From Deprivation to Day Care
In 1950, eminent british psychoanalyst John Bowlby was appointed as a short-term consultant to the World Health Organization on the subject of homeless children in post–World War II Europe. This position proved to be a turning point in his career. Bowlby, who had previously conducted research on the impact of children’s separation from their mothers or mother-substitutes early in life, had a long-standing interest in what he later came to call deprivation.1 Drawing from the available research on children in institutions as well as his own findings, he prepared his report, Maternal Care and Mental Health, published in 1951. It was “essential for mental health,” Bowlby argued, that “the infant and young child should experience a warm, intimate, and continuous relationship with his mother (or mother-substitute) in which both find satisfaction and enjoyment.” If this relationship was absent or insufficient—what Bowlby termed “maternal deprivation”—serious consequences for the child’s future mental health and character development would ensue.2 An adapted version of the report appeared in 1953 as Child Care and the Growth of Love, quickly becoming a best seller, and the volume was reprinted six times within ten years and translated into fourteen languages.3 Bowlby, at the time the deputy director of the Tavistock Clinic in London, became a household name on both sides of the Atlantic, and American newspapers closely followed his research findings.4 Although Bowlby himself had referred to mothers or “mother-substitutes,” his work further perpetuated traditional gender roles. Later critics have characterized Bowlby’s work as a reactionary theory designed to pressure women into staying at home with their children for fear of risking serious health consequences.5 Bowlby’s insistence on the crucial role of mothers while ignoring a whole spectrum of other possible factors led British psychoanalyst and feminist Juliet Mitchell to quip that “evacuee children were ‘maternally deprived’—bombs and poverty and absent fathers didn’t come into it.”6
“Maternal deprivation” rapidly gained currency among American mental health and child development experts. Bowlby’s report had surveyed the work of prominent American researchers, most notably psychoanalytically trained psychiatrists René Spitz and David Levy. The popularization of maternal deprivation in the early 1950s drew further attention to these studies and provided the scientific impetus for subsequent observation studies of infants designed to elucidate the wide-reaching detrimental effects of this form of deprivation.7
Concurrently, concepts of sensory deprivation had increasingly become popular and were used to describe a wide spectrum of phenomena. This focus on the necessity of sensory stimulation for normal early development soon led mental health experts to reexamine theories that highlighted the dangers of maternal deprivation. Experimental psychologists, basing their hypotheses on animal experimentation, questioned the accepted view of mother love as the crucial component in normal infant development. Instead, they proposed that a lack of sensory stimulation was the immediate cause of psychological damage. Conversely, psychoanalytically oriented researchers in the field of maternal deprivation cited findings of sensory deprivation experiments as proof of the necessity of maternal care. Thus blossomed a new cooperation between psychologists and child development experts from entirely different theoretic backgrounds. While many welcomed this interdisciplinary cooperation, other psychoanalytically inclined experts expressed concern at attempts to replace the abstract concept of mothering with specific variables of sensory stimulation. Some researchers viewed the two theories as complementary, commenting on the potential for mutual benefit from reliance on insight gleaned from different theoretical and experimental approaches. In their 1963 book, Growth Failure in Maternal Deprivation, pediatricians Robert L. Patton and Lytt I. Gardner devoted the entire first chapter to the topic of sensory deprivation and its relationship to maternal deprivation, voicing their hope that “scientists in biology and in the behavioral sciences might find useful this study of the organic manifestations of” maternal deprivation, which they called “a special form of sensory deprivation.”8
Here, I analyze the adoption of the basic premises, experimental methods, and terminology of sensory deprivation research into maternal deprivation theory. I examine how leading figures in the field of maternal deprivation—most notably, Mary Ainsworth and René Spitz—gradually accepted the sensory deprivation theory. I then evaluate the practical implications of the interrelations between theories of sensory and maternal deprivation as they are demonstrated in debates over day care in the United States. An economically stratified approach to deprivation emerged—middle-class children in day care programs were seen to be at risk for maternal deprivation, while day care programs targeting low-income and minority children were seen as therapeutic, combating sensory deprivation, and not carrying the risk of maternal deprivation. I conclude by analyzing President Nixon’s 1971 veto of a bill designed to provide universal day care, which exemplifies the tension between maternal and sensory deprivation and demonstrates how these concepts were applied selectively according to race and class. While the following chapters deal with racialized views of deprivation that emerged in the early and mid-1960s, this chapter focuses mainly on socioeconomic biases in the controversy over whether maternal deprivation was simply one form of sensory deprivation or was a unique psychological phenomenon.
Psychologist Mary Salter Ainsworth was one of the most influential figures in maternal deprivation research. After receiving her doctorate from the University of Toronto in 1939, Mary Salter served in the Canadian Women’s Corps, obtaining the rank of major. She then joined the psychology department faculty at her alma mater and pursued research on psychological testing and Rorschach evaluations. Newly married in 1950, she followed her husband, an army veteran and graduate student in her department, to London, where he completed his doctorate. Although Ainsworth’s dissertation had examined children’s sense of security, she had never been particularly interested in psychoanalysis. Yet an advertisement in the London Times led her to a research position at the Tavistock Clinic, where she worked with John Bowlby on a project examining the effects of maternal deprivation. Upon Leonard Ainsworth’s graduation, Mary Ainsworth followed her husband to Uganda, where she spent two years performing observations on mother-infant interactions. In 1955, Leonard Ainsworth’s work took the couple to Baltimore, where Mary Ainsworth worked her way from an adjunct position involving psychological testing and clinical supervision to professor of development psychology at Johns Hopkins University. Following a painful divorce in 1960, Mary Ainsworth never remarried and had no children of her own.9 Much of her remarkable career was devoted to the evaluation of mother-infant relations, and she became a pioneer in the nascent field of attachment theory, examining how the interactions between infants and parents shaped lifelong psychological relations. Ainsworth worked closely with Bowlby throughout her career, considering him a mentor, and shared his perceptions of the necessity of maternal care. The two corresponded and collaborated until Bowlby’s death in 1990, and their letters provide valuable insight into how the main proponents of maternal deprivation viewed the emerging field of sensory deprivation and how this view changed over time.
