Day Care, the Final Frontier 

—By Kevin Drum| Mon Apr. 15, 2013 12:13 PM PDT

In 2011, Jon Cohn wrote a story called "The Two Year Window," about new research demonstrating the importance of the first two years of a child's life. Roughly speaking, most child care that's average or better is probably OK. But down in the bottom third, conditions are often bad enough to cause permanent cognitive damage, sometimes at a biological level. One third is a lot of kids. 

Appropriately, two years later Cohn is back with a follow-up, "The Hell of American Day Care." Children who get proper attention and interaction, he says, "tend to develop the skills they need to thrive as adults—like learning how to calm down after a setback or how to focus on a problem long enough to solve it":

The caption in Mother Jones reads, "Unfortunately, this is the exception in America, not the rule."