A generation before Pizzagate, America’s wacko conspiracy beachhead concerned, of all things, an unassuming day-care center, set behind a chain-link fence in Manhattan Beach, California. In 1984, a nationwide frenzy broke out over the McMartin Preschool. The mom-and-pop establishment may have been run by a wheelchair-bound grandmother, but one of the caretakers, well, he could fly. According to one mother who turned out to be schizophrenic, the school dabbled in the dark arts; her two-year-old son was allegedly raped amid scenes of animal sacrifices (smashed baby turtles, van Gogh’d bunny rabbits). Emerging out of a combination of psychiatric incompetence and the bonkers, suggestible imaginations of preschoolers, the rumors segued into a full-fledged state prosecution. A nationwide witch hunt for other sites of demonic worship across America’s day cares ensued, with dozens falling under irrational scrutiny. “How safe is your child if that child is in day care?” NBC’s Tom Brokaw asked audiences in a segment titled “Daycare Nightmare.”
Eventually, solemn jurors and sheepish journalists resolved—as if confirmation were needed—that the so-called “satanic panic” had been a specious, ratings-driven hysteria. The sham case ended in acquittal, and might simply stand as a bizarre footnote to the American paranoid style had it not also spoken so powerfully to the broader social crosscurrents. At that very moment in American history, droves of women—new women—were making good on the liberal feminist promise, discarding baby bottles for legal pads. When mothers hit the corporate ladder, jettisoning little Timmy, anything was possible.
Today the day-care wars no longer take the form of hallucinogenic news segments and sensationalized tabloid stories. They are quieter, mostly dignified and often subterranean—stashed away in Reddit threads, city-mom forums and newspaper comment sections. Though not childcare experts, per se, the frequently anonymous contributors sometimes claim to hold Ph.D.s or have substantial training in statistics. They raid journal articles, pediatric medical studies, nonprofit research working papers—decoding the dark patterns. The commenters are not debating demons. They are debating data, the lingua franca of millennial parenting.
Who could have known that a rich understanding of statistics would be necessary to cracking the riddle of modern parenthood? Forget Dr. Spock’s injunction to simply trust yourself. Put aside the poetic psychoanalyzing of D. W. Winnicott and the reassurance of the “good-enough mother.” Upper-middle-class millennials turn to the crushingly practical, five-to-ten-mile-a-day-running Brown University economist Emily Oster and her bestselling book empire, which synthesizes quantitative studies on pregnancy and parenting. Oster, whose recent venture, a newsletter and website, aims to “create the most data-literate generation of parents” to date, has struck a deep chord with the standardized-test-hacking, Fitbit-toting generation, for whom the creation of life is just another data set or reverse-engineering prompt to ace.
In this metrics-saturated milieu, the mother who poses the question “Is day care bad for my baby?” to Google had better brace herself. Depending on algorithmic returns, naysaying reports may chastise her: you are saddling your child with psychic deficits for life! An author on Medium—anonymous but fluent in statistical analysis—traces rising cortisol levels among children in day care each hour the parent is in absentia: your gig paid for with repeated tests of your kid’s fight-or-flight response. Another popularly referenced study paints Quebec’s five-dollar-a-day day cares as psyche-damaging factories inadequate by design to the complex task of nurturing. (Compared to peers in other Canadian provinces, the Quebec children had “significant worsening in self-reported health and in life satisfaction among teens.”) In a Substack post, America’s teen mental-health crisis is provocatively if sketchily correlated with the rise of programs like KinderCare, the largest national chain, which began to enroll infants in 1985. Laura Wiley Haynes, a self-described “liberal Democrat,” argues that state-mandated 1:5 teacher-to-infant ratios spell out conditions of sensory deprivation, by way of a 1950s study of baby rhesus monkeys robbed of comforting surrogates. Commenters commend Hayes as “brave” to say what is somehow taboo today: namely, that mothering matters.
Meanwhile, other econometricians assert that day care for the youngest set is no cause for alarm. In fact, some will have you know, those parents who can’t cough up the thousands of dollars monthly are the ones who should worry—the truly negligent and deadbeat whose children are destined to be academic slowpokes by the time they enter kindergarten. Daughters of working moms earn 23 percent more than daughters of stay-at-home moms, crows a Harvard Business School report. A 2010 National Institutes of Health study attests that alums of high-quality day cares showed higher cognitive achievement in secondary school. It is reiterated by Oster herself that “quality” of the group center is what matters; yet elsewhere studies suggest that parents can’t reliably determine quality, vastly overrating their own children’s day cares compared to neutral observers.
And so, is the modern day-care center a life raft or a calamity? Necessary reinforcement for the overwhelmed parents or an abyss parenting can’t recover from? One thing that seems certain is that corporate, for-profit models, accounting for more than 10 percent of the childcare market, are the future of day care in the United States, as the organizations mercilessly acquire small centers and simultaneously lobby against universal day care in Washington. Another is that, whether or not we trust our kids to one of these centers, the effects of the Tamagotchified care they offer have migrated beyond their bright, unimaginative walls, setting the terms of our debates and afflicting our very self-conception as parents. Data, too, can be demonic.
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How did we arrive at the technocratic round of the mommy wars? Certainly readiness—even preference—to have surrogates raise one’s child is nothing new. Care and control have never been delimited by bloodline. Wet nurses (nutrices) were on hand for elites in ancient Rome and make cameos in the Old Testament. We know the porous logic of family life: family members vanish, or have trusty underlings, or can’t be bothered (the pram in the hallway and all that), or have important occupations (running the macrocosm while someone else attends to the micro-). The Park Avenue partner delegating the custody of his offspring to a crack team of domestic managers, tutors, chaperones and cooks is no freak of modernity—he’d fit right in with Roman servants languidly waving their palm-frond fans.
What may be newer is a revolution in the hierarchy of cachet—with day care not merely a convenience or absolution, but suddenly something of a status symbol: pre-Daltons and Harvards for the well-heeled in their booties. Nineteenth-century Americans, for their part, would be dumbfounded. In the years following the openings of the first collective day cares, in the 1850s and 1860s, day cares bore a stigma: They were “indelibly associated with the lower classes, familial crisis, and the need for uplift,” one historian of childcare has written. Sure, well-to-do women might run day nurseries, but they wouldn’t dream of slotting their own in one.