Iowa-trained psychologist Leon Yarrow was among the first maternal deprivation theorists to address the possible role of sensory deprivation. In 1951, Yarrow had abandoned a promising university career to join the U.S. Children’s Bureau, where he pioneered longitudinal studies on adoption. His work served as the basis for a change in official governmental policy recommendations, favoring placing children for adoption as early as possible, thus minimizing time spent in institutions or foster homes. This interest in the care of orphaned children led Yarrow to the field of maternal deprivation.10 In a 1961 review in the Psychological Bulletin, Yarrow delineated three different types of deprivation that occurred in the institutional setting: “sensory deprivation, social deprivation, and emotional deprivation.” He relied on animal studies to argue that severe impairment could result from a child’s early deprivation of sensory experience. Tying animal studies with observations on institutionalized children, Yarrow argued that even the most “extreme institutional environments” created sensory deprivation to a lesser degree than that described in animal studies. Still, he maintained, “developmental retardation is found, with the extent of retardation corresponding to the degree of sensory deprivation.”11
For Yarrow, sensory deprivation was a major reason why institutional care of young infants should be avoided. Still, he criticized attempts to conflate maternal and sensory deprivation as well as efforts to isolate the components of maternal deprivation into variables of tactile, auditory, and visual deprivation, which he saw as reductionist endeavors that promoted overly simplified interpretations of experimental findings. It was likely, he added, “that not all aspects of the mother-child relationship can be meaningfully reduced to such simple variables.”12 Although Yarrow adopted much of the sensory deprivation language, he still assigned a specific role to the concept of mothering that could not be reduced completely to a form of stimulation.
Ainsworth had mixed feelings about these developments in the field. Although she did not comment directly on Yarrow’s 1961 piece, she had previously commented on Yarrow’s work in her letters to Bowlby. Describing Yarrow’s presentation at the American Psychological Association, she noted that he gave “considerable emphasis to the ‘sensory deprivation’ aspects of the institutional experience with . . . inadequate attention to the fact that it is in interpersonal interaction, especially with the mother, that the infant and young child experiences most of its ‘sensory stimulation.’”13 Ainsworth criticized in even stronger terms the responses of two leading figures in the field of educational psychology, Robert Sears and Joseph McVicker Hunt, whom she claimed
welcomed the divorce of sensory stimulation from the child’s relationship with his mother, as though it were personally satisfactory to think of a component that was free from the sentimental glorification of the child-mother relationship. It seems to me that this, which represents a fairly common viewpoint in American psychology, misses the whole point of trying to understand how it is that the child’s relationship with his mother is so important for his development. When they find a variable such as sensory stimulation–deprivation they say “Aha! Here is something that is important that is impersonal and objective and for which the mother [as] such is not necessary.” Instead it seems to me they should say “Here is a component of the child-mother relationship which we can identify, and which helps us understand why it is that, under usual conditions, maternal care is necessary for health development.” . . . However, I got the impression that Yarrow, Sears and McV. Hunt felt that the sensory deprivation component quite accounted for all instances of impairment of intelligence attributable to separation. And certainly they quite ignore the clinical evidence pointing to the fact that repeated disruptions of the mother-child relationship may lead to very severe disturbances quite in the absence of institutionalization and “sensory deprivation.” I found the whole thing quite discouraging.14
In a later letter to Yarrow, Ainsworth emphasized her preference for conceptualizing the role of maternal care in terms of the mother’s relationship to the child rather than through biological or functional explanations. She was “uncomfortable,” she explained, with Yarrow’s “use of the term ‘stimulation’ when I would prefer the term ‘interaction.’” Still, she conceded that “both the definitions you give of your maternal care variables and your discussion of your findings makes it clear that there is no substantial difference in our viewpoints.” Both agreed that sensory deprivation research was an important component in the evaluation of maternal deprivation.15
While Yarrow and additional psychologists viewed maternal care within both biological and psychological frameworks, others focused solely on mothers’ functional roles. In 1961, psychologist Lawrence Casler published “Maternal Deprivation: A Critical Review of the Literature,” in which he effectively claimed that the detrimental effects attributed to “maternal deprivation” by Spitz, Bowlby, and others were in fact a result of reduced perceptual (or sensory) input. He suggested using “perceptual deprivation” rather than “the too-broad and yet too-specific term, ‘maternal deprivation.’”16 In particular, he argued that it was unlikely that maternal deprivation could occur in children under the age of six months, as a basic level of psychological matureness was necessary for the child to be able to respond to this form of deprivation.”17 Rather, the impediments to psychological and intellectual development that could be seen in institutionalized infants, he argued, resulted from a lack of sensory stimulation. His review extensively cited experiments from the field of sensory deprivation, both in human subjects and in animals.18
Ainsworth considered this review to be “quite horrible.”19 She wrote (but according to her records ultimately did not send) a detailed and highly critical letter to the editor of the monograph series that had published Casler’s piece. Making her disapproval clear, she offered to prepare a monograph in response that would present the research in the field in a “more balanced and less distorted way than Casler presents it.” This, she suggested, would be a reply to those who attempted to “translate maternal deprivation into sensory deprivation.” Ainsworth also suggested examining “Yarrow’s and Casler’s urgings toward redefining ‘maternal deprivation’ as “sensory deprivation.’” She was willing to consider the importance of certain aspects of sensory deprivation within maternal deprivation, she wrote, but was steadfast in her rejection of attempts to redefine maternal deprivation as merely a form of sensory deprivation.20
Although she never prepared this critical review, in her 1962 article, “Deprivation of Maternal Care: Review of Findings and Controversy,” published in a World Health Organization report on maternal deprivation, Ainsworth conceded that only in the early months of life was it “tenable” to argue that the child was suffering from “perceptual” deprivation rather than “maternal deprivation.” At this age, she claimed, “‘perceptual deprivation’ seems equivalent to insufficiency of maternal care.”21 In this manner, Ainsworth turned the equation propounded by Casler and others on its head: Perceptual deprivation was in fact a form of maternal deprivation. In any case, theories of sensory deprivation clearly had pervaded the attachment theorist’s view of maternal deprivation, and Ainsworth was now willing to explore the relevance of sensory deprivation theory to her study of mother-child interaction.
