I applaud Neal Pollack for writing frankly about a subject that must be quite painful for him and his wife; with luck, some valuable policy discussions may come out of it. However, I think he draws absolutely the wrong conclusions from his son’s experiences in day care.
Recently, Neal wrote an article on Salon about his two-year-old son Elijah’s expulsion from preschool. The article was timely, as a recent study from Yale University pointed out that preschool students are expelled at no less than three times the rate of students in the K-12 grades.
I can certainly sympathize with the frustration Mr. Pollack describes in searching for appropriate day care. We had a pretty bad experience with finding day care for Thomas as well. The first in-home day care we sent him to quickly proved to be a poor environment for him. Even at the beginning, when we were convinced we were selecting the right environment, I can still remember dropping him off that first day with this weird, wrong feeling. Robin vocalized it best as: “Um, well, here’s our baby. Hope you take good care of him. Uh, bye.” I think we would have felt that anywhere we took him, I don’t think the provider of that in-home day care was a bad person, and she certainly seemed the best of the several prospects we had checked out ahead of time, but fairly soon Thomas was crying pretty much all the time when dropped off, and some comments made by other members of the caretaker family indicated that the infants were getting minimal attention during the day: they were generally left in exersaucers most of the time.
The difference is that when we figured out what was going on, which didn’t take very long, we got him the hell out of there. We did all those parent-y things you’re supposed to, you know, actually do when you have a kid, like observe, ask questions, assess behaviors, and stay on top of the situation. Did the Pollacks ever consider that having a child bite and continually engage in self-destructive behaviors might be an indication that the day care program they had him in was not that great for him?
Neal articulately depicts the frustration and the pain that he and his son went through during the whole expulsion process, which really just makes me want to grab him and shake him: it’s not that he’s so imperceptive that can’t see what this is doing to his son, and it’s not that he doesn’t care about it, it’s just that he apparently ranks his responsibilities as a parent somewhere below his career as the Winona Ryder of American satire. His article and the followups on his blog all point the finger somewhere, anywhere, as long as it’s away from him and his family.
We can’t afford better care (presumably because he’s busy writing literary gems like this). The day care was overstaffed. The director didn’t get involved enough. They didn’t have enough psychological services (!) This reached the height of whining absurdity when he defensively pontificated on his blog:
I was trying to elucidate a legitimate sociological phenomenon, based on a study that came out the same day that my son got expelled, and to point out certain defects in our country’s child-care system.
Neal, the main defect in your child’s care system is you. Beyond the thumb-wrestling over ultimate responsibility — which you lose, Neal; you will always lose — who in their right mind would keep sending their child back into an environment where he bites like Dracula in training pants and pursues self-destructive behaviors that require medical intervention?
Children don’t come into this world on the wings of a stork; they arrive through blood and pain. And well-behaved, well-adjusted children don’t just appear by spontaneous generation; they are molded that way, often with great effort and frustration, by their parents. In the end, the right choice for us was for Robin to stay home and care for the kids full time. That required the difficult sacrifice of Robin’s medical school position, but it was the correct thing to do.
You can tell that Pollack loves his son, but that doesn’t seem to translate to a desire to figure out how to raise him or to do anything concrete to help the situation. Writing about it and using the story to publicize his new book doesn’t count. The problem is not, as he implies, a lack of money, or a lack of sufficient tax-funded social services, nor some great, only-now-discovered need for the rest of us to raise his child for him so he can continue his 24/7 literary narcissism unimpeded. The problem is that he needs to take some of that drive and perception and intelligence that he plows into self-promotion and writing and direct it to the longer-term investment of parenting.