Later in the American saga, it took nothing short of a national calamity for middle-class parents to park their children in day care. During the Great Depression, the WPA ran thousands of nursery schools—a rare experiment in maternal collectivism for the American state. During World War II, three thousand childcare centers sprouted, care of government subsidies doled out under the Lanham Act in the wartime scramble. But these short-lived chapters were concessions to states of emergency. After World War II, the collective day care returned to its status as an ideological no-go under the presiding portraits of Mao and Stalin—rigid, soulless detention centers for the homogenization of the baby set. Helpful, maybe, but insidious and downright un-American!
Ironically, it was the age of Reagan and “family values” that finally destigmatized group day care—while, in the American manner, perverting its available form. Just as Reagan slashed funding for public childcare for poor families, Congress created incentives for employer-sponsored day care for the middle and upper classes. Under the Dependent Care Assistance Plan of the 1981 Economic Recovery Tax Act, parents could write off the value of employer-provided childcare services. The private sector leapt into action to meet a new need: between 1982 and 1990, as more than half of America’s mothers joined the workforce, employer-sponsored childcare programs increased ninefold. Day care was no longer a Stalinist bogeyman; given a neoliberal rebrand, it was capitalism at its finest.
In time, a new breed of company entrenched itself—as American, and investor-friendly, as McDonald’s or Holiday Inn. The growth of these chains has been explosive. In 2022 alone, the fifty largest for-profit childcare chains (those owned by private equity firms or publicly traded) acquired or opened more than five hundred new centers. Their crisp signage and redacted windows occupy corporate commercial downtowns and tony suburbs: KinderCare, Learning Experience, Lightbridge Academy, Primrose, the Goddard School, Bright Horizons. Even as nonprofits and independent day cares shuttered en masse after the exodus of eighty thousand workers during COVID-19, annual 5 to 7 percent tuition hikes—and stingy staff compensation—have powered 15 to 20 percent annual profits at the chains. In 2005, Bright Horizons charged $1,000 to $1,200 a month ($1,600 with inflation) to care for infants and toddlers. In 2024 in Manhattan, the same chain, same service: a rent-rivaling $3,895 a month.
Despite the cost, the quality of care in these chains is not guaranteed. In the most superficial terms, these corporate centers adhere to the demands of 1970s feminist childcare reformers. Both women and men care for the children. They encourage boys to play with dolls and girls to take an interest in wheeled vehicles. The difference, of course, is that caretakers, saddled with four or five children, are paid an hourly starting rate of less than what a nanny makes watching a single child. (A study by the 1989 National Child Care Staffing Study found that the most “important predictor of the quality of care children receive … is staff wages.”) Online, a parent might discover comment sections overflowing with reports from bewildered ex-employees. One typical example reads:
I’ve worked at an early childhood care center in NYC. During the job training, we were basically told to keep it a secret if any “firsts” happened. Most employees are not being paid enough to really care at those jobs. They’re not thinking about you and your baby that much, they’re thinking about their next audition or gig (many of them are performers using it as a “survival job”). There’s no goddamn way I would ever have my kid go to any kind of school or daycare before age 5.
Benign neglect sounds like a luxury compared to other dispatches from the front lines. After working in a corporate center for a year, a Reddit contributor reported: “I spent a lot of that time watching other teachers yell at and make fun of the infants I was with (a common phrase to a crying baby was ‘this is why mommy doesn’t love you and sends you to daycare’), and blatantly disregard [Early Childhood Educator] standards. … My first week there the teacher told me we didn’t have to wipe the babies if it was just a wet diaper.”
A Big Mac tastes the same from Orlando to Omaha, but fast-food chain equivalents of McDaycare vary dramatically. Stories of decency and professional fulfillment also stock these online pages. Still, uneven quality and slipshod staff retention are a leitmotif. The individual teachers’ patience and personalities must have more to do with the sort of care children receive than the platitudinous manuals descended from corporate headquarters—and a parent must be capable of intuiting such traits. Which was just the sort of thing I told myself when I enrolled my daughter in one.
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When my university, contending with a personnel issue, invited me to return, post-Ph.D., to teach a course—just five days until the first lecture—my main vertiginous thought was not how to make Sontag interesting to a cohort of lacrosse jocks hiding behind their MacBooks but of the baby: what to do with her. She was eighteen months old. We were just back from the better part of a year abroad that had spared us the rigged American childcare market. Now we had a few days to find a solution. No room in the apartment for a babysitter. One-hundred-kid waitlists at anything Montessori-esque. No time to assemble a nanny share.
Throughout my pregnancy, I had watched the wards of the big chain day care downstairs, piled in wheeled jumbo cribs or on a chain-gang rope, as the paparazzi-caretakers waved iPad cameras. A bank and a hardcore master-of-the-universe fitness gym abutted the center. Somehow the day care didn’t seem out of place. “What is the amount? Let me see what I can do!” my department’s associate chair replied. An opening immediately available. A $10,000 “research and books stipend” approved. I would go to my job and the baby would go to hers, where she would, I feared, become one of the vanished tots in a corporate detention facility, subject to fluorescent lighting and professional inattention, transformed into a new data-stream to my phone. And yet the fact that it was so ludicrously expensive, nearly a thousand dollars a week, somehow in my innocence (or crassness) reassured me; it couldn’t be that costly and that bad.
The consensus among liberal elites in the U.S. is that it is more civilized to send your child to a center than to oppress a woman in your home, whether a thwarted stay-at-home mother or an exploited, foreign-born caretaker. Abroad, in a city where my husband had partially grown up, we had a part-time nanny, a ribald and until very recently illiterate raconteur: ebullient, 48 years old, one of twelve children, mother to four, who steadfastly attributed any rash, fever or crying spell to teeth. Along with the folksy children’s songs about guinea fowl and crabs who are or are not fish, I learned important R-rated terms. Garotas de programa (“hookers”), who traipsed around the baroque but seedy gardens by the Praça da República. Laranja (“orange,” or “dummy owner”), used to fraudulently convey property titles, as in an ex-husband’s uncle, to whom was conveyed, pre-divorce, the house in Pará they had bought for twelve bulls. Each day, I drifted to her wing of the apartment, ignoring my dissertation and finally becoming proficient in Portuguese and, I felt, motherhood.
Back in the States I knew I wasn’t supposed to talk about our childcare situation, or how complicatedly attached our quartet had become, whether because of genuine shared sentiment or because we paid a U.S. rate. Here, the question of nannies had been settled, really, in the 2000s, when the “nanny wars” divided professional working mothers over the offloading of parental duties onto female immigrant labor. Was one set of women building their careers on the backs of other women the logical culmination or ugly betrayal of feminist ideals? Few ventured answers beyond milquetoast concessions. The Atlantic’s Caitlin Flanagan performed exegesis on the tax code with the zeal of a born-again, proselytizing that one must pony up and pay nanny taxes: a measure so readily implemented that today a graphic on Care.com, the Tinder of childcare services, chirps, “Think nanny taxes are too costly? Think again.” Meanwhile, companies like Poppins Payroll and NannyChex abound.
But W-4s have not eased the consciences of others. This shift has been sharply captured in contemporary literature, where the charms of the mid-century “nanny confessional” have greatly diminished; Mary Poppins—sweet, safe, singing—is now a more complex character, as told by today’s novelists. The Prix Goncourt-laureled The Perfect Nanny by Leïla Slimani stages a Medea drama for our new millennium, recasting the events of a 2012 Upper West Side killer-nanny in an opulently bourgeois apartment in Paris. (“The baby is dead,” the book opens. “It took only a few seconds.”) A 2022 thriller by Joyce Carol Oates centers on an unknown serial murderer called the Babysitter who slaughters little boys, leaving their laundered, folded clothes beside the bodies. If not scenes from sadistic nightmares, other recent novels have surfaced the hidden order of racial unease reticulating the whole enterprise, as in Kiley Reid’s Such a Fun Age and Raven Leilani’s Luster. If no man is a hero to his valet, then no mother is a heroine to the nanny.
Spun another way, the threat of the nanny is too fierce, not to the baby but to the mother. In stratified foreign economies in which nannies are still the default of elites, stories travel through gossip chains of a child calling the nanny “mom,” followed reliably by the demand that the nanny take a vacation—détente styled as munificence. Our nanny’s usual charge, away in Paris for the year, was the daughter of a publisher, whose apartment we were renting; apparently, she wished her mother was her nanny and her nanny was her mother. At corporate day care, there is little risk of such confusion. The caregivers may be lovely and admirable, but the day-care/home divide is as clear to the child as the gloomy workplace is to the office worker—a distinction observed in the daily drop-off squalls.
Enlightened professionals further weigh the enriching activities of day care against the boredom and domestic alienation of the home. A kind of false equivalence is perpetuated by those who attribute the virtues of universal Scandi-socialist arrangements to day cares in the U.S.—forgetting, namely, that the crèches in Europe are heavily subsidized or even free and follow a generous paid parental leave. Yet parents in the U.S. reliably say they choose day care for all the good “socialization.” In the context of babies who can only engage in parallel play until around age three, this word always has, for me, the same slightly ridiculous effect of miniature baby boy suits and bow ties: an awkward, boxy imposition of an adult convention upon a round, doughy form. When probed, the term “socialization” simply means that the child is made to desire to do what he is required to do. Admittedly, day care does a very fine job of facilitating this, if you ever have observed the calm of a day-care toddler meal—the eerie, dejected silence of chewing—as though the tots had been given psychotropics.
My daughter did not cry at the first drop-off. I didn’t either—nothing could have felt more preposterous among the mini vinyl furniture and posters of female astronauts I don’t know the names of. After the first day, however, my daughter’s misery at our parting was firm and unwavering. They kept the infants and toddlers in the basement. It was like the dreary corporate offices whose windows we peered into, involuntarily, from our apartment—worse than Bartleby’s view of a brick wall: drones with headsets parsing 10-Ks. Infants and toddlers made to look, by confine and choreography, like miniature adults, pitted against the Deweyan mandate that adults become little children. If we were lucky and a particularly gentle teacher—who confided he was doing the gig for a college-degree program bankrolled by the center—was working the morning shift, I could un-Velcro my daughter from my shoulder and drape her against his, where she buried her face while I darted. “All smiles,” I sometimes got a message ten minutes later, with a picture of her brandishing a baby doll.
The MBAs at headquarters could not have invented a better token to assuage the guilt of parental absence than the live-updated photo apps. Over nap time, the day’s photo shoots stream into parents’ phones—amateur, dim-lit, off-centered—while a to-the-minute report on the tally of diapers changed, status on quartered grapes, eaten or rejected, and the peerless quantified enrichment activities make headlines in a personalized daily newsletter. I ask a mom friend how she is doing and she forwards a corporate day-care picture of her five-month-old daughter, wedged between the arms of a Boppy pillow. Yellow linoleum flooring spreads out behind her; ahead, a semi-translucent scarf the baby looks at with a blank stare. “We are doing well!” my friend replies. The work-home dilemma that has cursed contemporary motherhood is, with the silent kiss of a camera shutter, resolved. (She is in two places at once.)
I awaited the photos each afternoon, reading the accompanying captions with wary fascination. An explanation of my daughter using a roller to apply blue paint read: “When toddlers use novel materials to create they are developing the ability for creative innovation, a 21st century skill.” Play-Doh is an opportunity for her to “display hand eye coordination as she explores a textured rolling tool.” As the teacher and class wave scarves, not exactly Shen Yun, a note suggests: “As children follow the movements of the … scarves and move their own at the same time, they are developing directional tracking skills.” A photograph of my daughter with a paintbrush dripping with orange paint provokes a rush of parental pride in me, quickly dashed in the next photo showing all the kids are painting the same thing. My baby’s masterpiece is merely less evolved.
If socialization is the end, then corporate day care also allows parents something related, or rather, its opposite: unsocialization. Grandparents live far away, friends aren’t having kids, a nanny is too morally perilous and too risky. The impersonal mechanisms of a corporate center enable one to fulfill one’s obligations to those in charge of your child’s care through simple online payment. Escaping feelings of dependence and intimacy, even more than an exaggerated respect for a professional setting of putative experts and focus-grouped art projects, comes to define the appeal of these programs. Altogether, corporate day care reverses the natural order of human allegiances: you can’t trust in fickle individuals, but you can trust in LLCs, vast systems, corporate oversight and the cameras.