Although she did not perform her own research on sensory deprivation, Ainsworth gradually accepted this theory, participating in conferences on the topic, including a 1963 conference that also featured leading sensory deprivation researchers Donald Hebb and Austin Riesen.22 In 1973, when she was asked to write a book on sensory deprivation (a request she ultimately declined because of time constraints), Ainsworth wrote that her interest in sensory deprivation stemmed from her work on the deprivation of maternal care. She had wanted to write a book on sensory deprivation, she attested, ever since she completed a review of the literature on maternal deprivation in 1962.23
Ainsworth was familiar with ongoing sensory deprivation research. She recommended Philip Solomon, a psychiatrist and leading researcher in the field of sensory deprivation, to an acquaintance who requested a reference for a psychiatrist. She was also on friendly terms with John Zubek, a Winnipeg sensory deprivation researcher, and in 1960 was invited to give a lecture at the University of Manitoba, where Zubek served as head of the psychology department.24
Ainsworth gradually became more open to examining sensory deprivation research and its relevance to her work on maternal deprivation. When a prospective student contacted her in 1965 to inquire about research in early parental deprivation, she suggested either programs carrying out research in sensory deprivation on animals, as at McGill University, or those focusing on cultural deprivation among African American children at the University of Chicago. Her home institution, Johns Hopkins, she explained, had only a small research program on social attachment, and it was not specifically focused on parental deprivation. The alternatives she suggested—sensory deprivation work on animals or cultural deprivation research—demonstrated the interrelations she saw among early childhood maternal or parental deprivation and laboratory research.25
In 1966, Ainsworth first corresponded with psychologist Joseph McVicker Hunt, whose work she had previously criticized for its overemphasis of sensory deprivation and inattention to the role of maternal care. In this letter, she highlighted the interconnections between her research on early infants and Hunt’s research on the role of early experience in development of intelligence. Their work, she suggested, could “considerably overlap in viewpoint and interests.” Her research on maternal deprivation had led her to the same conclusions as Hunt reached: Early experience influenced later intelligence. Not mincing words, she admitted that her previous work on the development of intelligence following maternal deprivation was simply “wrong.” Her new approach, now saturated with biological terms, resembled Hunt’s. “Under circumstance of deprivation,” she wrote, “the infant does not have the experience necessary to develop his sensory-motor schemata in the same way and at the same rate that the average home-reared child has.” Yet as the infant matures, she wrote, “locomotion will develop”—a rather stilted way of saying that the toddler would soon be walking on his or her own. At that point, the child could change his or her environment by moving from one place to another, thereby obtaining the necessary stimulation for development. This letter indicates the influence sensory deprivation theory and terminology had on the development of Ainsworth’s work, leading her to reevaluate her previous ideas and rethink them within a biologically oriented and stimulation-based framework.26
Joseph McVicker Hunt plays with a baby, 1977. Courtesy of University of Illinois Archives, Urbana.
Although it is quite possible that Ainsworth sought to highlight the similarities rather than the differences in approach when corresponding with an eminent biologically oriented psychologist such as Hunt, she told Bowlby of a similar change in her approach. Describing her planned participation in a symposium that she speculated would highlight biological views of development, she added, “In my new frame of mind, this does not dismay me.”27 She had unquestionably modified her early views of the relevance of sensory deprivation to understanding infant development, demonstrating her gradual acceptance of sensory deprivation at as an important theoretical approach.
Austrian-born émigré psychoanalyst René Spitz had a long-standing interest in the dangers of parental separation in early childhood. Well-known today for his early descriptions of the detrimental results of prolonged institutionalization or hospitalization of young infants, Spitz defined a new syndrome, anaclitic depression, that resulted when young infants were separated from their primary caregivers.28 Unlike Ainsworth, Spitz’s profound interest in the role of sensory deprivation was evident from his early writings. Spitz referred to perceptual and motor deprivation in his famed paper on “hospitalism” (a syndrome of prolonged institutionalization), which he published in 1945, long before sensory deprivation had permeated psychiatric discourse. In 1955, Spitz was invited to participate in the Regional Research Conference of the American Psychiatric Association, held in Montreal. He and Donald Hebb shared a session titled “Some After-Effects of Social Isolation in Animal and Man.” Hebb delivered a talk on dogs reared in social isolation; Spitz spoke of the “somatic consequences of emotional starvation in infants.”29 In preparation for this talk and for his meeting with Hebb, Spitz read a number of articles by Hebb and his colleagues and had his assistant abstract and summarize Hebb’s major publications.30 Spitz opened his talk by stating that he had long followed Hebb’s work, emphasizing that Hebb’s experimental findings confirmed his own work. The idea that a psychoanalyst’s research on mother-infant interactions could be empirically confirmed by experimental studies on human and animal subjects in laboratory conditions is not self-evident. Rather, it illustrates Spitz’s acceptance of Hebb’s experimental methodology and the close relations Spitz believed existed between maternal and sensory deprivation.31 As a participant on the same panel as Hebb and particularly in his home city, Montreal, Spitz would certainly have felt compelled to highlight the importance of Hebb’s work. Yet that Spitz would cite this work as evidence of the validity of his psychoanalytic research indicates a far greater acceptance of the relevance of sensory deprivation theory than would have been necessitated by standards of professional courtesy.
Indeed, Spitz saw many parallels between sensory deprivation research and his own work. Not addressing sensory deprivation was even a point of critique when he evaluated the works of his psychoanalyst colleagues.32 In 1964, he claimed that “in the human infant, emotional deprivation without sensory and experimental deprivation is not possible,” thus arguing that every case of maternal deprivation would necessarily have a component of sensory deprivation.33 For Spitz, unlike Ainsworth, it was not a question of accepting sensory deprivation and its relevance for maternal deprivation; he viewed maternal and sensory deprivation as inherently linked.
Both Ainsworth and Spitz, who had pivotal roles in the development of seminal theories regarding the implications of maternal deprivation, saw the development of sensory deprivation theories as complementary to their approaches. Insights from sensory deprivation studies were readily incorporated into their thinking, fostering a broad interpretation of what the concept of childhood deprivation implied and what components were necessary for intellectual and psychological development. Maternal deprivation was seen as inextricably tied to sensory deprivation.
