DAYCARE: OUR SHARED BURDEN

 Robert A. Furman

             I am going to ask for your indulgence as I use this occasion to try to pull together my thinking about daycare as it has evolved over 45 years of consulting with directors, teachers, daycare providers.  I am indebted to them for what they have taught me as I am indebted to my colleagues at the Hanna Perkins Center, particularly those in a research group I will tell you about later, and most specifically to my wife.  I have the responsibility for how I have put things together and I  am not sure if all who have taught me will agree with the way I have used their contributions, but I want to acknowledge my indebtedness to them at the outset.

             My thinking about what to bring you at this time started with my wondering why the directors with whom I consult always seem to want to continue our fortnightly meetings, thinking about what it is that I must give them because I have always sincerely felt I got more than I gave.  I finally have come to think that maybe what I give them is an honest, admiring, respectful appreciation of all that they do at work, something that is usually in short supply for them.  This is not an unimportant contribution and I would not minimize it, but the contribution is one of the spirit more than of the mind, more of feelings than facts.  I often wonder if they are not in the position Mrs. Furman described as prevalent when she started working with the Cleveland public school system where the public did not respect the school board, who did not respect the superintendent, who did not respect the administration, which did not respect the principals, who did not respect the teachers, who did not respect the students.  There were, of course, some who did not pass on the lack of respect to those beneath them in the chain of command but to constantly refrain from doing so was a prescription for “burn out.”

            You all know well the lack of appreciation available in words, spirit, or dollars that is accorded all of us who work with small children.  You all know the thinking that says since our charges are so small, they can make only small and insignificant demands on us.  In fact that observation leads to a question about what is wrong with us, with you and me, that we persist in a field that in general is so little respected and rewarded, at least in this country.  As I will do a number of times in what I bring you, I will contrast the situation here with that in Finland where careers in providing daycare, in preschool education, are among the most respected, most competitively sought after for the 19- to 25-year-old age group.  But the question of why we persist in our field is an important one I want to address.

I believe that all of us know in our hearts and minds that what we do when we give so much to small children is really terribly important and even if our society cannot acknowledge that fact, we cannot avoid that conviction and it is the main reason we stay at our work.  It is the basic reason, although there are others, such as caring for small ones as we were cared for, fulfilling something of maternal aspirations and needs that are important parts of our personalities.

            With this as a brief introduction let me head back to 45 years ago when I started my work with all kinds of preschool settings, day- care centers, and many varieties of nursery schools: cooperatives, Montessori, traditional.  Whether correctly or wisely or not, I took the traditional nursery school as the model against which to measure all the others.  That made me think that if the preschool experience were designed for the child’s benefit, it would not start until the child was three and even then would start at maybe three times a week for up to three hours at the outset, progressing slowly during the year to being four hours a day, five days a week, a schedule adhered to for the next or the child’s fifth year as well.  Then ahead lay half-day kindergarten before full-day first grade the next year.  I took this as the norm for the child’s benefit because of what mothers told me about starting their three-year-olds, what I observed with my own children, and as something confirmed by the success of Head Start which followed the traditional nursery school pattern.

            What to do then about the children in day care?  At that time most daycare did not start until age three and it seemed to help to have mothers stay in the classroom with their child for up to a week if possible at the outset.  Helping children put their feelings into words about missing their mothers plus the kindness of the daycare providers all seemed to help.  When the road got rocky and problems seemed to appear, it helped to be able to address these promptly with some consultations and daycare seemed to be more manageable than I had ever thought it could be.

            To broaden out the picture, I early on had to learn a couple of lessons that brought mothers into focus.  I am a bit embarrassed to tell you the first story but it does go to prove we all have to start our learning somewhere.  There was a little boy at a daycare center whose aggression or anger was only brought in physical attacks on whomever was closest to him at the time he felt angry.  I worked with the daycare staff to get him to put his anger into words so he could explain what made him so cross and then they could work with him to try to resolve whatever was the distressing situation.  We slowly made splendid progress and his assaults had just about completely stopped when he stopped attending daycare.  Puzzled, the director finally made contact with the mother and the story unfolded that was to teach all of us some simple facts of life.  “Yes,” the mother reported, “I will not return him to the daycare.  Would you believe that one day he told me that he hated me and when I whipped him for that, he said he wished I were dead.  I asked where he learned to talk like that and he said at your center.  I won’t have that going on and he is never going back to your place.”  The mom had one tremendous point: We just left her out of the work we had done with her child, something we never should have done.  It was an unfortunate way to have learned the lesson, but we all learned it in a way we could never forget.

