Noam Chomsky

"When both parents are working extra hours, and for most on falling incomes, it doesn’t take a great genius to predict the outcome. The statistics show them. You can read them in Hewlett’s UNICEF study if you like. It’s perfectly obvious without reading them what’s going to happen. Contact time, that is, actual time spent by parents with children, has declined forty percent in the last twenty five years in the Anglo-American societies, mostly in recently years. That’s actually ten to twelve hours a week of eliminating contact time and what they call “highquality time,” time when you’re not just doing something else, is virtually disappearing. Of course that leads to the destruction of family identity and values. It leads to sharply increased reliance on television for child supervision. It leads to what are called “latchkey children,” kids who are alone, a factor in rising child alcoholism and drug use and in criminal violence against children by children and other obvious effects in health, education, ability to participate in a democratic society, even survival, of course decline in SATs and IQs, but you’re not supposed to notice that. That’s bad genes, remember."

Noam Chomsky