This merging of theories of maternal and sensory deprivation yielded interdisciplinary interpretations as researchers attempted to subsume the findings of sensory deprivation experiments into a psychoanalytic framework. Anthropologist Ashley Montagu suggested that “if we massage the skin in infancy, it may later be unnecessary for a physician to massage his psyche.”34 This viewpoint demonstrates the broad interpretations of sensory deprivation research and how it was viewed as salient to understanding a wide range of phenomena. Indeed, University of California at Los Angeles psychiatrist Stanley Cohen, basing his conclusions on a review of sensory deprivation experiments on animals, suggested adding to the Freudian stages of development a supplementary cutaneous stage in which all stimulus was transmitted through the skin. This suggestion, made in all seriousness, demonstrates that sensory deprivation research was seen as highly relevant for understanding psychoanalysis and was readily adopted and transferred into psychoanalytic discourses.35
The interface between theories of sensory and maternal deprivation gave rise to practical interventions. Casler, who saw maternal deprivation as simply one case of sensory deprivation, devised three experimental interventions examining the role of specific forms of stimulation.36 In a study examining the effects of extra tactile stimulation on institutionalized infants, the impersonal language Casler employed is striking: “Two young women, designated hereafter as ‘handlers,’” he explained, “were hired to administer the tactile stimulation.”37 Designed as a case-control intervention, the “handlers” would provide the children in the case group with two ten-minute periods of “additional tactile stimulation” while saying “Hello, Baby” once every sixty seconds. The control group received only the greeting, without the tactile stimulation. This greeting was delivered “in a neutral tone and without smiling” to “minimize the possibility that the subject would respond to ‘affection’ rather than to skin contact.”38 The results indicated, according to Casler, that the babies who received extra stimulation functioned at a higher level and scored higher on tests evaluating their language development and their personality characteristics.39 As a result of his findings, Casler argued that if satisfactory sensory stimulation could be provided in institutions, “there is reason to ask whether mother love remains a variable of importance in infant development.”40 Thus the replacement of the concept of maternal deprivation by sensory deprivation led to the development of specific interventions, described in this case as “extra handling” of infants.
Within a few years, theories of sensory deprivation supplemented and even replaced those of maternal deprivation. The interface between these two theories gained particular significance in the debate over child day care throughout the 1960s. Theories of deprivation, child development theories, public policy, and American politics all converged in the contentious discussion of child care arrangements.41 With the ever-increasing rise in women’s employment, suitable child care became a necessity. Experts in child development warned of the substandard conditions available to some children whose mothers worked and who were left with older siblings or neighbors or in understaffed and unqualified group homes. During World War II, when women were employed in war-related industries, descriptions of children left in parked cars while their mothers worked long hours in factories aroused public concern. In 1942, under the Lanham Act, the government allocated funds for the care of children whose mothers were engaged in wartime industries. Matching state funds, federal money supported local child care centers, which opened in forty-seven states. Under severe time and budgetary constraints, most centers were of questionable educational quality, but they at least answered the needs of working mothers. Yet the end of the war led to the abrupt end of federal funding for child care, and few facilities subsequently were available for infants and toddlers.42
New trends in child development theory led experts to underscore the psychological and intellectual benefits of early child educational programs. Furthermore, descriptions of the highly effective Soviet educational system, which began with very young children and molded productive and precocious schoolchildren, led Cold War American child development experts to wonder whether waiting to begin formal education with kindergarten placed Americans at an educational disadvantage.43
Yet alongside this surge of interest in day care, the threat of “maternal deprivation” and animosity toward maternal employment still dampened interest in early child education. Child care scholar Sonya Michel has argued that the most vehement opposition to both maternal employment and the establishment of day care facilities was voiced by psychologists.44 The research by Bowlby, Spitz, and others on the dangers of maternal deprivation had in fact examined the detrimental effect of prolonged separation from the mother combined with institutionalization, often in conditions that provided very little beyond food and shelter. Yet their findings were seen as applicable to all forms of maternal separation, regardless of length or alternative caring arrangements provided. Many observers viewed maternal deprivation as a real threat even in the case of short and reversible separations between children and their mothers. These psychological theories of maternal deprivation were used to encourage young mothers to stay at home.45
Most child development experts envisioned a mother caring for her young children in her own home as the ideal situation and consequently saw maternal employment as a sign of pathology, either sociocultural (poverty required the mother to work) or psychological (for middle-class mothers). Women who worked were seen as having psychological difficulties in accepting their natural social role. Psychologically compelled to compete with their male counterparts—suffering from “penis envy” or sublimating their personal frustrations—working mothers were subjected to a variety of unflattering interpretations.46 Mental health experts put much effort into elucidating those personality characteristics that led mothers to choose to work, a choice that clearly was not seen as self-explanatory.47 As a result, day care was seen as a “problem service,” provided for children of working mothers in low-income homes or prescribed by social workers for children from inadequate homes. Such children were removed from their homes for certain hours each day, regardless of their mothers’ employment status.48
The question of deprivation played a pivotal role in the public and professional debate on the merits of day care and the different sectors for whom it would be beneficial. On the one hand, day care programs were designed to provide children from low-income families with the stimulation they lacked in their impoverished home environments. On the other hand, maternal deprivation theorists expressed their worries about separating children from their mothers. These perceptions were closely tied to race and class. Low-income and minority children were seen to benefit from the separation from their mothers and the placement in day care programs, while middle-class children were seen to be at risk for maternal deprivation. Sensory deprivation theories were also invoked in the debate over cultural deprivation and remedial education, as will be seen in the following chapter.
By the early 1960s, as women rallied for equal rights and opportunities, middle-class women were touting child care arrangements as a means to ensure professional advancement. Faced with the inevitability of increasingly large numbers of children requiring care outside of their homes as American society seemed poised on the brink of social change, child development experts altered their perceptions of child care to fit the times. These experts gradually attempted to reframe day care programs no longer as solely custodial solutions but instead as conferring developmental benefits. Looking back, child psychologist Bettye Caldwell and pediatrician Julius Richmond recalled that “during the late 1950s and early 1960s a sure path to ostracism in the field of early childhood education was to emphasize attendance at nursery school as an influence on intellectual development.”49 By the mid-1960s, however, early childhood education was widely accepted as having significant developmental and psychological benefits. These benefits, however, were seen to be mainly applicable to low-income and minority children. Child care historian Elly Singer has claimed that while the benefit in terms of cognitive development was emphasized in evaluations of child care programs for children from low-income families, studies of child care for middle-class children focused on the negative emotional effects of separation from their mothers.50 This discrepancy can be understood through the differential interpretations of sensory and maternal deprivation according to class and race. In an article published in a 1963 World Health Organization review of child care centers, Julius Richmond, who later became the director of Head Start and served as the U.S. surgeon general, provided a historical overview of how sensory deprivation research had led to a reevaluation and reframing of maternal deprivation theory and argued that through careful design, maternal deprivation could be avoided when providing day care for young children.51 By the middle of the decade, however, the emphasis changed from how to avoid the deprivation that might be caused by day care to how day care could counter the deprivation that afflicted children from minority and low-income homes.