            This was how mothers finally got into focus for me, that they could never be ignored, that all that went on with their child had to go through them.  But this new awareness brought its problems as well: What to do with inadequately nurtured or neglected children?  Everyone was uncomfortable with the ever-present invitation and ever-present temptation to become the better mother, the replacement mother, in effect kidnapping the vulnerable child. Everyone succumbed to the temptation usually at one point or another until it became clear the terrible loyalty conflict thus imposed on the child; further if a teacher could be successful in becoming a real substitute mom, it meant the child was losing a mom every year he moved onto a new classroom.  Struggling with this dilemma brought two helpful insights.  The first was the need for work with mothers, to see if one could be able to refer them for some kind of professional counseling to help them get their lives in better order, their children better invested.  This is hard work, not within the usual skills expected of directors of daycare centers, a job that requires special training.  The problems with such mothers haunt us still to this day and how to work with them, how to, if possible, help them enter the developmental phase of motherhood is a complex issue not solved by currently popular crash courses on parenting.  It is in itself a topic for a full evening’s discussion.

            How to deal with these children in the daycare center was not a simple question either and I will always be so indebted to Mrs. Green for explaining to me how she managed such situations.  She told the story of a five-year-old boy who arrived every morning dirty, hungry, and in torn clothing.  She would greet him with something like, “My goodness me!  You know our rules about clean clothes that aren’t torn, about clean hands and faces and so you go and wash up and take these clothes to put on while I mend and wash what you are wearing.  And I bet you didn’t have breakfast yet, so when you’re all cleaned up, go to the kitchen and I will tell the cook to get you a breakfast.”  This was in the era before breakfasts were routinely provided.  Mrs. Green had such a nice way of not being critical of the mother, putting it all on conforming to center rules.  She did try to help the mom be more responsible and did meet with some success because she had the knack of not being critical and  was truly fond of the little boy which made a bond for her with the mother.  The heartwarming end of this story came some 25 years later when this boy, now a grown man and father, returned to the Center to enroll his child despite the fact attendance there meant a considerable drive for the family. In telling you this story, I want to stress that while we could all feel how right Mrs. Green’s approach was, it took 25 years before the story was completed and this is something that research projects about young children rarely take into account -- how long we have to wait to know with reasonable certainty about the effects of things that unfold in the earliest years.

            At this point in my development I was quite complacent about daycare and its management after three and was as supportive as I could be of Eleanor Hosley’s (1998) efforts  for home daycare that could be properly supported and developed for children under three.  She fought long and hard for the education, supervision, and support of those providing home daycare but like all government-funded ventures, no matter how solid and important the programs are, they always seem to have much too short a life.  This led to the push for daycare before three, something our society wanted very much, but somehow I was loathe to consider.  I was in such a minority in my feelings and the reports of success for early daycare so glowing that I had to sit down and do some thinking.

            What was it that I objected to about what was to me “too early daycare?”  We had seen some children at Hanna Perkins who had had day care from almost birth on, who presented to us with warped personalities we could not alter.  I remember so well one little boy who was always eternally pleasant to every child and adult, a very attractive little boy until you watched closely and discovered he never had an original idea of his own, that he was an eternal follower, lost until someone took him in hand to join them in some activity.  He survived by adapting to everyone else but had nothing of himself inside, was in effect just a shell of a person.  I could recognize this did not happen to all children in daycare from birth, but it was clear it could happen to some, and, if it did happen, it created a situation most difficult if not impossible to alter.  This is when I started to think and to write about the risks of early daycare, defined for me as day care before three: that early daycare carried risks for the child and the problem was to think about when those risks became prohibitive, what one could do and not do to ameliorate the risks.

            In this context let me tell you some things about our research group at Hanna Perkins.  It is a group of [twelve] child analysts who have been meeting monthly for nearly [ten] years to review all the published papers and books we can locate about what we call “severe and early disturbances” and we have been trying to integrate these with our experiences with such cases.  It is difficult as very few have the clinical database we do, as the children we have studied we have usually known daily within the context of their families for periods of from two to six years.  In this way we get a depth of understanding not available to many others.

            From our studies we can pinpoint a number of crucial tasks that need to be accomplished with the small child by his mother in the earliest years, with failure to complete these tasks manifest either at the time or else manifest many years later.  What are some of these crucial steps in development?  One is the moving from body to mind with the fulfillment of basic bodily needs becoming the bridge over which the infant moves from only noting body sensations, deriving pleasure only from their alleviation, to meeting his mother and finding pleasure in her person, in the relationship with her, becoming aware of the feelings she has and generates in him.  When  this bridge from body to mind and feelings and relationships cannot adequately take place we can later meet a person whose goal in life can only be the enjoyment of body sensations such as from drugs, alcohol, or sex.  Another of the crucial early steps is building a personality bit by bit by taking in bits and pieces of his caretaking mother and in this way building his personality, becoming a person.  It stands to reason the greater number of caretakers involved with the child, the greater number of pieces of others he has to put together, to integrate in building his personality; and likewise it would stand to reason that the more susceptible to fragmenting back into small pieces under stress this child would be.  A third of the early crucial steps is, of course, just the stimulation every baby needs to invigorate his life forces so that he can survive and grow, something known from Spitz’s work so long ago in the orphanages of Mexico.  We are seeing a second step here in the children adopted from China or Russia where they are nurtured adequately for their first year to survive but are not adequately loved to tame their basic aggressive drives into a constructive life force.  They show up as children presenting an enormous task to their adoptive parents in needing to have their basic rages and angers, their destructiveness, loved into some kind of civilized drives.  We see the same problems with the children of addicted mothers who can only but partially nurture their infants in the first year or so.  To forecast for some of these undernurtured children a later life of violence is very easy.  Said another way, it takes a great deal of denial not to see the life of violence and aggression that may lie ahead for them if untreated or unhelped.

            Children who are violence prone, bodily addicted, subject to dissolution or fragmentation under stress are children who will never know the pleasures of being a full person, will always be a drain on their society from the life paths they will follow.  Children who head in these directions are children for whom the risks of early deprivation were too great.  As adults these people are simply most difficult if not impossible to help.  These are the outcomes of early child development that make me so apprehensive about the risks of inadequate nurturing, inadequate mothering in the earliest months or years.

            Of course I cannot say that every undernurtured, every inadequately nurtured child will succumb in adulthood as I have just described.  I can say, however, if we see a pattern of child rearing that has as its endpoint risks of these types of outcomes, then it seems fair to me to say those risks are unacceptable ones.  The crucial steps from body to mind, in forming a fully integrated personality, in mastery of the basic inherent destructive drives are made during the first year of life, really during the first two years of life to be safe in what one is saying.  It is from these facts and experiences that I find myself willing to say that day care with multiple care givers in the first two years of life poses risks I would not want any child to take.  After one-and-a-half years the dangers may be less, but what the risks entail are to me too great to allow because of their basic irreversibility.

            Those who operate day care for infants under 18 or 24 months will be distressed by what I say, I know, and I am sorry for that distress, but I think there are very few who would not agree that for the first year-and-a-half of life an infant belongs with his mother.  Again I think this is something we all know in our hearts and minds and that our common sense tells us, much as we are often forced to ignore and to evade that awareness.  This is the burden I am referring to that we all must carry in pursuing day care for children which we feel basically is not right.

           I will not evade the hard core problem of what to do when it is demanded of us that we provide day care before 18 or 24 months;  we can either do so or go seek another job, which would make us feel better but would not change the situation at the center we would be leaving.  There is only one thing I know to do and that is to get the permission of the powers that be of the center to tell mothers who apply for care under two years, “Yes, I will accept your child and do the best by him that we can, but I would be less than honest if I did not tell you how much better for you and for your child for you to be at home with him or, failing that, to use a home day care program where there would be just one person involved with his care.”  You could add that, if you wish, “I will explain in detail the basis for my suggestion but I do want you to know my point of view.”  I would find the burden we carry easier to endure were I able to speak in such fashion.  I would also be happier if I knew there were better supervision and education for home daycare settings and this is one crucial goal we should always lobby for.

           Let me explicitly address something about mothers that to this point has been implicit.  Daycare is a threat to some mothers in that the diminished number of minutes spent with the child decreases the minutes of relating that stimulate her maternal side.  Said another way, a mother’s chance of entering or maintaining herself in the developmental phase of motherhood is diminished as her stimulation from her child is diminished.  We have, in addition, seen mothers who have brought a toddler to daycare and for the next few years have reacted to and expected of that child as if he were still a toddler, mothers whose development as mothers has been frozen or arrested at that point when their intimate relationship with their child ended.