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Keeping your baby out of corporate day care will spare you the demoralizing drop-off scenes, but it is no guarantee against either the indignities—or the temptations—of datafied parenting. The home, too, has been primed for technocratic transformation. The first bassinet in which your newborn is placed may be Dr. Karp’s $1,695 Snoo, automated to respond to night stirrings with soporific undulations. The unlucky events of the night populate a horseshoe-arced chart on the parent’s phone, the purpose unclear, except perhaps to quantify parental mettle. More charitably, the forensic doting can have the air of a latter-day, bobo Luke 12:7—even the very hairs of your head are all numbered. The contemporary market simply appreciates that the deep-pocketed and the overly anxious are aligned. A $299 non-FDA-approved “smart” sock monitors heartbeat and oxygen levels of infants in an abundance of caution against the menacing cipher of SIDS. We took our chances, but I did succumb to a $7.99 breastfeeding app that tracks how long the baby feeds on each side: start left breast, finish right breast, start right breast, finish left. (So determined was I to keep things even that my daughter never requested “milk,” but instead referred to the whole activity as “switch sides,” shouting it at me as I tried to wean her, like some gruff longshoreman on a loading dock.)
Beyond this, I gave up on data-mongering after Oster’s first book on pregnancy, a series that has now creeped up to four, with the latest out this spring. Her promise that interpretations and choices rustle out of metric sets like numberless crows scattering in a field was alluring, but my experience of reading her was always better captured by the “bottom line” at the end of each chapter. Anyway, the issue for me was never the coffee or sushi Oster okays. My problem was that over the course of five months of severe morning sickness, I had consumed hundreds of poppyseed bagels—mysteriously, the only food I could eat without involuntarily gagging. At month three, it dawned on me in a feverish epiphany that I was growing an opium-addict baby with a drug-addled brain. I scoured the internet for studies to feed my Oster-hunger—my need for expert, empirical, redemptive clarification. I turned up nothing. I realized I was in mental free fall. Oster’s book should come with a parental advisory.
Often enough, I have found when I reemerge into the dataverse that the questions under treatment would never have crossed one’s mind—though once apprised of them, you are left answering to your fitness as a parent. There are simply so many disasters you have failed to imagine! As promenaded on Oster’s website: “How Dangerous Is It for My Kid to Drink Bathwater?” and “Is It Safe to Bathe My Baby During a Lightning Storm?” Then the headier fare: Does the data bear out that you should “stay together for the kids”? What does the new empiricist voice at the Temple of Apollo declare as to whether “kids need siblings”? A recent newsletter soberly summarizes Oster’s no-nonsense mantra as “no secret option C”—which is to say, no point in considering alternatives that go beyond the data. For parents, the appeal of all these verificationist mental gymnastics is similar to what they get from corporate day care: the illusion that every decision can be “justified” with empirical evidence, allowing you to efficiently sidestep the sense of unknowing and failure that are half of parenting. As for children, one wonders what it does to a blossoming psyche to be told, in Oster’s words, that “magical thinking … gets in the way.” Will children raised according to the philosophy of no secret option C have any use for imagining new ways of being in the world, whether personally or politically?
As data parents would tell it, they are merely mastering, paying mind, professionalizing, becoming experts of infancy. I have heard bright professional women, exemplary mothers, adopt the corporate gibberish dispensed on the apps as they marvel at the enrichment programs the big chains come up with. A Wall Street mom at our center pumps her fist as she tells me she “loves all the STEM” her one-year-old is getting. Another acquaintance in finance, enumerating the pluses of her corporate day care, cites the “sensory play”: big plastic bins loaded with sand, water, snow shoveled from the outside that the kids stick their hands in—bringing nature to kids instead of kids to nature. An IMF banker I meet sends her son to one corporate center because, as she laments, “all the nanny did was hold the baby.” But more than anything, I have heard peers disarmingly confess, sometimes with a girlish, aw-shucks pride in their helplessness, the limitations of what they have to offer their children. That at all of four months, lo and behold, they have no more to give them, and so out into the world they go.
The part that goes unsaid is that many of these mothers find they don’t have a penchant for the daily demands of parenting—a taboo that might also be taken as a truism given the vast corporate handover of a certain class’s infants. The monotonous idyll of having a baby, which could be otherwise experienced as a paradisical repetition of days, breeds something worse than resentment or boredom. It breeds worry that you just are not doing enough for the baby’s development: FOMO, or fear-of-milestone-obstruction.
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A day-care classmate cries at the sight of me each pickup, calling out “mommy.” Another, a daughter of a PE exec, is in the center from 7:31 a.m. to 5:55 p.m. each day; a teacher tells me she has been on that schedule since she was a few months old. When I stopped to think about my daughter’s days, I never thought she was being subjected to anything like mistreatment. I believed the photos and liked her caretakers, even if not the fact that I was still meeting new ones in her final week. Around the time the Ivy League largesse expired, and our childcare budget shrunk, bibbidi-bobbidi-boo, back into a pumpkin, I met a Brazilian woman who was finishing paralegal coursework and looking for part-time babysitting; she had a daughter of a similar age. She now watches the girls while I teach in the mornings. Both of our daughters have tauntingly experimented with calling the wrong mom “mommy,” but it is not a misdemeanor I have found especially flustering. (My daughter also identifies me as the nun in Madeline and the girl on the tortilla-chip bag, both in different ways startlingly astute.) I do not get many photos from our sitter, either, but people at the park know my child—“the one that doesn’t stop”—and, for me, that is enough.
Certainly, this “option C” is no feminist utopia; and already some recent neoliberal startups are trying to Airbnbify these kinds of casual childcare arrangements. But it allows me, for the time being at least, to imagine I’ve found some escape from what often feels like a multiple-choice trap: transfigure your baby into the Giga Pet you used to dangle from your belt loop in grade school, as if through willed regression; find a nanny so perfect your child calls her “mom”; or stay at home and displace your anxieties about your own purportedly stunted development onto your child. In all scenarios, bleed money.
My daughter’s hour-long nightly nursing marathons subsided with the end of day care, but I otherwise noted no changes in her. Before and after, equal parts sweetie pie and maniac. One nightly ritual, however, has outlived her days at the center. Evenings, while we cook dinner, she tugs down the tea towels from the oven door and gathers her bibs—any spare fabric she can get her hands on—and lays the cloth in rows on the kitchen floor, where she rests her menagerie of stuffed animals (baby dolls; a plush, regal green Babar elephant; a Claes Oldenburg-style sardine), each one allotted a little cot. One by one, she pats the backs of the ragtag gang, as the teachers did the children at nap time. My daughter’s day care isn’t systematic. Sometimes she gets distracted smoothing a wrinkle out of a cloth for minutes on end, or leaves Babar forgotten and askew, looking like a gunned-down mobster. Nothing goes recorded. She hasn’t coined any perfectionist mantras. She’s light on stats. But as far as I know, she doesn’t charge any fees.
