There was an impassioned, but polite discussion about daycare going on the Brooks post today. I thought I would try to craft a post to give the commenters something to dig their teeth into and to bring in more people into the conversation. But I’m having a hard time with this. How do you write about daycare without pissing off everyone?
If you claim that there is no difference between the two forms of care, the full time parents lose it. They know how hard they are working raising their kids and how it would be impossible to replicate that effort. The connections that they have with their children and other benefits for the kids are impossible to measure in any academic study.
If you claim that kids raised at home are better off, the parents of kids in daycare lose it. They look at their kids and see healthy, smart, well adjusted tikes. They look in the mirror and see secure, balanced adults. Who needs that guilt trip, especially when one income doesn’t cut it anymore?
I think that the daycare v. homecare debate is a bad one. As long as the daycare is high quality and the parents have their priorities in order, the kids will be okay. Either way you go, there will be some trade-offs. Might as well be honest about that. But it’s all good.
The debate about daycare v. homecare is also impossible to really get a handle on. Each family is so different that it makes comparisons almost impossible. For example, momzom said that the fact that neither she nor her husband could take the pressure of being the sole breadwinner means that her child is better off in daycare. I don’t really care where the money is coming from just as long as we pay the cable bill. My kids might be better off in daycare, because I’m a flake, but not because of money issues.
And what are you going to do? People have to work.
That said. I don’t think we shouldn’t talk about daycare at all. While I’m sure that everyone who reads this blog has their kids in great childcare, there are also a lot poorly funded, under supervised, over crowded daycares out there. My kid was in one.
Jonah was one of ten toddlers watched by one woman who was also caring for her two kids. The kids played in one small room where they weren’t allowed to touch the little glass animals. She didn’t speak a word of English, so I had no idea if my kid took a nap or if he ate lunch. I wasn’t that worried, because he was only there for twenty hours a week, and Juana was a loving woman. But that setup wasn’t great for the kids who were there for 60 to 80 hours.
I think we can have a daycare v. daycare debate. We should look at what are good practices here and abroad and then replicate them. We could discuss new ways to fund daycare and pressure Washington to do their share. We could study the long term affects of bad daycare to force politicians to pay attention to the matter. We could pressure the workforce to allow their staff to get home to pick their kids on time.
They are a lot of excellent reasons to talk about daycare, if we can only figure out how to do it without making everyone crazy.
Apt. 11d 
From my son’s excellent daycare some best practices…
Small child / teacher ratio
Notes home every day from their primary caretaker
Assigned rooms for babies, toddlers, and “big kids”
Health care for teachers
Repect for teachers (so you better not pick up your child late)
Rice and beans
A village/tribal mentality that allowed neophyte (sp?) parents like myself great advice and lots of hugs…
The cost of all of this? Not doable for most people and doesn’t make sense for parents with many kids.
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My son is in a great daycare. They go to art museums, they have dance teachers come in, they are learning Spanish. It’s a 6 to 1 ratio. The lead teacher is a teacher. It’s 3, 4, and 5 year olds. They call it preschool, but anything that is open from 7:30 to 5:30 is daycare. He is there 20 to 25 hours a week. I pay twice as much as I would to other daycares in town. I pay more for this part-time care than I did his full care last year. Most people coulnd’t afford it, hell I can’t afford it. But I feel good about where he is, it’s enriching, and takes some of the sting out of not being home with him full-time like I was for my other 3 children. But after 12 years as SAHM, I was ready for a change.
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I like the idea of the daycare v. daycare debate. Quality costs money, lots of it. Both of my children are in full-day pre-school (daycare) and it is expensive. However, I don’t worry about them during the day because I know that they are well cared for. They have a great time and are learning good things that I would never think to teach them. What most of the public doesn’t realize is what this costs. Where I live with 2 children it is about $20,000 per year. When I told one of my husband’s partners that, he was blown away. I don’t think a lot of people realize what good care (of any kind) really costs. My perception is that most folks think daycare is $100 a week and that it is not that big of a deal to afford it if you need to do so. What they don’t think about is that you couldn’t hire a teenage babysitter for that amount, much less put your children someplace safe, nuturing and educational.
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Someone was asking on another thread about daycare child/staff ratios and group sizes, so I thought I should post the American Academy of Pediatric’s advice. The ratio is the first figure, and the maximum group size is the second.
Birth-12 months 3:1 6
13-24 months 3:1 6
25-30 months 4:1 8
31-35 months 5:1 10
3-year-olds 7:1 14
4-year-olds 8:1 16
5-year-olds 9:1 18
6-year-olds 10:1 20
I don’t know about the recommendations for older children, but I think that the toddler group sizes are about right, but that young infants need even smaller groups than the AAP recommends.