            How ivory-towered am I in wishing that mothers were never separated from their infants in the first or second year of life?  Now I will take you back to Finland, which of the northern European countries is not alone in paying mothers to stay home the first year of their baby’s life.  Mothers receive from the state their income from the prior year during that first year at home.  This holds true up to about $60,000 a year and above that a certain percentage will be made available.  Had a mother not worked the prior year, she would receive a minimum of just over the equivalent of $6,000.  For the child’s second and third years, the state offers the same $6,000 to stay home with her child and offers three years of job security in addition.  Fathers are not neglected as following the birth of a baby each dad has two weeks fully paid leave to be at home with his family.  But the Finns do something more that is very important and that is every mother can opt to work but three-fourths time for three-fourths pay until her youngest is seven years old.

            These facts from Finland are important as they have evolved by trial and error over the years and really end up with the same conclusions to which our research has led us.  I want to focus a bit on their three-quarters work and pay offer to mothers and try to understand what this is all about.  I think one can recognize that with older children it means that mother can be at home when the children arrive from school and the after-school care programs.  This is an anti-latchkey provision for the older child.  For younger children it means something else and that is that when a mother goes to use daycare for the second year and up, she can be sure that she will turn over her child to just one day care worker whose hours will encompass her three-quarters day; that is, the mother will return to pick up her child from day care before that one worker will have finished her working day.  Just one care provider means a protection for the child from an endless series of providers.  It means a protection for the mother as she will have to report to and hear reports from just one person to stay in full touch with what goes on with her child.  Greatly diminished is the risk of the mother losing touch with her child.  Let me add just one other Finnish touch available for the mother who uses daycare: Each daycare center has a consulting psychologist and social worker on hand to work with the mother if problems arise -- prompt intervention is the best of problem containment.  These consulting professionals are state supplied.

            I mention these aspects of the Finnish situation not just to justify the positions I have taken but for another reason as well and that is to learn from their example how to try to ameliorate the stresses of daycare when we feel too close to the “too great a risk” line.  They are always working to minimize the number of care- providers to whom the mother-child couplet is exposed.  It is best for the child, best for the mother.  Something we could suggest and try to promote for some of the mothers using day care that is too risky is that they seek from their employer the three-fourths time work.  The other point to notice is the availability of professional child development assistance for early intervention.  They do not ask that their directors also be child psychologists, perhaps something we should emulate.

           I think it is important to insert here an observation about the “bottom line,” about economics.  At the end of World War II, Finland had been ravaged by both Russia and Germany, had large areas of their country annexed by Russia, had to assimilate hundreds of thousands of refugees from those areas, had enormous reparations to pay to Russia.  Few countries were in worse straits.  At the end of about one generation, 30 years, Finland had the highest standard of living in Europe.  Their success had many roots, prominent among them being their competent, conscientious, reliable work force.  These character traits are hard to teach, are acquired I believe by identifications with parents, beginning in the earliest mother-child relationship, and it would seem the Finnish investment in their youngest has been handsomely repaid.  Contrast their situation with that reported last June in our local paper where a state-sponsored study found only 14% of Ohio high school graduates acceptable for the work force.  There is no way I can prove I am correct in my thinking about the role of the earliest mother-child relationship, there could be no statistics available for such proof, but common sense seems quite compelling to me.

            Let me review briefly where I think I have gotten to date in my thinking about day care.  I feel our studies show, common sense tells, and northern Europeans know there are certain tasks in personality maturation that are best guided and developed by just one person, the child’s mother, and that if these steps do not unfold properly or fully, a person may emerge unable to cope in our competitive society or, even worse, through violence proneness and drug addiction will for a lifetime be a drain on our society.  It is obvious that all who have day care under two will not end up this way but it is also obvious that there is a serious risk that some will and for those the result is a tragedy for all.  It is on this basis I say the risks seem too great for daycare under two.  This thinking puts the focus clearly on the mother and the importance of her job, makes me want to campaign for so many of the Finnish provisions even if I know my campaign will not succeed in my lifetime.