One of the earliest remedial interventions was designed by Caldwell and Richmond, both of whom were at the State University of New York in Syracuse at the time. This early childhood enrichment program, which opened its doors in 1964, was designed “to develop powers of sensory and perceptual discrimination, an orientation toward activity, and the feeling of mastery and personal accomplishment.” Focusing on children from low-income homes, the program later served as the model for Head Start.52 In their eight-page description of their proposed program, the words “deprived” and “deprivation” appear thirteen times, referring to sensory deprivation, cultural deprivation, and maternal deprivation. The program targeted children from low-income homes with working mothers and described those children as deprived. There was no mention of the children’s ethnic background. The authors attempted to distinguish between the deprivations that already afflicted the children (sensory deprivation, environmental impoverishment) and maternal deprivation, which, they contended, was not an inevitable result of the intervention. “The basic hypothesis to be tested,” Caldwell and Richmond explained, was “that an appropriate environment can be programmed which will offset any developmental detriment associated with maternal separation and possibly add a degree of environmental enrichment frequently not available in families of limited social, economic, and cultural resource.”53 Thus, the authors in fact proposed that the benefits of environmental enrichments that would compensate for deprived homes would outweigh the potential risk of separating children from their mothers.
Describing the early results of the Syracuse Children’s Center, Caldwell and Richmond argued that “inadequate sensory input during the early years is strongly implicated as one of the factors involved in the early learning deficit so often shown by the child who grows up in an environment of poverty.” Accordingly, efforts were made “to provide variety in intensities of sensory input, color, shape, texture, sound patterns, etc.” Even the necessity of maintaining order within the child care center was ascribed to sensory theory: “The maintenance of order is an essential aspect of the sensory environment and is crucial to help the child distinguish figure from background, particularly for the child whose home environment may be somewhat crowded or even chaotic.”54 The need for an orderly environment as a value in itself apparently was not sufficiently self-evident, and the authors relied instead on deprivation theory to highlight its importance. Caldwell and her student collaborators argued in a later article that “we have offered environmental enrichment, and we have shown that it is possible to do this without producing the classical picture of maternal deprivation.”55 This polarization of sensory deprivation (the target of the intervention) and maternal deprivation (not an inevitable side effect of the separation) is characteristic of descriptions of interventions designed for children from low-income families during this era.
Caldwell elsewhere argued that the “optimal environment” for young infants would be in their own homes, “in the context of a warm, continuous emotional relationship with his own mother under conditions of varied sensory input.” Yet not all mothers, Caldwell continued, were capable of providing the care and stimulation young infants needed. Lamenting the absence of a “literacy test for motherhood,” she cited researchers who had found evidence of inadequate parenting abilities among low-income mothers. Early intervention programs provided what she described as the “professionalization of the mother-substitute” role. By providing a surrogate mother alongside adequate stimulation, the early intervention program headed by Richmond and Caldwell would counter sensory deprivation without leading to maternal deprivation.56
In a special 1965 issue of the journal Child Welfare devoted to the question of day care, a program director at a child day care facility in New York argued that the separation of children from their mothers was not necessarily harmful. He went so far as to venture that perhaps “day care can offer something valuable to children because they are separated from their parents?”57 Another article in the same issue described a “day care service that is perceived and operated as a social service for parents and children of low socioeconomic status.” This service was provided to children “whose family situations do not contribute to their best interests.” The article made no reference to maternal deprivation but included detailed descriptions of the interventions designed to offset cultural deprivation, including linguistic learning, development of perception, conceptualization, and self-identification.58 Thus, the separation itself from the home and the low-income working mother was seen as therapeutic rather than pathogenic. Deprivation was depicted as the target of the intervention rather than an unwanted outcome of the separation of children from their mothers. Although the discussion of maternal separation made no specific mention of race, the article was based on the work at Seven Hills Neighborhood Houses, an inner-city housing agency that served mainly African Americans and migrants from the Appalachian area.59
Many educators at this time held that children from different socioeconomic backgrounds had different needs. This distinction was made abundantly clear in an article by Eleanor Hosley, executive director of the Cleveland Day Nursery Association, a nonprofit early child care association that had been established in 1882. Hosley described the different groups of children that could be observed at the day care centers. Children of working mothers “must spend” most of their waking hours in a day care center and thus “desperately need the enriching educational experiences that might be expected to be provided by their mother could she be with them.” Thus, the day care center would provide compensation for the time that children of working mothers spent away from them. In contrast, the child “who lives in a city slum with crowds of people who have neither the time nor the knowledge to devote to his special needs also requires an enriched background, whether or not his mother has employment.” Finally, children of the rich “whose parents are constantly on the go” also required such attention, and “therefore the process of meeting the needs of the culturally deprived preschool child from low-income areas involves the same basic essentials as the education of the 3- and 4-year-olds of more privileged background.”60 Although the author attested to the similarity of the needs of children from different socioeconomic strata, the subtext of her description was that some children needed compensation for being separated from their parents, while others should be separated from their parents as a form of therapeutic intervention. There was no mention of race; furthermore, when Hosley later mentioned race in the article, she did so to draw attention to the devastating effects of discrimination on children’s self-esteem.61 Yet the description of the “slum” children living in poverty in inner-city Cleveland, alongside the fact that the day care program for low-income children served a classroom that was 90 percent African American, left little room for doubt about the subtext.62 For Hosley, removing children of color from their inadequate home environments was therapeutic in itself, regardless of whether or not their mothers were employed.
These comparisons between the needs of low-income and middle-class children appeared in many publications on early child care. Menninger Clinic psychologist Lois Murphy described middle-class children as often being “over-mothered and overstimulated,” while mothers of deprived children cannot “provide the stimulation that most middle-class children receive. . . . [C]onversation may be squelched and curiosity discouraged.” The day care consultant’s role was to evaluate the child’s background and determine the form of intervention needed for the individual child.63
As late as 1975, by which time early child care had gained widespread acceptability and no longer was recommended solely for children of low-income families, an article in the American Journal of Orthopsychiatry was wary of the possible adverse effects of day care on middle-class children. The author argued that just because children from impoverished environments were not adversely affected by full-time day care did not mean that the same held true for children “from more stimulating middle-class homes” since the “nature of the mother-child relationship and the development of competence in infancy is known to differ across socioeconomic levels.”64 This distinction between the different needs of children of different socioeconomic levels and the role accorded to day care for each group—therapeutic for low-income families, depriving for the middle class—persisted and had a lasting influence on the development of child care programs.
