Editor’s Note: This post is part of a series further exploring “The Two Year Window,” my feature story on babies, the brain, and poverty that appears in the new issue of TNR. Click here to access all of the supplemental material.

Ongoing abuse, neglect, and adversity early in life can have long-lasting effects, changing and potentially damaging the way the brain develops. Controlled studies of children who spent infancy and early childhood in Romania’s orphanages have shown that those children are more likely to end up with significantly diminished cognitive and emotional abilities.

OK, so what does that mean for children here in the U.S.?

Obviously, they’re not subject to the same conditions as the Romanian orphans were. But pretty much every expert I interviewed for my story agreed that large numbers of children are getting shoddy care. And by shoddy care, they meant everything from being ignored all day while strapped into a car seat to more clear-cut, and physically dangerous, forms of abuse or neglect. If you have the stomach for it, go to Google and type in “infant died locked car.” Or read the recent St. Louis Post-Dispatch series on 45 infants who died in local day cares for reasons other than disease.

In other words, there's a spectrum of shoddy care – from mediocre to poor to awful. The hard part is figuring out exactly how many kids fall into each category. And despite considerable research and consultation with experts, I came up with only two reliable sources.