            Let me try to anticipate some very appropriate criticism that could be made about what I am saying for it will seem to many that I am advocating some very radical and expensive approaches to some societal problems on the flimsiest of evidence.  Where are the supporting statistics and numbers to back up what I am saying?  This is the point at which I want to say some things about research in child development which is, I would suggest, the most complex and difficult field for research.  The reasons for this are fairly straightforward as a child’s evolving development is influenced by innumerable variables which, in addition to their numbers, complicate the picture even further by mutually influencing one another in ever changing patterns and complexities.

            Let me give you just one example of what I mean by telling you about two three-year-old boys each starting their first day care experience in the same excellent daycare center, each about to be exposed supposedly to identical daycare experiences.  I am indebted to Beatrice Griffin from Jewish Day Nursery for the example of the two mothers applying at JDN for their children.  One was in a hurry, asked about fees, hours of operation, availability of busing for her child, registered him, and left in a hurry.  The second mother made it clear from the moment she arrived that she was most ambivalent about the whole procedure, and scornfully asked about Mrs. Griffin’s training and credentials and then explored the same for all the staff.  She wanted to investigate the building and that meant every room and bathroom, the playground, and the kitchen where the cook’s training and credentials came under close scrutiny.  She left without any decision made, but a week later, came back to enroll her child.  Mrs. Griffin then went on to describe what it was like to call each mother to report when the child was ill and had to be taken home.  The first mother was hard to locate at work and, when found, took some minutes to recall just who Mrs. Griffin was.  Once they were connected, she did make appropriate plans for someone to come and pick up the child.  The second mother recognized Mrs. Griffin’s voice before she identified herself, immediately asked if her child were ill, promised to be there in minutes to pick him up.  The point is a simple one.  With the second mother her child was never out of her mind for one moment all day long.  With the first mother it was out of sight, out of mind.  Guess for whom the daycare experience may prove to bring unacceptable risks which would not be true for the other child of the same age?  These two boys would have identical demographic data for any statistical studies of daycare while it is so simply obvious they were headed for different experiences.

            Studies, for example, evaluating the effects of daycare by focusing on a single element -- say of how a child responds to strangers after months of daycare as compared with children not in daycare -- simply make no sense but have been used to extol the virtues of daycare.  In like fashion, the effects of daycare that concern us often do not become manifest until 10 or 15 or more years later.  Another factor that has to be kept in mind is that there are two types of research basically: that which sets out to prove a point as compared to that which seeks to explore an area or topic to learn.  In his book on learning disabilities, Gerald Coles (1987), spoke to this latter point when he wrote that research seeking the biological roots of learning disabilities “has never been a dispassionate examination of a scientific question but rather has been a collection of tracts intent on making the child or his neurology responsible for his difficulties.”

           In this context, there was a fascinating paper early in the summer in the Journal of the American Medical Association (Barnes & Bero, 1998) about passive smoking, the effects of the tobacco smoke you breathe in from someone else’s cigarette.  It seems the literature is quite evenly divided between studies that say passive smoking is not dangerous and studies that show it is dangerous.  The paper I am referring to set out to explore how studies by reliable investigators using carefully controlled techniques could get such diametrically opposed results.  They found that none of the studies showing the dangers of  passive smoking were done by investigators with any connection to the tobacco industry while something like 80% of the studies exonerating passive smoking were done by investigators with direct or indirect support from the tobacco industry.

            What I am trying to communicate is that some areas of research are most difficult to quantify and child development is one of those.  I am suggesting that when you read of research studies so often reported in Time, Newsweek, The Wall Street Journal, or The Plain Dealer, use your common sense, your feelings, your thinking in evaluating those reports.  The prestige of the publication and the prestige of the reporting university or research center should never excuse you from using your own judgement and feeling very safe in doing so.  I was helped in this regard by a wise neurology professor in medical school who told us that in evaluating published research papers always to remember that “paper can never refuse ink.”  In our research we do not usually come out with impressive numbers of children studied but the numbers we have of days of observation of the children we study, the intensity with which they have been followed, are overwhelming and unmatched, quite frankly, almost anywhere in the world.

