Home-Alone America: The Hidden Toll of Day Care, Behavioral Drugs, and Other Parent Substitutes.

Home-Alone America: The Hidden Toll of Day Care, Behavioral Drugs, and Other Parent Substitutes, by Mary Eberstadt (New York: Sentinel, 2005), 218 pages, hardcover, $25.95. Available from American Opinion Book Services, P.O. Box 8040, Appleton, WI 54912 (plus shipping and handling); by phone at 920-749-3783; or online at www.aobs-store.com.

Widespread mental and behavioral problems among school-age children; near-epidemic levels of sexually transmitted diseases (STDs); escalating levels of obesity and clinical depression--"these poignant facts either did not exist a quarter century ago or were markedly less prevalent than they are now," observes author and stay-home mother Mary Eberstadt. "What is responsible for the specific, novel problems seen in children and teenagers today?"

Eberstadt's easily digestible book examines the evidence that the social pathologies plaguing American youngsters is the result of "the ongoing, massive, and historically unprecedented experiment in family-child separation in which the United States and most other advanced societies are now engaged." Too many children are being sent out of the home to be raised by rented strangers. Too many children have only one parent at home. Too few parents are adequately involved in the lives of their children.

The author recognizes that every family situation is different. "The purpose of these pages is not to ask what any one woman or man or family has decided to do," she writes. "It is rather to ask what the accumulation of many millions of such decisions is doing to the children and adolescents of this society."

The book was inspired, in large measure, by an experience described by Eberstadt's 10-year-old daughter, whose grade school class had volunteered some time at a local "high-end" day care center near the nation's Capitol. The daughter was shaken by the experience. "There was a boy, a little boy, who was really sick and cried the whole time," she recounted. "His ear was all red, and he shrieked if they even touched it. The day care ladies were nice and everything, but he wouldn't stop. It was just so sad. All he did was keep screaming the same thing over and over: Mommy! Mommy!"

For Eberstadt, who had been immersed in literature examining the social impact of day care, the spectacle of "a distressed ten-year-old, empathizing with an even more distressed two-year-old," resulted in an epiphany: the most important problem with institutionalized "care" is that children need their parents, particularly their mothers. The accumulating social problems she describes validate a politically unpalatable truth articulated by Aristotle millennia ago, namely that children who are raised by "everyone" are "equally neglected by all alike."