While some early child care experts attempted to distinguish between maternal deprivation, a phenomenon used nearly exclusively to describe middle-class children separated from their mothers, and sensory deprivation, which afflicted lower-class children who remained at home with their mothers, others attempted to conflate the two concepts. Some psychologists sought to depict the mother as the mediator of all forms of deprivation, maternal and sensory. Early childhood educators David Weikart and Dolores Lambie created the Ypsilanti Home Teaching Project, which involved sending teachers “into the homes of disadvantaged families to provide a training program for the mother and a tutoring program for the preschool child.” Approximately 75 percent of the participating families were white. The researchers examined the different characteristics of the mothers participating in the program, who were rated by the participating teachers by what the authors described as a “general ‘good-bad’ dimension.” The authors concluded that “it is not social-economic status that determines cognitive deprivation but lack of warmth and verbal communication by the mother.”65 In the face of life’s adverse circumstances, the mother was credited for providing an adequate environment. Yet in cases when the creation of such an adequate environment was not feasible as a consequence of poverty, illness, insufficient opportunities, and lack of support, the mother was at fault. A “good” mother would have been able to create the necessary surroundings for the child’s optimal development. Similarly, Lois Murphy propounded a “concept of vulnerability” that took into account both socioeconomic status and “adequacy” of mothering. According to her classification, “high risk mothers” were those who suffered from “sensory defects, deficiencies of strength, energy, or physical resources, as well as apathy, depression, extreme passivity, excessive lability, and marked irritability or hostility.” These inadequate mothers were depicted as suffering from deficiencies of every kind, from sensory deficits to deficits of psychological and physiological abilities. In this case, not only were children from low-income homes viewed as deprived but their mothers too were conceptualized through a framework highlighting their lacks and deficiencies.66
Many psychologists accorded mothers a central role in the prevention of deprivation. Ainsworth and her former student Silvia Bell depicted mothers as the mediators of deprivation or of adequate development. While Ainsworth and Bell conceded that the home conditions associated with “socioeconomic deprivation” detrimentally affected cognitive development, such conditions were seen as secondary to adequate mothering: A “harmonious infant-mother relationship can act as a buffer protecting a child from their detrimental effect, and, in fact is the single most important factor alleviating socioeconomic disadvantage.”67
At some level, this approach empowered low-income mothers, who were seen as potentially competent and responsible for the fate of their children; however, it also reinterpreted the results of the detrimental effects of poverty and lack of opportunities as consequences of maternal behavior. Thus, the effects of poverty were transposed into a psychological discourse, shifting the responsibility from society or the government to the individual mother. Subsequent interventions focused not on ameliorating the dismal living conditions of these impoverished families, creating job opportunities, and providing governmental assistance but rather on educating mothers to act more effectively as buffers against the influence of adverse life circumstances.
The practical implications of this approach were the components of in-home interventions designed to train mothers to better stimulate their children. Such programs sent educators into the homes of low-income families, teaching deprived mothers to mitigate the effects of deprivation on their children.68
Some child development researchers compared the educational and developmental role of the mother to that of the day care teacher. Middle-class mothers were described as spontaneously acting like teachers in child-centered nursery schools, turning their homes into learning environments. Conversely, other researchers argued that an “ideal day care program” provided child rearing equivalent to that provided by active, middle-class mothers.69 This was sometimes viewed as a form of compensation for inadequate mothering. Psychologist Lois Murphy wrote that the “kind of things a ‘good’ mother does with a year-old baby may be helpful for these children [from “deprived” backgrounds] at a much older age.”70 Having been deprived of a good mother in infancy, these children could enjoy the substitute maternal care provided by nursery school teachers.
Implicitly or sometimes quite openly, these child development experts claimed that preschool offered no developmental benefits to middle-class children beyond providing custodial solutions when the mother was unavailable to care for her children. In contrast, removing lower-class children from their impoverished surroundings and placing them in day care facilities could be seen as the equivalent to placing such children with the middle-class mothers they so lacked and thus instilling in them the values and care they were deprived of at home.71 Hence, while emphasizing the role of early child care in promoting intellectual development was no longer “a sure path to ostracism,” its benefits were mainly viewed as applying to children from low-income homes.72 Middle-class children still risked the detrimental effects of separation from their mothers, who remained the ultimate ideal source of education and stimulation.
Government committees evaluating child care programs in the mid- and late 1960s sought the opinions of experts in the field of maternal deprivation and child development. In 1968, Lyndon Baines Johnson appointed the President’s Commission on Income Maintenance Programs. Chaired by business leader Ben Heineman, the commission was designed to evaluate possible welfare reform strategies.73 The initial prospect of an income maintenance program received much support on the political left, whose members did not believe, as conservative critics suggested, that a guaranteed income was incompatible with the ideal of individual advancement through hard work and education. Rather, income maintenance proponents touted such a program as a way to supplement low wages and thereby assist low-paid workers in rising from poverty. The commission set out to examine how income maintenance could be compatible both with encouraging individuals to work and with providing a safety net for the working poor. One of the questions the commission addressed was who would be required to work to be eligible for government benefits. Requiring mothers of young children to seek employment would clearly necessitate an overreaching reform of day care services. Thus, Dr. Iris Rotberg, a specialist in education policy and commission staff member, surveyed leading psychologists, including Ainsworth, for their opinion on the widespread implementation of early day care programs.74 Ainsworth replied in detail, distinguishing between day care programs designed to take care of children of working mothers and those designed to “provide stimulation to intellectual development to infants and young children in disadvantaged segments of the population.” She provided a critical