Art credit: Ben Quesnel, Cribbed, 2018. Multimedia installation, 132 x 127 x 71 cm. Courtesy of the artist.
A generation before Pizzagate, America’s wacko conspiracy beachhead concerned, of all things, an unassuming day-care center, set behind a chain-link fence in Manhattan Beach, California. In 1984, a nationwide frenzy broke out over the McMartin Preschool. The mom-and-pop establishment may have been run by a wheelchair-bound grandmother, but one of the caretakers, well, he could fly. According to one mother who turned out to be schizophrenic, the school dabbled in the dark arts; her two-year-old son was allegedly raped amid scenes of animal sacrifices (smashed baby turtles, van Gogh’d bunny rabbits). Emerging out of a combination of psychiatric incompetence and the bonkers, suggestible imaginations of preschoolers, the rumors segued into a full-fledged state prosecution. A nationwide witch hunt for other sites of demonic worship across America’s day cares ensued, with dozens falling under irrational scrutiny. “How safe is your child if that child is in day care?” NBC’s Tom Brokaw asked audiences in a segment titled “Daycare Nightmare.”
Eventually, solemn jurors and sheepish journalists resolved—as if confirmation were needed—that the so-called “satanic panic” had been a specious, ratings-driven hysteria. The sham case ended in acquittal, and might simply stand as a bizarre footnote to the American paranoid style had it not also spoken so powerfully to the broader social crosscurrents. At that very moment in American history, droves of women—new women—were making good on the liberal feminist promise, discarding baby bottles for legal pads. When mothers hit the corporate ladder, jettisoning little Timmy, anything was possible.
Today the day-care wars no longer take the form of hallucinogenic news segments and sensationalized tabloid stories. They are quieter, mostly dignified and often subterranean—stashed away in Reddit threads, city-mom forums and newspaper comment sections. Though not childcare experts, per se, the frequently anonymous contributors sometimes claim to hold Ph.D.s or have substantial training in statistics. They raid journal articles, pediatric medical studies, nonprofit research working papers—decoding the dark patterns. The commenters are not debating demons. They are debating data, the lingua franca of millennial parenting.
Who could have known that a rich understanding of statistics would be necessary to cracking the riddle of modern parenthood? Forget Dr. Spock’s injunction to simply trust yourself. Put aside the poetic psychoanalyzing of D. W. Winnicott and the reassurance of the “good-enough mother.” Upper-middle-class millennials turn to the crushingly practical, five-to-ten-mile-a-day-running Brown University economist Emily Oster and her bestselling book empire, which synthesizes quantitative studies on pregnancy and parenting. Oster, whose recent venture, a newsletter and website, aims to “create the most data-literate generation of parents” to date, has struck a deep chord with the standardized-test-hacking, Fitbit-toting generation, for whom the creation of life is just another data set or reverse-engineering prompt to ace.
In this metrics-saturated milieu, the mother who poses the question “Is day care bad for my baby?” to Google had better brace herself. Depending on algorithmic returns, naysaying reports may chastise her: you are saddling your child with psychic deficits for life! An author on Medium—anonymous but fluent in statistical analysis—traces rising cortisol levels among children in day care each hour the parent is in absentia: your gig paid for with repeated tests of your kid’s fight-or-flight response. Another popularly referenced study paints Quebec’s five-dollar-a-day day cares as psyche-damaging factories inadequate by design to the complex task of nurturing. (Compared to peers in other Canadian provinces, the Quebec children had “significant worsening in self-reported health and in life satisfaction among teens.”) In a Substack post, America’s teen mental-health crisis is provocatively if sketchily correlated with the rise of programs like KinderCare, the largest national chain, which began to enroll infants in 1985. Laura Wiley Haynes, a self-described “liberal Democrat,” argues that state-mandated 1:5 teacher-to-infant ratios spell out conditions of sensory deprivation, by way of a 1950s study of baby rhesus monkeys robbed of comforting surrogates. Commenters commend Hayes as “brave” to say what is somehow taboo today: namely, that mothering matters.
Meanwhile, other econometricians assert that day care for the youngest set is no cause for alarm. In fact, some will have you know, those parents who can’t cough up the thousands of dollars monthly are the ones who should worry—the truly negligent and deadbeat whose children are destined to be academic slowpokes by the time they enter kindergarten. Daughters of working moms earn 23 percent more than daughters of stay-at-home moms, crows a Harvard Business School report. A 2010 National Institutes of Health study attests that alums of high-quality day cares showed higher cognitive achievement in secondary school. It is reiterated by Oster herself that “quality” of the group center is what matters; yet elsewhere studies suggest that parents can’t reliably determine quality, vastly overrating their own children’s day cares compared to neutral observers.
And so, is the modern day-care center a life raft or a calamity? Necessary reinforcement for the overwhelmed parents or an abyss parenting can’t recover from? One thing that seems certain is that corporate, for-profit models, accounting for more than 10 percent of the childcare market, are the future of day care in the United States, as the organizations mercilessly acquire small centers and simultaneously lobby against universal day care in Washington. Another is that, whether or not we trust our kids to one of these centers, the effects of the Tamagotchified care they offer have migrated beyond their bright, unimaginative walls, setting the terms of our debates and afflicting our very self-conception as parents. Data, too, can be demonic.
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How did we arrive at the technocratic round of the mommy wars? Certainly readiness—even preference—to have surrogates raise one’s child is nothing new. Care and control have never been delimited by bloodline. Wet nurses (nutrices) were on hand for elites in ancient Rome and make cameos in the Old Testament. We know the porous logic of family life: family members vanish, or have trusty underlings, or can’t be bothered (the pram in the hallway and all that), or have important occupations (running the macrocosm while someone else attends to the micro-). The Park Avenue partner delegating the custody of his offspring to a crack team of domestic managers, tutors, chaperones and cooks is no freak of modernity—he’d fit right in with Roman servants languidly waving their palm-frond fans.
What may be newer is a revolution in the hierarchy of cachet—with day care not merely a convenience or absolution, but suddenly something of a status symbol: pre-Daltons and Harvards for the well-heeled in their booties. Nineteenth-century Americans, for their part, would be dumbfounded. In the years following the openings of the first collective day cares, in the 1850s and 1860s, day cares bore a stigma: They were “indelibly associated with the lower classes, familial crisis, and the need for uplift,” one historian of childcare has written. Sure, well-to-do women might run day nurseries, but they wouldn’t dream of slotting their own in one.