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Stay-at-home-parents who are providing their children with everything that high-quality daycare provides are not just “staying at home” – they are home-schooling (especially for 3-4 year olds). Home-schooling can be great. I have read comments from many parents whose children could not thrive any other way and they clearly know what they’re talking about. But home-schooling is not for everyone and most children can get similar results going to preschool/high-quality day-care.
As an introvert, I found it impossible to provide my extroverted son with the social interaction he needed. Spending that much time socializing with the moms – as great as many of them were – exhausted me. Some personalities are harder to fit together than others. If you have a child who inherits the personality of that sibling you always butted heads with you’re just going to need some time away to keep yourself sane.
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I think we generally lose sight of kids’ resilience and individuality. Parents who want the best of their kids get the expectation that any moment of a kid’s life that isn’t educationally guided — by parents, by quality daycare, by expensive preschooling — is time lost forever. The poor kid will fall behind her peers moment by moment, until she ends up going to technical school at night to learn how to repair circuit boards.
Kids, like adults, aren’t like that. They ebb and flow. They vegetate for a while, then blossom all at once (then vegetate some more).
This doesn’t excuse substandard childcare or chronically-sick educational systems. But if you can avoid those, I think a jumble-pie solution of parenting, daycare, preschool, care by friends and relatives, and whatnot, works for most families and most kids.
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As far as providing quality childcare to the masses, probably the hugest hurdle will be that of getting the US government to subsidise the industry. One of the basic problems with childcare, or any other staff-intensive job, is that, in a developed country, it is impossible to do a quality job while also charging what the majority of the population can afford. This is because developed nations have high salary demands for skilled or even semi-skilled labour. In a factory, those salary demands can be met because technology allows each individual worker to be much more productive than he or she used to be. Here’s a crude example: with one worker and four robots, instead of five workers, that one worker can be paid more than when there were no robots. A decade later, when there is one worker and nine robots, the worker can be paid even more still. Wages can keep rising along with the general economy. (This isn’t the place to go into what happens to those other nine jobs, though.)
But in childcare (and also in elderly care, for example) technology can’t replace human effort, so there is no way to make individual workers more efficient per dollar paid to them. If there were no other industries competing for workers, this wouldn’t be a problem, but in the real world, childcare workers look around and see that wages in other fields rise with the general economy – but in childcare, it’s very difficult to increase wages without going broke, because there is no way to increase “productivity” (ie happy, well-adjusted children) without adding more staff, and/or adding higher quality staff. So wages become an ever higher percentage of a childcare agency’s budget. (This is also one of the key reasons that education budgets tend to rise: teachers’ wages need to keep up with other professions’ wages, even though teachers can’t really become more productive in teh sense of educating more and more children per hour, the way a factory worker can become more productive by using robots to build more cars per hour than he could 30 years ago.)
Unfortunately, the only way that I’ve seen to fix this problem is to acknowledge that in some fields, it’s just not possible to get high qualiyt outcomes on a profit-driven model (except, of course, if you are charging such high fees – like those mentioned above – that only the well-off can afford to purchase your “product”). In staff- and skill-intensive professions such as childcare and eldercare, not only does the market not work for the majority of the population, it can’t work for the majority of the population, practically by defninition (because if the majority of the population had high enough incomes to afford expensive childcare, then childcare agencies would have to pay commensurately higher salaries to their own employees in order not to lose them to better-paying industries).
The only way I see around this is for childcare to be subsidised enough so that high quality care is affordable by all. But that means higher taxes, something the American public seems loathe to accept.
Despite my optimism yesterday, Laura, I think this is going to be a difficult hurdle to clear. I’d love to be proved wrong, though.
(By the way, Laura, great post – you really did a great job of taking the discussion from where it had gotten, to where it needed to go.)
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“Kids, like adults, aren’t like that. They ebb and flow. They vegetate for a while, then blossom all at once (then vegetate some more).”
Sure. When my son was a toddler, we spent a lot of time just walking around the neighborhood looking at cars and trucks, picking up leaves and sticks etc.. But as soon as kids are old enough to need friends, well, we don’t live in a world where that just happens. When I was growing up my mom let me play out in the backyard with neighborhood kids. Where I live, that’s not possible any more. Parents have to schedule unstructured play time with peers. Worse, most parents insist on coming and having a social hour during “play-dates” – or maybe I just don’t seem trustworthy :). In any case, the result is that when my son’s playing with his friends, I can’t take advantage of the time to do laundry, clean the kitchen, or read a book.
Also, children are expected to come into kindergarden reading and at least writing their names. If parents don’t know how to teach their children these things, then the children need to go to preschool to learn them.
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That said. I don’t think we shouldn’t talk about daycare at all. While I’m sure that everyone who reads this blog has their kids in great childcare, there are also a lot poorly funded, under supervised, over crowded daycares out there. My kid was in one.