overview of the current approach to early child care, which was designed “to supplement family care and to provide the stimulation the child lacks and home,” arguing that “many experts on preschool education fear that this kind of emphasis might very well do damage through a lop-sided emphasis on cognitive development—over-stimulation, etc.” As opposed to this “new-fangled” approach to day care, which emphasized sensory stimulation, Ainsworth described the “more old-fashioned notion of day care,” which was to “simply to look after the children of working mothers.” In this case, Ainsworth warned, it was necessary to attempt to “minimize the effects of deprivation (whether this is considered to be ‘maternal deprivation’ or deprivation of stimulation),” which could be analogized to the experience of infants in long-term residential facilities, by means of adequate staffing and individual attention. Distinguishing between the two different purposes of day care, Ainsworth added that to her knowledge, “no one was bold enough to propose removing children from adequate homes in order to give them whatever advantages day care of an enlightened kind might have.”75
Thus Ainsworth distinguished between remedial day care programs, which were potentially useful for children from deprived homes regardless of maternal employment, and programs targeting nondeprived children of working mothers, which should use adequate staffing to avoid maternal deprivation. Rotberg confided in Ainsworth that she suspected “that in the real world any extensive or broad based day care system could not be staffed with perceptive, stable and interested caretakers” such as those provided in “model” programs. After requesting input from a number of leading psychologists and child development experts, Rotberg ultimately recommended that the criterion of employment be excluded when determining the eligibility of mothers of young children for public assistance, a recommendation adopted by the Income Maintenance Commission.76 Requiring women to work and providing the day care facilities to enable them to do so were not steps the commission was willing to condone. The report stated that stipulating the provision of day care on maternal employment or training was “costly, narrowly conceived, and coercive.”77
Following the distinction Ainsworth had suggested, the report compared “purely custodial care” with childhood enrichment, reaching the same conclusion Rotberg had articulated in her letter to Ainsworth. Developing a real enrichment program with a satisfactory adult-to-child ratio would be too great a challenge. The report concluded that if day care was regarded as an “important child development opportunity,” it should be offered universally as an extension of public education and not as a method to “coerce” the “poor mother to work regardless of their skills, abilities and desires.”78
The commission recommended the creation of a national income supplement program. It would provide a base minimum income, which would be reduced by fifty cents for each dollar of income from other sources, thus providing an incentive for participants to continue working.79 The commission did not complete its evaluation until 1969, and the new president, Richard Nixon, partially adopted its recommendations in the Family Assistance Plan (FAP). The FAP, announced in 1969, was designed to guarantee the indigent a fixed income level and would require work from all but mothers of small children. Responding to growing dissatisfaction with the Aid to Families with Dependent Children Act, which provided benefits to single mothers, it is ironic that Nixon ultimately proposed a welfare reform that promised a guaranteed income to all. Particularly at a time when the public was deeply dissatisfied with antipoverty measures, which were often seen as perpetuating dependency and being “abused” by African Americans, Nixon’s FAP might seem surprising. Yet as Marisa Chappell has argued, this plan in fact embodied a deeply conservative view of the family, designed to strengthen the position of the male breadwinner by rewarding work rather than penalizing it through reduced benefits and to reduce the incentive for single mothers to work.80 Severely criticized by both liberals and conservatives, the bill was allowed to disappear quietly in 1972, avoiding controversy in an election year.81 Work requirement for welfare eligibility did not resurface for more than four decades, until the passage of President Bill Clinton’s overarching welfare reform, the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, which contained strict work requirements, including for mothers of young children.82
In 1971, President Nixon vetoed the Economic Opportunity Amendments, which were designed to serve as an extension of the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 and included the establishment of a comprehensive child development program that would have served as the legal basis for providing universal day care.83 Nixon criticized the entire package but found the Child Development Act “the most deeply flawed provision of this legislation,” condemning its “fiscal irresponsibility, administrative unworkability, and family-weakening implications.” Under pressure from conservative politicians and activists, Nixon instead approved extensive tax deductions for child care expenses, demonstrating what has been termed a “hidden welfare” policy.84
This policy of direct provision only for the neediest people while providing tax benefits for the middle class has been revised numerous times but nevertheless still characterizes the current state of U.S. funding for child care. Currently, while most mothers of young children of preschool age are employed, the nation has no universal state-sponsored system of preschool child care such as exists in Australia, France, Japan, or the Scandinavian countries.85 Children from low-income families are eligible for federally subsidized care, while middle- and upper-class families benefit from indirect support in the form of tax rebates and deductions.86 At first look, this differential system might seem surprising. Since both child development experts and politicians held that early child care was beneficial, rallying behind programs such as Head Start, it would seem logical that policymakers would argue that such care should be available to all. Yet, as David Rothman has shown, many federal programs developed in the 1960s and early 1970s that might have been expected to raise awareness to the necessity of universal access to certain services in fact achieved the opposite effect.87 Rather than questioning the wisdom of minimizing government involvement and maximizing individual choice and the free market, certain exceptions further crystallized the reliance on these same principles. For example, the decision to provide funding for all dialysis patients by federal law in 1972 did not promote more awareness of other catastrophic illnesses in which universal health coverage might be warranted.88 Similarly, the acceptance that early child care could be beneficial for intellectual and psychological development did not lead to the conclusion that it should be available to all. Class and race-specific interpretations of deprivation helped present early child care as an exception to the rule of minimal government intervention and free-market exchange of services but did not lead people to question whether these principles should be in play in the debate over early education.