Later in the American saga, it took nothing short of a national calamity for middle-class parents to park their children in day care. During the Great Depression, the WPA ran thousands of nursery schools—a rare experiment in maternal collectivism for the American state. During World War II, three thousand childcare centers sprouted, care of government subsidies doled out under the Lanham Act in the wartime scramble. But these short-lived chapters were concessions to states of emergency. After World War II, the collective day care returned to its status as an ideological no-go under the presiding portraits of Mao and Stalin—rigid, soulless detention centers for the homogenization of the baby set. Helpful, maybe, but insidious and downright un-American!
Ironically, it was the age of Reagan and “family values” that finally destigmatized group day care—while, in the American manner, perverting its available form. Just as Reagan slashed funding for public childcare for poor families, Congress created incentives for employer-sponsored day care for the middle and upper classes. Under the Dependent Care Assistance Plan of the 1981 Economic Recovery Tax Act, parents could write off the value of employer-provided childcare services. The private sector leapt into action to meet a new need: between 1982 and 1990, as more than half of America’s mothers joined the workforce, employer-sponsored childcare programs increased ninefold. Day care was no longer a Stalinist bogeyman; given a neoliberal rebrand, it was capitalism at its finest.
In time, a new breed of company entrenched itself—as American, and investor-friendly, as McDonald’s or Holiday Inn. The growth of these chains has been explosive. In 2022 alone, the fifty largest for-profit childcare chains (those owned by private equity firms or publicly traded) acquired or opened more than five hundred new centers. Their crisp signage and redacted windows occupy corporate commercial downtowns and tony suburbs: KinderCare, Learning Experience, Lightbridge Academy, Primrose, the Goddard School, Bright Horizons. Even as nonprofits and independent day cares shuttered en masse after the exodus of eighty thousand workers during COVID-19, annual 5 to 7 percent tuition hikes—and stingy staff compensation—have powered 15 to 20 percent annual profits at the chains. In 2005, Bright Horizons charged $1,000 to $1,200 a month ($1,600 with inflation) to care for infants and toddlers. In 2024 in Manhattan, the same chain, same service: a rent-rivaling $3,895 a month.
Despite the cost, the quality of care in these chains is not guaranteed. In the most superficial terms, these corporate centers adhere to the demands of 1970s feminist childcare reformers. Both women and men care for the children. They encourage boys to play with dolls and girls to take an interest in wheeled vehicles. The difference, of course, is that caretakers, saddled with four or five children, are paid an hourly starting rate of less than what a nanny makes watching a single child. (A study by the 1989 National Child Care Staffing Study found that the most “important predictor of the quality of care children receive … is staff wages.”) Online, a parent might discover comment sections overflowing with reports from bewildered ex-employees. One typical example reads:
Benign neglect sounds like a luxury compared to other dispatches from the front lines. After working in a corporate center for a year, a Reddit contributor reported: “I spent a lot of that time watching other teachers yell at and make fun of the infants I was with (a common phrase to a crying baby was ‘this is why mommy doesn’t love you and sends you to daycare’), and blatantly disregard [Early Childhood Educator] standards. … My first week there the teacher told me we didn’t have to wipe the babies if it was just a wet diaper.”
A Big Mac tastes the same from Orlando to Omaha, but fast-food chain equivalents of McDaycare vary dramatically. Stories of decency and professional fulfillment also stock these online pages. Still, uneven quality and slipshod staff retention are a leitmotif. The individual teachers’ patience and personalities must have more to do with the sort of care children receive than the platitudinous manuals descended from corporate headquarters—and a parent must be capable of intuiting such traits. Which was just the sort of thing I told myself when I enrolled my daughter in one.
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When my university, contending with a personnel issue, invited me to return, post-Ph.D., to teach a course—just five days until the first lecture—my main vertiginous thought was not how to make Sontag interesting to a cohort of lacrosse jocks hiding behind their MacBooks but of the baby: what to do with her. She was eighteen months old. We were just back from the better part of a year abroad that had spared us the rigged American childcare market. Now we had a few days to find a solution. No room in the apartment for a babysitter. One-hundred-kid waitlists at anything Montessori-esque. No time to assemble a nanny share.
Throughout my pregnancy, I had watched the wards of the big chain day care downstairs, piled in wheeled jumbo cribs or on a chain-gang rope, as the paparazzi-caretakers waved iPad cameras. A bank and a hardcore master-of-the-universe fitness gym abutted the center. Somehow the day care didn’t seem out of place. “What is the amount? Let me see what I can do!” my department’s associate chair replied. An opening immediately available. A $10,000 “research and books stipend” approved. I would go to my job and the baby would go to hers, where she would, I feared, become one of the vanished tots in a corporate detention facility, subject to fluorescent lighting and professional inattention, transformed into a new data-stream to my phone. And yet the fact that it was so ludicrously expensive, nearly a thousand dollars a week, somehow in my innocence (or crassness) reassured me; it couldn’t be that costly and that bad.
The consensus among liberal elites in the U.S. is that it is more civilized to send your child to a center than to oppress a woman in your home, whether a thwarted stay-at-home mother or an exploited, foreign-born caretaker. Abroad, in a city where my husband had partially grown up, we had a part-time nanny, a ribald and until very recently illiterate raconteur: ebullient, 48 years old, one of twelve children, mother to four, who steadfastly attributed any rash, fever or crying spell to teeth. Along with the folksy children’s songs about guinea fowl and crabs who are or are not fish, I learned important R-rated terms. Garotas de programa (“hookers”), who traipsed around the baroque but seedy gardens by the Praça da República. Laranja (“orange,” or “dummy owner”), used to fraudulently convey property titles, as in an ex-husband’s uncle, to whom was conveyed, pre-divorce, the house in Pará they had bought for twelve bulls. Each day, I drifted to her wing of the apartment, ignoring my dissertation and finally becoming proficient in Portuguese and, I felt, motherhood.
Back in the States I knew I wasn’t supposed to talk about our childcare situation, or how complicatedly attached our quartet had become, whether because of genuine shared sentiment or because we paid a U.S. rate. Here, the question of nannies had been settled, really, in the 2000s, when the “nanny wars” divided professional working mothers over the offloading of parental duties onto female immigrant labor. Was one set of women building their careers on the backs of other women the logical culmination or ugly betrayal of feminist ideals? Few ventured answers beyond milquetoast concessions. The Atlantic’s Caitlin Flanagan performed exegesis on the tax code with the zeal of a born-again, proselytizing that one must pony up and pay nanny taxes: a measure so readily implemented that today a graphic on Care.com, the Tinder of childcare services, chirps, “Think nanny taxes are too costly? Think again.” Meanwhile, companies like Poppins Payroll and NannyChex abound.
