Canada’s recent experience with universal government childcare showed that more women entered the workforce after it was enacted, such that 75 percent of children ages 1 through 4 were in non-parental care. While researchers found this did not seem to damage kids’ academics, it drastically damaged their behavior: “the Quebec policy had a lasting negative impact on the non-cognitive skills of exposed children, but no consistent impact on their cognitive skills [which include self-regulation]. At older ages, program exposure is associated with worsened health and life satisfaction, and increased rates of criminal activity. Increases in aggression and hyperactivity are concentrated in boys, as is the rise in the crime rates.” Yes. Government childcare led to more crime.

I’m not saying women should not work. I’m a working mother. I am saying, however, that we need to discuss the social effects of more mothers out of their homes full-time, especially when most women with children would prefer to work part-time. We need to consider that we may be earning more money to pay for the kids’ vacations and piano lessons at the expense of their ability to handle conflict. The more women leave their children to themselves, to loneliness and paid caregivers whom, however kind, simply are not mommy and simply cannot conjure up those natural biological ties, the more this in the aggregate could have devastating social consequences. Several years ago, Mary Eberstat raised questions like this in deeper detail, and backed it up with far more research than I can put into an article.

If so, women need to hear this, and we need to be socially validated in our unpaid but utterly crucial work of passing on and creating self-regulation within our children through thousands of small, and sometimes annoying, interactions no one else can foster. And policymakers need to think about whether, given the drastic increase in what can only be called riots in both impoverished neighborhoods such as Ferguson and tony neighborhoods such as those surrounding the University of Missouri, when separated from mothers into government childcare and preschool programs, the kids will really be alright.