This is Part One in a two-part series examining the harmful impact of daycare on children. Click here to read Daycare Deception, Part II: The Life-Long Consequences.
During the last 50 years, one of the most profound shifts in our national culture has been the monumental rise of daycare. Across the nation, daycare centers have arisen in thousands of neighborhoods. It is a multi-million dollar industry with its own self-interest for expansion that often aims to have taxpayers subsidize its business. The consequences have profoundly impacted us today. In 2025, the WA Department of Health claims that 779,000 children “need child care,” and daycare has been a major topic among senators and representatives during this and previous Legislative Sessions.
Is more daycare a benefit to our society? We answer a resounding “No.” Daycare harms motherhood, and it harms children, too. In fact, one way to measure the health of a society is to gauge its level of daycare.
The Rise of Feminism
Daycare is the logical consequence of the second wave of feminism that occurred during the Sexual Revolution (1965–75). Feminism, in this form, is often dubbed “pro-woman,” but in reality, it is anti-femininity – a rejection of the feminine, or what Karl Stern calls “the flight from woman.” It wants women to act more like men, especially when it comes to having a career.
Second-wave feminism posits that work should be central to a woman’s identity, rather than the all-important task of raising good children in a loving home, a task for which she is uniquely gifted to do. One example of this lack of motherhood is the rise of women going into work, or “trying to have it both ways” – of having a career and being a mother at the same time. Sometimes this is called “balance” between work and motherhood, but “balance” is too often a euphemism for compromise.
Tragically, the rise of feminism attacks the natural bond between mother and child. This can be seen through the dramatic rise in abortion as well as through the increase in children sent to daycare. Yet children need love – not just any generic love, but the specific love of their own parents. Daycare can never replace the loving arms of one’s own mother and father.
Doing the Splits: The Lie of “Balance”
There are tragic results for such a compromise and a distancing between mother and child. There is only so much and time and energy one person has to give. Splitting that time and energy between a demanding career and being a mother results in two different types of kids:
(a) Daycare Kids: Outsourcing their children to other people — a daycare worker, or a teacher for some 30 or 40 hours each week.
(b) Home-Alone Kids: Leaving their children to fend for themselves, such as after they get home from school, or during the summer vacation. They are unsupervised and often are exposed to worldly living and graphic images of violence and pornography on the TV and the internet.
Yet this news story has gone largely unreported. In his #1 New York Times best-selling book Bias, Emmy Award winner for CBS Bernard Goldberg writes a chapter entitled: “The Most Important Story You Never Saw on TV.” In it, he exposes the exponential growth of daycare.
Goldberg writes: “This absence of mothers from American homes is without any historical precedent, and that millions upon millions of American children have been left … ‘to fend for themselves’—with dire consequences. … Except many of them are not caring for themselves very well. They have fallen into a kind of pit of emptiness and alienation.” Sociologist Andrew Hacker Hacker tells us that this represents “a new approach to motherhood,” one in which “most [women] are disinclined to make caring for their children their primary occupation.”
We need to change the narrative surrounding sending children to daycare; it’s more harmful than the general public believes. In Part Two, we will examine more closely the specific harms toward children that daycare engenders.
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