In a review published in Commentary, Jonathan Kay states that, “Liberals embrace daycare for its liberating potential” while “conservatives oppose its spread.” However, through workfare, conservatives have sent impoverished mothers to work and thus expanded the market for daycare. If as Mary Eberstadt, author of Home-Alone America believes, “children are happiest and safest when they are under the close supervision of mommy and daddy,” it is odd that our country seeks to separate the children of the poor from mommy during much of the day, especially when so many of them already lack a daddy in the home.

One of the strangest trends in our culture is the way we seem to want to take the supposed advantage of a stay-at-home-mom away from the children who are already the most disadvantaged. While Eberstadbt “acknowledges that for many families – poor ones, especially – having a parent stay home with the children is simply not a realistic option,” the truth is that it may be best for our country as a whole if we make it a “realistic option” for poor families. Impoverished mothers have little “vested in their careers.” They leave small children in daycare to clean hotel rooms, wait tables, interrupt meals to read telemarketing scripts – and care for other people’s children in daycare centers. Their children are the ones most likely to be in the “Dickensian” daycares Eberstadt decries. If youngsters in such child care arrangements are more likely to grow up to be criminals, mental cases, alcoholics and drug abusers, then it is in our interest as a country to make it possible for the children most “at-risk” of turning into troubled adults – the children of the poor – to have stay-at-home parents.

The problem of latchkey children could be addressed through more cohesive neighborhood organization. Even in a culture of dual-earner marriages and single parents, most neighborhoods have adults who are home during the day. Perhaps families could pool together to have their children go to the home of a designated, responsible adult until a parent can pick the child up or neighborhoods could form special places specifically for these purpose.

Although not directly mentioned in Kay’s review, the decline of the homemaker has had a major impact on daytime television. Dramatic serials became known as “soap operas” because their commercials were directed at an audience interested in household products. Today, many of the daytime commercials assume an audience that is home involuntarily – thus the proliferation of commercials hawking the services of personal injury lawyers and various technical schools.