But W-4s have not eased the consciences of others. This shift has been sharply captured in contemporary literature, where the charms of the mid-century “nanny confessional” have greatly diminished; Mary Poppins—sweet, safe, singing—is now a more complex character, as told by today’s novelists. The Prix Goncourt-laureled The Perfect Nanny by Leïla Slimani stages a Medea drama for our new millennium, recasting the events of a 2012 Upper West Side killer-nanny in an opulently bourgeois apartment in Paris. (“The baby is dead,” the book opens. “It took only a few seconds.”) A 2022 thriller by Joyce Carol Oates centers on an unknown serial murderer called the Babysitter who slaughters little boys, leaving their laundered, folded clothes beside the bodies. If not scenes from sadistic nightmares, other recent novels have surfaced the hidden order of racial unease reticulating the whole enterprise, as in Kiley Reid’s Such a Fun Age and Raven Leilani’s Luster. If no man is a hero to his valet, then no mother is a heroine to the nanny.
Spun another way, the threat of the nanny is too fierce, not to the baby but to the mother. In stratified foreign economies in which nannies are still the default of elites, stories travel through gossip chains of a child calling the nanny “mom,” followed reliably by the demand that the nanny take a vacation—détente styled as munificence. Our nanny’s usual charge, away in Paris for the year, was the daughter of a publisher, whose apartment we were renting; apparently, she wished her mother was her nanny and her nanny was her mother. At corporate day care, there is little risk of such confusion. The caregivers may be lovely and admirable, but the day-care/home divide is as clear to the child as the gloomy workplace is to the office worker—a distinction observed in the daily drop-off squalls.
Enlightened professionals further weigh the enriching activities of day care against the boredom and domestic alienation of the home. A kind of false equivalence is perpetuated by those who attribute the virtues of universal Scandi-socialist arrangements to day cares in the U.S.—forgetting, namely, that the crèches in Europe are heavily subsidized or even free and follow a generous paid parental leave. Yet parents in the U.S. reliably say they choose day care for all the good “socialization.” In the context of babies who can only engage in parallel play until around age three, this word always has, for me, the same slightly ridiculous effect of miniature baby boy suits and bow ties: an awkward, boxy imposition of an adult convention upon a round, doughy form. When probed, the term “socialization” simply means that the child is made to desire to do what he is required to do. Admittedly, day care does a very fine job of facilitating this, if you ever have observed the calm of a day-care toddler meal—the eerie, dejected silence of chewing—as though the tots had been given psychotropics.
My daughter did not cry at the first drop-off. I didn’t either—nothing could have felt more preposterous among the mini vinyl furniture and posters of female astronauts I don’t know the names of. After the first day, however, my daughter’s misery at our parting was firm and unwavering. They kept the infants and toddlers in the basement. It was like the dreary corporate offices whose windows we peered into, involuntarily, from our apartment—worse than Bartleby’s view of a brick wall: drones with headsets parsing 10-Ks. Infants and toddlers made to look, by confine and choreography, like miniature adults, pitted against the Deweyan mandate that adults become little children. If we were lucky and a particularly gentle teacher—who confided he was doing the gig for a college-degree program bankrolled by the center—was working the morning shift, I could un-Velcro my daughter from my shoulder and drape her against his, where she buried her face while I darted. “All smiles,” I sometimes got a message ten minutes later, with a picture of her brandishing a baby doll.
The MBAs at headquarters could not have invented a better token to assuage the guilt of parental absence than the live-updated photo apps. Over nap time, the day’s photo shoots stream into parents’ phones—amateur, dim-lit, off-centered—while a to-the-minute report on the tally of diapers changed, status on quartered grapes, eaten or rejected, and the peerless quantified enrichment activities make headlines in a personalized daily newsletter. I ask a mom friend how she is doing and she forwards a corporate day-care picture of her five-month-old daughter, wedged between the arms of a Boppy pillow. Yellow linoleum flooring spreads out behind her; ahead, a semi-translucent scarf the baby looks at with a blank stare. “We are doing well!” my friend replies. The work-home dilemma that has cursed contemporary motherhood is, with the silent kiss of a camera shutter, resolved. (She is in two places at once.)
I awaited the photos each afternoon, reading the accompanying captions with wary fascination. An explanation of my daughter using a roller to apply blue paint read: “When toddlers use novel materials to create they are developing the ability for creative innovation, a 21st century skill.” Play-Doh is an opportunity for her to “display hand eye coordination as she explores a textured rolling tool.” As the teacher and class wave scarves, not exactly Shen Yun, a note suggests: “As children follow the movements of the … scarves and move their own at the same time, they are developing directional tracking skills.” A photograph of my daughter with a paintbrush dripping with orange paint provokes a rush of parental pride in me, quickly dashed in the next photo showing all the kids are painting the same thing. My baby’s masterpiece is merely less evolved.
If socialization is the end, then corporate day care also allows parents something related, or rather, its opposite: unsocialization. Grandparents live far away, friends aren’t having kids, a nanny is too morally perilous and too risky. The impersonal mechanisms of a corporate center enable one to fulfill one’s obligations to those in charge of your child’s care through simple online payment. Escaping feelings of dependence and intimacy, even more than an exaggerated respect for a professional setting of putative experts and focus-grouped art projects, comes to define the appeal of these programs. Altogether, corporate day care reverses the natural order of human allegiances: you can’t trust in fickle individuals, but you can trust in LLCs, vast systems, corporate oversight and the cameras.
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Keeping your baby out of corporate day care will spare you the demoralizing drop-off scenes, but it is no guarantee against either the indignities—or the temptations—of datafied parenting. The home, too, has been primed for technocratic transformation. The first bassinet in which your newborn is placed may be Dr. Karp’s $1,695 Snoo, automated to respond to night stirrings with soporific undulations. The unlucky events of the night populate a horseshoe-arced chart on the parent’s phone, the purpose unclear, except perhaps to quantify parental mettle. More charitably, the forensic doting can have the air of a latter-day, bobo Luke 12:7—even the very hairs of your head are all numbered. The contemporary market simply appreciates that the deep-pocketed and the overly anxious are aligned. A $299 non-FDA-approved “smart” sock monitors heartbeat and oxygen levels of infants in an abundance of caution against the menacing cipher of SIDS. We took our chances, but I did succumb to a $7.99 breastfeeding app that tracks how long the baby feeds on each side: start left breast, finish right breast, start right breast, finish left. (So determined was I to keep things even that my daughter never requested “milk,” but instead referred to the whole activity as “switch sides,” shouting it at me as I tried to wean her, like some gruff longshoreman on a loading dock.)
