Reply to NY Mag: Daycare is Broken

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]What's broken is an economy that forces a majority of parents to work full-time in order to make ends meet.[/quote]

This.  Institutionalized child care is never a good thing for babies and young children.  It’s just a sad result of our economic system. [/quote]

I agree totally that institutionalized child care is never a good thing for babies and young children.  However, while the economic system often seems to make this inevitable for many families, I also wonder why so many people do not consider this hard fact when planning, or failing to plan, their families.  The attitude in this country seems to be that everyone is entitled to have as many children as they want rather than encouraging people to figure out what they actually can afford, what daycare options they can reasonably plan for, before bringing children into the world.  So many new mothers and many new fathers as well are quite surprised by how much they would prefer to care for their own infants at least the first few years but find they have failed to anticipate this and therefore can't economically find a way to do it.[/quote]

I don't disagree with you, but would argue that this cuts both ways. I took time off when my child was born (and chose not to have another child) specifically because I did not want to put her in institutionalized care as an infant or toddler, nor did I want to do that with a subsequent child. We adjusted our financial planning to accommodate this and have never regretted it.

But I also have empathy for people who struggle with this because I know better than most that when you take time off to SAH, there are serious career consequences. It's really hard that these consequences almost entirely fall on women since that is most often who is going to stay home with a very young child due to breastfeeding and how infant bonding generally works. Plus men face a ton of stigma for taking time off. I get why not everyone is able to do this. And I'm not willing to argue that you should only have children if you can afford a full time nanny -- I think that's really limiting and classist.

We need to make it possible for middle and working class people to be good parents without having to rely on institutional care for very young kids. That means mandating longer parental leaves, creating more part-time options for parents of young kids, or maybe reconfiguring our social structure to enable extended family to help more with children.

The model of the dual-income family with kids in insitutationalized daycare was not invented by parents. It's the result of a very capitalist society that encourages people to move far from family in order to have profitable careers, and then to outsource childcare to professionals. It benefits corporations and people who sell things, because it puts more people into the workforce and increases family incomes to buy stuff. But families themselves have been complaining about this set up for decades now. A lot of people want out. But it's not something that can be solved via personal choice.[/quote]

slow clapping.  This is the absolute truth right here.  
And I did not know how things would turn out or how I would feel about this until I became a parent who actually had to buy my own things for my own children.  I can afford it but boy does my heart feel something different than what it did before I had kids.  [/quote]

Sorry, but daycare starting at 5 months has been awesome for our family. My mother is too old to care for DD full time. Didn't want a nanny..Love the idea of longer parental leaves but studies show longer than 6 months harms workforce attachment

How about we advocate for better options for families that don't stigmatize daycare, or women working outside the home? At kindergarten you cannot tell which kids went to daycare as babies because the notion that daycare is so horrible is a lie. There is some evidence of small effects but nothing like you'd expect from the discourse above.[/quote]

HI, I'm the slow clapper.... I'm in the same boat and 100% agree with you.  I was honestly clapping at the last part of what the poster was saying --- the way things are set up do not give a lot of people a lot of options to raise their families the way they want.  I love daycare for my babies--- they are super social butterflies and it really helps them that way.  All I'm saying (or clapping to) is that there have to be options that make it easier on all of us, instead of forcing us into a path we did not know existed until kids arrived-- there are just some things you don't know until you're in the thick of it.  Folks should have the ability to make some adjustments without it being this full scale over adjustment because of how the system is basically set up. [/quote]

That PP is posting right wing talking points about families not wanting daycare that are used to avoid funding daycare[/quote]

I'm "that PP" and what I'd actually love subsidized daycare. But I think the way you make that work is by also offering longer parental leaves and encouraging both parents to take them. Babies in daycare is dumb. It's incredibly expensive for the daycare (and thus the parents) because of the ratios needed to make it safe, and because of the scarcity of daycare spots, many babies are un suboptimal daycare environments that really do pose problems for healthy development.

If parents all got 6 months of leave and took them separately, we could then offer subsidized daycare/preschool starting at 1 year. At that age the teacher-child ratios get much more favorable to the daycare and only better as they get older. Kids are napping more minimally and they have organized days with regular meals (and eating solid foods) that are all conducive to a group care enviornment in a way that babies just are not.

But the way it's currently set up, in order to keep your kid home for a year, you either have to (1) hire a nanny, which is not affordable for most families, (2) have family help, something that is not available for many, many families, or (3) have one of the parents quit their job, since pretty much no one offers 6-12 months parental leaves, even unpaid. Nine times out of ten, families are going to "choose" option 3 because the other two are not options, and most of the time it's going to be the woman who quits.

We cannot separate the daycare conversation from the paid leave conversation. The solution is not "subsidized childcare starting at 8 weeks" which is when most American women are expected to return to work, if not before. That will never, ever happen because the cost of providing group care for infants is way too high. It just doesn't make sense. [b]Babies need to be in smaller care environments with 1:1 or maybe 1:2 care. It's just how it is. [/b]We aren't going to get anyway until we acknowledge this and then start talking about how best to provide that care while still supporting families and women.[/quote]

Infants do fine in daycare. They are not traumatized and they get their needs met. Most abuse and neglect of children happens at home. Our daycare was FAR better at caring for my child when she was an infant than my mother was, which thankfully she was self-aware about.

I totally get it may not be many parents' preference and that is totally fine. Realistically, many men would not choose to take six months off of work even if it were offered to them, so in practice, what would happen from reducing the supply of child care for infants (what you are suggesting) would negatively impact women's ability to work outside the home. Not everyone wants to care for a baby full-time, and that is completely fine.[/quote]

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