High Masculine Tones

Most public pronouncements about child care are not based on critical thought about whether our compulsion for economic growth has spun out of control. Although we are now coming to grips with the ecological limits to growth, we still haven't grasped that there are also moral and psychological costs of economic expansion -- social limits to growth as well as ecological ones.

Instead, the policy experts take our usual, busy, "pragmatic" approach of accommodating the growth mentality: If the statistical studies show mounting child care "needs" because both parents must work, then the obvious solution is to spend billions to "provide" child care services.