Beyond this, I gave up on data-mongering after Oster’s first book on pregnancy, a series that has now creeped up to four, with the latest out this spring. Her promise that interpretations and choices rustle out of metric sets like numberless crows scattering in a field was alluring, but my experience of reading her was always better captured by the “bottom line” at the end of each chapter. Anyway, the issue for me was never the coffee or sushi Oster okays. My problem was that over the course of five months of severe morning sickness, I had consumed hundreds of poppyseed bagels—mysteriously, the only food I could eat without involuntarily gagging. At month three, it dawned on me in a feverish epiphany that I was growing an opium-addict baby with a drug-addled brain. I scoured the internet for studies to feed my Oster-hunger—my need for expert, empirical, redemptive clarification. I turned up nothing. I realized I was in mental free fall. Oster’s book should come with a parental advisory.
Often enough, I have found when I reemerge into the dataverse that the questions under treatment would never have crossed one’s mind—though once apprised of them, you are left answering to your fitness as a parent. There are simply so many disasters you have failed to imagine! As promenaded on Oster’s website: “How Dangerous Is It for My Kid to Drink Bathwater?” and “Is It Safe to Bathe My Baby During a Lightning Storm?” Then the headier fare: Does the data bear out that you should “stay together for the kids”? What does the new empiricist voice at the Temple of Apollo declare as to whether “kids need siblings”? A recent newsletter soberly summarizes Oster’s no-nonsense mantra as “no secret option C”—which is to say, no point in considering alternatives that go beyond the data. For parents, the appeal of all these verificationist mental gymnastics is similar to what they get from corporate day care: the illusion that every decision can be “justified” with empirical evidence, allowing you to efficiently sidestep the sense of unknowing and failure that are half of parenting. As for children, one wonders what it does to a blossoming psyche to be told, in Oster’s words, that “magical thinking … gets in the way.” Will children raised according to the philosophy of no secret option C have any use for imagining new ways of being in the world, whether personally or politically?
As data parents would tell it, they are merely mastering, paying mind, professionalizing, becoming experts of infancy. I have heard bright professional women, exemplary mothers, adopt the corporate gibberish dispensed on the apps as they marvel at the enrichment programs the big chains come up with. A Wall Street mom at our center pumps her fist as she tells me she “loves all the STEM” her one-year-old is getting. Another acquaintance in finance, enumerating the pluses of her corporate day care, cites the “sensory play”: big plastic bins loaded with sand, water, snow shoveled from the outside that the kids stick their hands in—bringing nature to kids instead of kids to nature. An IMF banker I meet sends her son to one corporate center because, as she laments, “all the nanny did was hold the baby.” But more than anything, I have heard peers disarmingly confess, sometimes with a girlish, aw-shucks pride in their helplessness, the limitations of what they have to offer their children. That at all of four months, lo and behold, they have no more to give them, and so out into the world they go.
The part that goes unsaid is that many of these mothers find they don’t have a penchant for the daily demands of parenting—a taboo that might also be taken as a truism given the vast corporate handover of a certain class’s infants. The monotonous idyll of having a baby, which could be otherwise experienced as a paradisical repetition of days, breeds something worse than resentment or boredom. It breeds worry that you just are not doing enough for the baby’s development: FOMO, or fear-of-milestone-obstruction.
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A day-care classmate cries at the sight of me each pickup, calling out “mommy.” Another, a daughter of a PE exec, is in the center from 7:31 a.m. to 5:55 p.m. each day; a teacher tells me she has been on that schedule since she was a few months old. When I stopped to think about my daughter’s days, I never thought she was being subjected to anything like mistreatment. I believed the photos and liked her caretakers, even if not the fact that I was still meeting new ones in her final week. Around the time the Ivy League largesse expired, and our childcare budget shrunk, bibbidi-bobbidi-boo, back into a pumpkin, I met a Brazilian woman who was finishing paralegal coursework and looking for part-time babysitting; she had a daughter of a similar age. She now watches the girls while I teach in the mornings. Both of our daughters have tauntingly experimented with calling the wrong mom “mommy,” but it is not a misdemeanor I have found especially flustering. (My daughter also identifies me as the nun in Madeline and the girl on the tortilla-chip bag, both in different ways startlingly astute.) I do not get many photos from our sitter, either, but people at the park know my child—“the one that doesn’t stop”—and, for me, that is enough.
Certainly, this “option C” is no feminist utopia; and already some recent neoliberal startups are trying to Airbnbify these kinds of casual childcare arrangements. But it allows me, for the time being at least, to imagine I’ve found some escape from what often feels like a multiple-choice trap: transfigure your baby into the Giga Pet you used to dangle from your belt loop in grade school, as if through willed regression; find a nanny so perfect your child calls her “mom”; or stay at home and displace your anxieties about your own purportedly stunted development onto your child. In all scenarios, bleed money.
My daughter’s hour-long nightly nursing marathons subsided with the end of day care, but I otherwise noted no changes in her. Before and after, equal parts sweetie pie and maniac. One nightly ritual, however, has outlived her days at the center. Evenings, while we cook dinner, she tugs down the tea towels from the oven door and gathers her bibs—any spare fabric she can get her hands on—and lays the cloth in rows on the kitchen floor, where she rests her menagerie of stuffed animals (baby dolls; a plush, regal green Babar elephant; a Claes Oldenburg-style sardine), each one allotted a little cot. One by one, she pats the backs of the ragtag gang, as the teachers did the children at nap time. My daughter’s day care isn’t systematic. Sometimes she gets distracted smoothing a wrinkle out of a cloth for minutes on end, or leaves Babar forgotten and askew, looking like a gunned-down mobster. Nothing goes recorded. She hasn’t coined any perfectionist mantras. She’s light on stats. But as far as I know, she doesn’t charge any fees.
Art credit: Ben Quesnel, Cribbed, 2018. Multimedia installation, 132 x 127 x 71 cm. Courtesy of the artist.
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