The 1971 Child Development Act had originated from two separate bills developed by Senator Walter Mondale, a Minnesota Democrat, and Representative John Brademas, a Democrat from Indiana. As the name implies, the bill highlighted the developmental benefits afforded by early education, modeling itself after the perceived success of Project Head Start. The Mondale-Brademas proposal was unique in that it depicted early child care as providing developmental benefits rather than as solely a custodial solution. Accordingly, it sought to confer this developmental benefit universally, not only to children from low-income homes. The bill would have provided federally subsidized child care to middle-class families on the basis of a sliding-scale fee system. At first, this proposal garnered bipartisan support, as liberal-leaning Senate Republicans such as New York’s Jacob Javits and Pennsylvania’s Richard Schweiker joined to cosponsor the bill. Furthermore, the bill’s supporters depicted it as complementing the Nixon-backed FAP, providing the infrastructure of quality child care necessary to enable welfare reform that encouraged maternal employment. The bill eventually gained cosponsorship from 120 House members, approximately a third of them Republicans. Yet negotiations to accommodate the demands of community leaders and feminist activists invested in a community-action structure that would maximize local governance and minimize federal oversight led to the insertion of community-action principles in the bill. Much of the political wrangling centered on the level at which programs would receive direct federal support: The government preferred to award funds to states and large institutions, while local activists pushed to allow grants to small grassroots groups. The proposal originally provided funding primarily at the state level but allowed cities with populations above five hundred thousand to apply for autonomous child care systems; community activists, however, negotiated the threshold downward to five thousand, effectively bypassing state involvement and closely aligning the plan with the Great Society’s community action programs. Conservatives as well as many liberals worried that these changes would prove structurally unwieldy. Furthermore, as the FAP fell out of favor among conservative politicians, conservative support waned for a bill depicted as FAP’s auxiliary child care program.89 The community action aspect of the bill alienated Republican supporters, who viewed these principles as radical and reeking of socialism. Particularly in light of the urban race riots of the mid- and late 1960s, community action programs had become anathema to conservative politicians, who accused activists of inciting violence and disorder. Thus, the rejection of the Child Development Act also formed part of the backlash against Johnson’s Great Society programs and the principle of “maximum feasible participation.”90
In an already contentious political atmosphere, including a debate over Nixon’s renewed diplomatic relations with China, which aroused conservative wrath, the Child Development Act was highly controversial. As the bill’s Republican supporters distanced themselves from the final proposal, Nixon faced an extremely vocal opposition. An orchestrated letter-writing campaign warned Nixon against destroying the American family.91 Conservative pundits portrayed this bill as an attempt to “Sovietize” American society—and in particular, vulnerable children—by providing collective group care and weakening American family values.92 While the right wing fought against the bill, activists who highlighted its community action aspect led more mainstream groups to lose interest in the support. Although the National Organization of Women had originally been a staunch supporter of universal day care as a means to promote mothers’ rights, this influential group was marginalized in a debate that became transformed into a power struggle between two extremes.93
Nixon’s veto of the Child Development Act after his previous public support for more accessible child care clearly reflected the political pressures exerted on the president as well as his personal preferences and biases. Child care was “ok for social workers,” he stated bluntly in private meetings, but constituted “bad politics.”94 When it became clear that the FAP proposal was doomed to fail, Nixon lost interest in child care reform. He had no desire to provide middle-class children with what was touted as a developmental benefit: His primary interest had been in providing a custodial solution to encourage the employment of low-income mothers.95 Never an outspoken advocate of women’s rights, Nixon’s views of day care were similar to those he held on abortion: Both should be available to poor women in dire straits but should not be seen as a universal right designed to promote women’s individual freedom.96
Although liberal backers of Project Head Start had initially worried that the Republican president would erode the program’s political backing, Nixon had reaffirmed his belief in compensatory education as a means by which to target perceived deprivation. In a 1969 message to Congress on the antipoverty programs, Nixon argued that “so crucial is the matter of early growth that we must make a national commitment to providing all American children an opportunity for healthful and stimulating development during the first five years of life.” This commitment, according to Nixon, was exemplified in his controversial decision to move Project Head Start from the Office of Economic Opportunity to the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare.97 Many child development experts criticized this decision, as the program’s supporters feared that the move would “emasculate the concept of comprehensive child development programs,” changing the focus from a comprehensive outlook on the child’s home and community to a narrow view of education.98 Nixon’s wording clearly echoed deprivation-based approaches, as he referred to the necessity of stimulation during childhood and added that “many of the problems of poverty are traceable directly to early childhood experience,” a view shared by many early educators and mental health professionals.99
Nixon made specific reference to this earlier commitment in his 1971 veto, emphasizing that he was not shirking his responsibility to provide early childhood education by rejecting the proposal for universal child care. The Child Development Act, he argued, went “far beyond what this administration envisioned.” Nixon accepted the need to provide day care “to enable mothers, particularly those at the lowest income levels, to take full-time jobs.” Furthermore, “the protection of children from actual suffering and deprivation,” he argued, was an “imperative.” These needs, however, were already seen as sufficiently addressed by Project Head Start, the Social Security Act, and child health and preventive care through Medicaid. For nondeprived children, however, the proposed bill had dangerous implications, diminishing “both parental authority and parental involvement with children” and “altering the family relationship” by working against efforts to bring “the family together.” Thus, while day care provided an environment that enhanced growth and development and was presented as a positive service with many health and cognitive benefits, it offered these benefits only for lower-class children. Nixon held the risks of diminishing familial authority, separating children from parents, and reconfiguring the family structure as too great for children from middle-class families. When child care arrangements for middle-class children were necessary, Nixon believed, the federal government should play only a limited part: The “Federal Government’s role wherever possible should be one of assisting parents to purchase needed day care services in the private, open market, with Federal involvement in direct provision of such services kept to an absolute minimum.” This limited role contrasted starkly to the federal involvement deemed necessary for children eligible for Head Start—children from culturally and ethnically diverse and low-income backgrounds. For them, federal involvement was seen as beneficial.100
Middle-class mothers were perceived as choosing to take on employment and consequently were expected to make private arrangements for child care.101 In contrast, children from low-income families were held to have an acute need for early childhood education, a need that the president believed the federal government had both an obligation and a clear incentive to fulfill. For middle-class children, however, early day care was seen to be risky, an unacceptable meddling in normative family life. Nixon’s dual approach to day care—positive for the deprived levels of society but dangerous and depriving for the middle class—demonstrates the tension between theories of maternal and sensory deprivation. Concerned citizens, child development experts, politicians, and even the president believed that compensatory day care programs were necessary for children from low-income or “deprived” homes. Yet in the case of an adequate home, day care centers were seen as serving at best a custodial function and as potentially harmful, separating children from adequate mothers.
By the early 1960s, a decade after the term “maternal deprivation” was first coined, authors examining maternal deprivation dedicated a substantial proportion of their publications to the interrelations between sensory and maternal deprivation. Yet this discussion did not remain solely theoretical. The tension between these two concepts shaped the discourse over day care in the United States. Although it would be a stretch to claim that the entire debate over day care can be reduced to these two concepts, their selective application to families of differing socioeconomic strata provides a useful starting point for a historical understanding of America’s lack of a coherent approach to child care.
Furthermore, this examination of the debate over day care exemplifies the connections between the expert discourse of child development professionals and public policy. While policymakers were certainly influenced by research carried out by child development experts, prevailing stereotypes of both lower-class and middle-class mothers as well as researchers’ personal views on how mothers should raise their children influenced presuppositions and research hypotheses. Theories of sensory deprivation (and later cultural deprivation) were invoked in derogatory descriptions of low-income mothers and were put to use in advocating selective separation of children from their inadequate mothers to provide necessary components that were seen to be missing. Similarly, maternal deprivation theories were invoked to sway young middle-class mothers to stay at home with their children, instilling a dread of separation from the child for fear of creating irreversible deficiencies. Yet in both cases, the focus was on what children lacked rather than on their strengths, capabilities, or singularities, demonstrating how deeply ingrained the deprivation model had become.