On the other hand, my nephew is much better off in daycare than home with his mother. His dad getting demoted, thereby forcing his mom to return to work, was the best thing to happen to that kid in his short life.
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Kate, I totally agree with you about the problems of scheduling play time. As my son hit three, then four, the number of his playmates in some kind of 5-day daycare or preschool when from most to all. It’s been challenging to work out playdates and activities with his friends.
But these are logistical problems, not developmental problems. I’m just not convinced that developmentally, one track (daycare / preschool) vs. another (full-time parenting) has an obvious advantage. And that’s fine with me. I don’t see why there has to be a right answer.
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I appreciate everyone’s anecdotal information about their good daycare situations. Like I said, my kids didn’t have the best situation, so it’s good to hear about other models.
What I would like to see happen in these daycare discussions is room for full time parents to say “I’m doing a good job.” Just as all the parents of kids in daycare can say that in their particular situation, kids and parents are happy, so too should the full time parents be able to say that in their particular situation, everyone is well off.
With my husband’s high powered career, the entire family is better off with me staying home at the moment. There is someone to stay home with the kids during illness, the dinner gets cooked, and they get some interaction with a parent. With Ian’s speech disability, noone else could do what I’m doing. I may not love being in the house all the time; it’s hard for an extrovert. But I love reading the kids books and taking them to the park, so it’s not awful. My husband and I treat his job and our kids as a team effort. I do think in our particular situation, my kids are better off with me being home. I’m proud of my work.
I’m going back to teaching part time this fall, so I’m looking around for some home-based care for Ian right now. It won’t be as good as me, but he’ll be okay.
We also have to remember that outside of our well educated, well meaning families, there are a lot of kids who aren’t getting great care. Not at home and not in daycare. It’s a mistake to think that just because our kids are thriving that other kids are, too.
Reuben, sadly, could not point me to a remedy for scaling up the great models you all have described today. (Keep telling me more, BTW.) As lefties, we should we keep thinking this through.
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Just goes to show that every family has to do what works for them.
As for universal childcare practices. I think it’s imperative for parents who put their kids in a new daycare situation (from infancy until kindergarten) to go through an obligatory observation or “transition” period. It should be a requirement to be able to see your child in a group setting – how does he/she adjust to the other kids/teachers, how does he/she interact, etc. It teaches the parents a lot about their own kids – tells them if group daycare is even the right choice for the kid (even if it’s NOT the right choice for the parent). Some kids transition in a day, others transition over a few weeks. But, it allows for the parents to get used to the new situation with less “guilt” and the children to get used to the new “school” arrangement without tears and fears of abandonment. Problem is: many schools don’t allow this necessary observation period and many employers won’t allow the time required of their employees.
Joan Williams just did a piece on NPR’s Marketplace report: http://marketplace.publicradio.org/shows/2006/03/14/PM200603146.html
It was interesting – talked about problem hourly employees have with caregivinig. More businesses need to raise awareness of caregiving needs of their employees, but too many employees feel that their situation is unique and personal. Furthermore, employees feel that they put their job at risk when their family needs them.
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We also have to remember that outside of our well educated, well meaning families, there are a lot of kids who aren’t getting great care. Not at home and not in daycare. It’s a mistake to think that just because our kids are thriving that other kids are, too.
From a social justice perspective, I think this is so key. Even if the middle class is able to muddle through – compromising here and being frustrated there, but basically able to give our kids what they need – a huge percentage of the population simply does not have access to decent care, but has to put their kids in it anyway. It’s beholden on the better off to agitate for universal, high quality healthcare, even if we ourselves can afford to stay home or put our kids in good private care. It’s a gender issue, an equity issue, and a child welfare issue.
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Henry,
I’m not trying to advocate a single “right answer” for everyone. I’m sorry if I came across that way. I was trying to explore the factors that lead to different people having different “right answers” for themselves. Many stay-at-home parents feel that if I assert that my child isn’t harmed by being sent to daycare then I’m saying that their sacrifices are meaningless. But the two are not mutually exclusive – just because some children are best off staying at home with a parent doesn’t mean that my child would be if I weren’t so selfish/ incompetent/etc.. So, I was trying to non-judgementally explore ways in which differences in parent and child personality are major factors in which decision is right for a given family. In my case, we have a “mismatch” – introverted mother/extroverted child. Managing a social schedule that is satisfying for him is grueling and my results still fall short of what he gets by going to school. So I think that, for me, school is win win. Unfortunately, as a mother no matter what you choose some people will get nasty with you and it tends to make me a bit oversensitive.
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Unfortunately, as a mother no matter what you choose some people will get nasty with you and it tends to make me a bit oversensitive.
I hear you.
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I know this is a thread about daycare, but I have to say … as the spouse of a stay-home parent, I really think *my employer* is the biggest beneficiary of my family setup.
