"In a typical week during the winter of 2002, 11.6 million (63 percent) of the 18.5 million children under 5 years of age were in some type of regular child care arrangement.

...Almost one-quarter of all preschoolers were cared for in organized facilities, with day care centers (13 percent) being more commonly used than nursery or preschools (6 percent). Overall, other nonrelatives provided homebased care to 14 percent of preschoolers, with 6 percent cared for by family day care providers.

...Employed mothers of preschoolers relied on day care centers (21 percent) more than nursery schools and preschools (8 percent) and Head Start programs, kindergarten, and grade schools (5 percent). Children under the age of 5 were also cared for by a family day care provider (10 percent), nonrelatives in the provider's home (6 percent), and nonrelatives in the child's home (5 percent), such as babysitters, nannies, au pairs, and housekeepers providing child care services."

Progressive thinkers are always pressing to get children into non-maternal care at earlier and earlier ages. Five-year-olds, after all, need to prepare for first grade by going to kindergarten. Three- and four-year-olds need to get a leg up on the kindergarten curriculum by attending preschool. One- and two-year-olds need an early start on socializing by spending their days in day care.  And so it goes, in a regression that pulls children out of the home at ever-earlier ages.  That young children are actually round pegs in the square holes that educationists keep creating in this out-of-home bureaucracy seems almost unthinkable. But a study recently completed by researchers at the Yale Child Study Center makes the misfit between young children's needs and preschool programs' offerings all too clear.

Drawing data from randomly selected 4815 classrooms in the 52 state-funded pre-kindergarten programs in the 40 states that have such programs, the researchers uncovered a very disturbing pattern: pre-kindergarten students are expelled from their programs at rates more than three times as high as those for students attending kindergarten though twelfth-grade classes.

"No one wants to hear about three- and four-year-olds being expelled from preschool," acknowledged Walter S. Gilliam, the lead Child Study Center researcher. "But it happens rather frequently."

The pre-kindergarten expulsion rate ran one-and-a-half times higher among four-year-olds than among three-year-olds and more than four-and-a-half times higher among young boys than among young girls. But the overall pattern of high expulsion rates for pre-kindergarten students is indisputable: the overall margin of error for the data sampling was less than two percent.

Some readers of the new study may wonder if the young children getting expelled from their pre-school programs are not actually the smart ones: perhaps they have, after all, figured out what they must do to get back home with their mothers - where they belong in the first place.

Are husbands today more likely to pressure their wives to become working stiffs or more likely to encourage them to stay home with the kids? No longer embarrassed as they once were to depend on their wives for support, American men represent a little-noticed factor in the movement of mothers into the workforce. According to three economists writing in The Quarterly Journal of Economics, the growing acceptance on the part of husbands to the idea of wives working outside the home is due to the increased numbers of men who, since World War Two, grew up in families in which their own mothers worked.

Using the Integrated Public Use Micro sample of the U.S. Census Bureau for the decades 1940 to 1980, the researchers document the rising proportion of men raised by working mothers, state by state, who were either directly or indirectly affected by the labor changes triggered by World War Two. Building in part upon an earlier study in the Journal of Political Economy that documented how the increase in women's labor force participation during the war reduced the relative wages of men right after the war (see New Research, July 2004, p. 3), these researchers document how that increase in the employment of women during the war generated even higher levels decades later.

Looking specifically at women born between 1930 and 1935 (who were too young to be directly affected by the war, but would be affected by the change in the pool of available men decades later), the researchers found that a 10 percent higher war mobilization rate of men yielded a 16 percent total increase in the employment of these women between 1940 and 1980. While the "direct" effect of the war on women born prior to 1930 was found to fade over time, the war's "indirect" or "echo" effect on these younger women persisted because, the researchers theorized, they had married men whose war-time mothers had worked when they were young. The greater numbers of men in the population whose mothers had worked, they claim, "encourages women to increase their investment in market skills."

To support that theory, the researchers found that states with higher ratios of children being raised in families with working mothers relative to nonworking mothers experienced higher levels of female labor force participation in the following generation, a statistically significant pattern that held over several decades. "Having a working mother significantly increases the probability that a man's wife works; the magnitude of the effect ranges from 24 to 32 percentage points, depending on the definition of a working mother and the data set used."

Whether the generational pattern leading to higher levels of maternal employment can be reversed is not a question the economists ponder. But their study at least suggests that husbands ought to encourage their wives to stay at home, not simply for the well-being of their own children, but to increase the possibility that their grandchildren might also enjoy the benefits of full-time motherhood.