And just as some people have managed to find "good news" in the increase in sick kids, so, too, has there been no lack of advocates who give a thumbs-up to the documented increase in aggression and other behavioral trouble. Belsky antagonist Allison Clarke-Stewart, for example, rationalized the aggression problem in 1989 this way: "Children who have been in day care think for themselves and want their own way" and "are not willing to comply with adults' arbitrary rules." Others have gone further. A University of Chicago psychologist offered the particularly Orwellian response to the 2001 NICHD study that "aggression" was actually "self-assertion" and that day care babies and toddlers were simply "much more sturdy little interactors" than tots at home. A writer for Salon similarly opined that it is "better to be smart and cheeky than dim and placid." It was elsewhere suggested that the traits being measured by NICHD are the same alpha qualities of future corporate titans. As with the advocates who have no trouble finding a silver lining in sick kids, so has there been no shortage of those who have translated bad behavior into diapered rugged individualism.

And here again the moral sensibility of our separationists seems to be a different order from that of most people - including most parents, whether they use day care or not. Anyone who has ever done playground duty with small children knows exactly the difference between an "assertive" little boy playing loudly with a truck and another little boy who just used the same truck to hit another child over the head. Just about anyone who has spent time around small children knows the difference between real aggression and childish high spirits. But what about parents who aren't around to learn this much in the first place? Might they not have a dimmer understanding of that distinction than other people do?