           Let me move onto the last area I want to address and that is welfare reform, the drive to “get them off welfare” and “to end welfare as we know it.”   As I have not hesitated to be controversial up to now, I am not going to change here.  I will start by acknowledging the self-esteem that emerges from being a successful wage earner and also what some of the day care center directors have taught me and that is that the strict rules of welfare reform with its vouchers and the like have brought reality into many lives where it had not impinged before and that has been beneficial to all, parents and children alike.  I find myself accepting that but I guess I always want to balance the dollars lost to so-called “welfare cheats” with those stolen ultimately from you and me from such as the former head of Blue Cross Blue Shield, the former head of the Physicians Malpractice Insurance Company, and their lawyers.  One type of crook does not excuse another but it seems important to me to keep a sense of perspective in this area.  This the day care center directors did when they had no agonizing concerns about the dollars lost to those on welfare who were cheating but rather were focused primarily on the importance of bringing reality into the lives of those who at their own risk had been  able to avoid it.  So I do see the constructive sides of welfare reform.

            There is, however, another side that causes me distress.  Let me start with an example brought by a participant in one of my consultation groups.  She told of a mother of three whose two-year-old she had just accepted for daycare.  The mother had taken a job at Burger King, three bus rides and ninety minutes from her home.  She had been forced to take this job in order to maintain eligibility for Medicaid and her food stamps.  Her five-year-old son is being taken to school and accepted after school by a neighbor the mom hoped would be reliable.  Her thirteen-year-old daughter had refused any kind of supervision as she had refused to supervise her younger siblings and the worry about her after school under no supervision was real and great.  To get to her job on time, the mom gets up at 6:00 a.m., drops off the younger two boys by 7:00 a.m. to get to work by 8:30.  She leaves work at 4:30 p.m. to get to the daycare center by closing time at 6:00 and is home with the other two by 6:30 when she begins to work as a mother, to make dinner for all.  What will she do in a winter snow storm, when one of the children is ill at school, when a bus breaks down?  This is a mom just recently off drugs and alcohol. How long can she endure the stresses of her work situation before falling back on drugs or alcohol?  And all of this for a job that pays her minimum wage with little or no chance of advancement past that.

           This is all what I call “the cruel hoax.”  The mother is off welfare as they say and is a good statistic in that regard, but what kind of a future lies ahead for her as she joins the workforce?  The healthy part of her for the next many years will be preoccupied with concerns for the safety and welfare of her three children and how long can she endure the schedule and lifestyle forced upon her?  And all this for minimum wage compensation.

            The “cruel hoax” works in another way and that is one perpetuated on you and me, on our society, in the delusion that this bit of welfare reform is reducing the numbers on welfare.  What it is doing is everything it can to develop the next generation of welfare dependent personalities in denying to these three children the attention of the mother they need.  How long before the thirteen-year-old loose on the street is another kind of statistic with a pregnancy?  How much can this exhausted mother give each night to her younger two to help them grow and mature.

            What is wrong with this picture?  It is not hard to know.  The drive to “get them off welfare,” to “change welfare as we know it” forgot about mothers and children’s needs for their mothers and not too many years down the road we will have to pay the price for this forgetting.  Any welfare program that in its dealings with mothers and families does not give first priority to preservation of the mother-child relationship is an exercise in tragic futility.  Of course what I would advocate would cost money but as the TV commercial for the automobile repair man said, “You can pay me now or you can pay me a lot more later on.”  Certainly tax dollars would be at issue raising the cry of “tax and spend” to which I could only reply in this instance with “invest to survive” but I am not sure who would listen.

           What is the problem here?  What I am talking about concerning the role of mothers with their small children is not radical thinking.  I do believe it is just common sense if one pauses for a moment for some quiet reflection.  It is understood in Europe.  What has gone wrong here?

           Once more I find myself addressing sociological problems without any training to do so and once again my excuse will be that I did not ask for these problems to come to me, they just did and I have to do the best I can with them.  It seems to me it all has to do with mothers and how we think and feel about them, how we can or cannot acknowledge their role in life, in our own lives even.  I will bring just two thoughts in this regard, the first a quote from Donald Winnicott’s “The Child, the Family and the Outside World” of 1964:

            I am concerned with the mother’s relation to her baby just before birth and in the first weeks and months after birth.  I am trying to draw attention to the immense contribution to the individual and to society which the ordinary good mother with her husband in support makes at the beginning, and which she does simply through being devoted to her infant.

           Is not the contribution of the devoted mother unrecognized precisely because it is immense?  If this contribution is accepted, it follows that everyone who is sane, everyone who feels himself to be a person in the world, and for whom the world means something, every happy person is in infinite debt to a woman.  At a time in earliest infancy when there was no perception of dependency, we were absolutely dependent.”