My kids both stayed home with my husband until they were 3, and then went to pre-school. Both girls actually prefer to be in group settings; they love the socialization that comes with pre-school or organized playgroups. And the neighbor kids I know who spend much of the day with a high-quality sitter are also thriving.
The sanity factor for my husband and myself, though, has been huge. Dinner is not a crisis in our house, doctors’ appointments and illness can be absorbed, I can stay late when I need to. My employer always gets my full attention because I’m not pulling a second shift. I am not nearly as frazzled as the moms I know in dual-income families.
Not saying there’s no qualitative difference between different kinds of daycare, or different kinds of parents. But as Laura alluded to, there are benefits to the situation beyond just the bond with the kids.
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Differences in parent and child personality are major factors in which decision is right for a given family.
Absolutely. Sorry, if I sounded like I was reading something into your comment that wasn’t there. I was mostly trying to clarify myself.
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It always seemed so simple to me.
Obviously, it’s individual.
You have to choose the best quality care for your kid available. The quality, not the form is what’s important. If you are great with kids, patient, and enthusiastic about the job of stay-at-home parent, that’s the best choice.
If you want to, or must work, and your best friend is done with an incredible nanny — and you want to work, then that is the best choice.
If your older child attended a great daycare, in which you have utter confidence in the staff, that’s your best choice.
A kid in a GOOD day care or with a great nanny beats a kid at home with a depressed, frustrated miserable mom. A kid home with a dedicated mom beats a lousy day care or an apathetic nanny.
This is why it just never made sense to me when people talk theoretically about daycare vs. nanny. vs. stay at home parent. Because it is all so subjective and dependent on the varying quality of the various options.
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I’m disappointed that things haven’t progressed more since I became a single custodial mom back in 1973, when my kids were 5 and 7, but in fact they have improved somewhat. I had to return to work after being a stay-at-home mom, and the child care arrangements available to me in the suburbs were scarce and stressful for all. Plus I was competing for job advancement with men with stay-at-home wives. At that time, ironically, day care centers were available for welfare mothers, but not for middle-class suburban working single moms. And after-school activities required chauffeur service, as always. I spent most of my precious weekend mornings car-pooling in exchange for the weekday afternoons I could cobble together with my SAHM neighbors. There are more choices now.
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Savtadotty,
My mum was doing the same thing as you at around the same time (though not in the suburbs), and I remember her having to take my brother and I to work, and he and I having to basically hide in an office all day, so as not to disturb customers (it was a car rental agency) who weren’t expecting to bump into two small children with their faces covered in jam. We hated it, and she knew it – which only made her feel even more guilty about it. My poor mum…
Here’s hoping that each generation has to work a bit less hard at this.
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I was just thinking that one of the pluses (for everybody) of SAH parenting is that it provides an onramp for a child-centered paying career for women who might not otherwise consider it. I had never done paid babysitting until I had a one-year-old at home who needed a bit of company, and I know that after working as a parent volunteer at a coop preschool, that I would definitely consider working at a preschool. It’s hard work, but working with preschoolers can also be genuinely magical. There also seem to be quite a few women out there who would never have considered a teaching career, but for having spent some time at home with their own children.
So, I think it is quite arguable that running down SAHPs is ultimately detrimental to the project of providing high quality childcare and schools. If staying home with ones own children is not a worthwhile endeavor, a fortiore taking care of other people’s kids isn’t either.
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Darn it! I should have looked it up. It’s “a fortiori.”
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Also, I think that SAHPs should be aggressively recruited (and perhaps given scholarships) for childcare, teaching, and other child-centered jobs. After years of studying childcare and medical manuals, furiously networking, and lurking around preschool and schools, SAHPs often wind up with positively encyclopedic medical and educational knowledge. It’s a terrible thing to waste that kind of resource. And knowing that their abilities are valued and sought after would be good for SAHPs and would perhaps eliminate some of the hothouse/harem atmosphere that sometimes makes the SAHM world a bit off-putting.
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In light of Amy’s comments, one of the best preschools in our area is a cooperative — which also makes it one of the most affordable. The requisite contribution by parents is not excessive — one day a month plus involvement in evening fundraisers and some committee work. Admittedly this is difficult for a single, working parent.
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He slept through the Northridge earthquake when we moved back to El-Lay six months later. And looked at us like we were idiots when we got him out of bed to evacuate the business-temporary apartment we were in while waiting for our house sale to close.
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Good Day,
Well, while I can see the arguement to a point that its somewhat subjective as to which is best, DayCare or a nanny, I contend that there is just no substitute for a good quality nanny. Ok, there is one. In my opinion, the only accecptable substitute, and best substitute for that matter, is the parents.
What is hard to find is data on this. If anyone out there has any hard data, and expecially statistics, I am interested.
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