorder and hyperactivity. And she includes familiar but still troubling figures on teen pregnancy and the spread of sexually transmitted diseases.

Eberstadt’s book attempts to link these problems to absent parents. Obesity, she writes, is in large part the product of a lack of supervision when children return every afternoon to empty homes or are mollified by sugary snacks in day care or at after-school programs. She says so many children are medicated because parents spend less time with them, and therefore do not know how children really behave. And while they are unsupervised, teenagers, not surprisingly, are sometimes having sex.

Eberstadt, a Washington-based research fellow for Stanford’s Hoover Institution, says she recognizes that many mothers have to work out of economic necessity.  "But this is a book for people who have choices," she said. "Any one family might be fine participating in the trends mentioned in the book. But if you step back from that individual family and look at society as a whole, I think you see that some people aren’t fine. Some kids in day care do just great. Some kids in day care have problems because of day care. I think we can open an honest conversation about these things."