On a policy level, much of the debate about childcare comes down to how best to shore up a failing system. While there is tremendous disagreement about what role government should play, everyone from democratic socialists to the US Chamber of Commerce to Republican senators acknowledges that childcare isn’t working for too many households and that it’s having negative ripple effects on both families and the economy. From the reddest states to the bluest, lawmakers are actively wrestling with that reality.

On an individual parent level, however, much of the debate is still stuck on whether sending a child to a daycare center is going to harm them for life. That argument — along with its counterpoint, that formal childcare is an unalloyed positive — gets in the way of a productive conversation about making sure every parent has the care they need to raise their kids the way they want while providing for their families.

It was helpful, then, when Phoebe Arslanagic-Little and Ellen Pasternack wrote a recent piece titled “Daycare pseudoscience” for Works in Progress, an outlet generally aligned with the “abundance” movement. Much of their ire is directed at daycare critics like the prominent psychoanalyst Erica Komisar, who regularly claims that formal childcare disrupts children’s normal brain development — claims that Arslanagic-Little and Pasternack dismiss as “pure speculation.”