Reply to Summer is so long and it’s the worst for kids and parents.

Forum Index » General Parenting Discussion

Reply to "Summer is so long and it’s the worst for kids and parents."

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous]As with many aspects of our education and childcare system ("system"), the problem is that these issues only exist for families where both parents work AND they have young kids AND they lack the support network that can make this easier (grandparents nearby, for instance).

Everyone else is unbothered because they don't have to do the childcare scramble every year. Plus even for families that struggle, they age out of the struggle. And there's this weird thing with parenting issues where when you age out of them you often become dismissive of other people who are struggling with the exact same thing. It's half "I did it so you can too" and half "once it was over I realized it wasn't that bad." It's one reason why parents are often one another's biggest critics.

The learning loss piece isn't a sufficient motivator because people simply don't care enough. People with resources will pay to address that problem (I know some wealthy parents whose kids make their biggest academic leaps in the summer and actually LIKE the extra time off because they can do CTY or language tutoring and other things that school/activities actually get in the way of). Many people with fewer resources don't care as much, or have bigger fish to fry. So once again, it's this sliver of the population in the middle who cares about learning loss but can't afford to address it themselves.

In other countries, education and childcare policy is actually crafted to address these groups in the middle -- it's geared at middle class dual income families and their kids. Many/most benefits also help poor families, but that's not the incentivizing force because poor people rarely have any political power, but middle class people in other countries do. And then rich people are going to do what they want and the key is to not stand in their way too much or they'll start making noise about how their taxes are funding the system for everyone else. It's a bit of a balance, but it starts by targeting the middle group.

In the US, we just tell the middle group to figure it out and dangle the possibility of getting rich and not having to pay high taxes as an incentive (that most won't reach, especially in post-Boomer generations, due to education and housing costs).[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics