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ABSTRACT
Parental overuse of portable technology poses a bonafide threat to the welfare and development of children. In the past decade, researchers have documented this phenomenon whereby parents pay far more attention to handheld electronic devices than to their children's safety and developmental needs. What most studies have failed to examine is the extent to which workers in privately owned and operated daycares also exhibit technology-induced distracted behavior. This article aims to identify the moral harm of caregivers' distracted behaviour in a private daycare setting or, more simply, the welfare effects of distracted daycare. First, with the assistance of recent research, the phenomenon of distracted caregiving is defined. Then, the documented harms of distracted caregiving in a daycare setting are catalogued. Next, an ethical analysis of the phenomenon of distracted daycare working is undertaken from four normative ethical perspectives: (i) ethical egoism, (ii) utilitarianism, (iii) principlism and (iv) care ethics. Five recommendations for reforming distracted daycares, each based upon one or more of the four ethical perspectives, inform the article's conclusions.
Notes on contributor
Shane Ralston is Teaching Faculty and Assistant Dean at Wright College, Woolf University. He is the author of two monographs: John Dewey’s Great Debates – Reconstructed (2011) and Pragmatic Environmentalism: Towards a Rhetoric of Eco-Justice (2013). He also edited the collection Philosophical Pragmatism and International Relations: Essays for a Bold New World (2013). He has authored over fifty articles, book chapters and popular essays on topics ranging from child welfare to corruption to the history of American political thought.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Correction Statement
This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.
Notes
1 See, for instance, Molet et al. (Citation2016), Radesky et al. (Citation2014), Nierenberg (Citation2014) and Bale et al. (Citation2010).
2 I coined the phrase ‘distracted daycare’. See Ralston (Citation2016, Citation2019).
3 All of the theories are selected for reasons related to the nature of the inquiry. The first two are consequentialist theories because the question motivating the inquiry is, by its very construction, concerned with consequences, specifically what harmful moral consequences distracted daycare engenders. The second two – princplism and care ethics – are standard approaches to analyzing biomedical ethics issues involving matters of consent, authority and attentiveness – all of which are pertinent to distracted daycare. Thank you to the referees for their helpful feedback on the proper ethical theories for conducting the present analysis.
4 Thank you to the referee who posed the objection that the focus on private daycares is too American-centric. Much of my analysis does rely upon the American model of privately-owned daycare as the exemplary case. However, the United States does not have a monopoly on privately owned and operated daycares. The question is how extensively monitored and regulated these private daycares are. Although Britain has an extensive regulatory environment, especially since the OFSTED (Citation2019) was created to inspect private daycares, prior to that the situation was similar to the U.S. in that daycares were only casually monitored by Local Authority Social Services. The problem of distracted daycare also manifests in Canada, especially in unregulated child care facilities, where child deaths are not even tracked. See Monsebraaten and Chown (Citation2014).
5 According to the U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics (Citation2017), ‘Childcare workers must meet education and training requirements, which vary by state. Some states require these workers to have a high school diploma or equivalent, but many states do not have any education requirements for entry-level positions’. This is not universally true or the case in countries across the globe. In France, for example, the government mandates that all daycare workers have, at minimum, a college degree and, in some cases, a specialized post-graduate degree. The same is true in many Scandinavian countries. See Cohn (Citation2013).
6 According to the U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics (Citation2017), in 2015, the median hourly pay for a daycare worker was $9.77 or $20,320 per year.
7 For statistical evidence that millennials use cell phones and other devices to the point of distraction more than members of previous generations, see the U.S. Chamber of Commerce (Citation2012, November 12) report.
8 See the technology policy of Kinder House Day Care (Citation2015, January).
9 See the social media policy of Hooper Academy’s (Citation2017).
10 Ralston (Citation2019) characterizes some of the reasons why daycare workers see themselves as free from any responsibility for their own technology-related distracted behaviour and any consequent harms to child welfare: ‘These daycare employees … typically feel: (1) resentful towards daycare owners and clients for their low wages; (2) entitled to use internet-enabled devices during work hours even if there is a policy against it; (3) blameless for any accidents that could have been prevented had they not been distracted; and (4) convinced that they should protect and be protected by fellow daycare workers when accused of distracted caregiving, even when the coverup involves lying or other forms of deceit (what I call ‘distracted daycare workers’ omerta’)’.
11 See, for instance, the open-door policy of Toddler Town (Citation2017).
12 I would like to thank the referee for the helpful suggestion to discuss the different treatments of the issue by act and rule utilitarians.
13 Principlism is not without its critics. The ethical theory has been criticised from a communitarian perspective for being too individualistic and inadequate for addressing some substantive areas of ethical inquiry. See Callahan (Citation2003). Principlism's claims about the usefulness of principles has also come under scrutiny. See Clouser and Gert (Citation1990).
14 One objection to claims that distracted caregiving produces social, emotional and speech delays is that ignoring a child cannot, by itself, have this strong an effect on their early development. On the medical model of child psychology, most developmental delays are hereditary or based on biological, not social, factors. While in the majority of cases distracted parenting is probably only one contributing factor, extreme cases (e.g. a child placed in a highly restrictive environment deprived of most speech input) can produce dire consequences for a child's development. Although a child with minimal speech input from a distracted caregiver is not the only influence on that child's poor speech development, it is nonetheless one less input (and a very critical one), which can lead the child to cultivate language skills at a slower pace than a child with undistracted caregivers. Thank you to an anonymous critic for this point.