For example, anyone actually charged with the care of little children knows that a sick baby or toddler is a uniquely pitiful thing, in part because such a child is too young to understand why. Yet such natural empathy is not the prism through which the sick child problem in day care is viewed by our advocates. Generally speaking, their response to the sick kids problem has run one of two ways: Either ignore it altogether or rewrite the script so that sicker is actually better.

Thus, in A Mother's Place: Choosing Work and Family Without Guilt or Blame, Susan Chira acknowledges "several studies have also shown that children in day care suffer from more ear infections and illnesses in general," and then brushes it off with "[but] they are hardier when they are older." Susan Faludi in Backlash sounds the same note: "They soon build up immunities." Similarly, when a well-publicized 2002 study showed that babies and toddlers in day care get sick more often than those at home - about twice as many colds, for example - the advocate cheer going up around the country was notably creepy. As one lead researcher explained, this finding "lifts a heavy stone off the backs of guilt-ridden parents who put their children in large day care centers. The benefit to having colds in the toddler years is that kids miss less school later when it counts."

Now step back from this discussion for a moment and ask yourself: If we were talking about anything but day care here, would anyone be caught cheering for the idea that some little children get sick twice as often as others? I think we all know the answer to that one. And that dissonance raises the question of what exactly is going on with this sort of callousness about small children. It is very hard to spend even a day in charge of a sick baby or toddler and be able to accept the Nietzschean line that what does not kill him will make him stronger - in other words, that being sick is good for him. But what if you are not around it, if it has been made someone else's problem? Might you then be a little less tuned in to just how much a sick baby or toddler needs?