I hesitate to point to the New Republic's article on day care in America, because so many of my friends have kids in day care right now. They worry enough as it is. But there is a huge difference between the places that serve middle-class communities and the day care that serve the poor.
Jonah spent some time at an unlicensed home-based day care, when he was little. Nine toddlers and babies in a window-less basement apartment with one non-English speaking babysitter. There were some days that I worried about his safety.
Apt. 11d 
I haven’t read the article but will feel free to pontificate on my day care experiences. 🙂 My mom watched S for her first year, but when we moved to Maine, we had to get her a “real” day care. We found a place that was housed in a new building. The littles were on one side, the older kids on another. The bathrooms had several toddler sized toilets so that toilet-training kids could go together. S was pretty much trained there. There was an indoor gym so the kids could get exercise even when the weather was bad, as it often was in Maine. Memere (the owner’s mother) would fill in for the teachers during naptime and pat the kids’ backs. They served a full hot lunch.
Best. Day care. Ever. I still miss it, even though my kids don’t need day care.
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A big part of the reason that so many child care programs receive a designation of low quality is because of our increased focus on academic achievement at very early ages. Lots of children are receiving attentive and loving care in “low quality” facilities. These facilities just don’t have an academic focus. For middle-class kids, that doesn’t really matter because they’re getting the academics at home but at-risk kids need a much more rigorous intervention in their early years to catch up to their middle-class peers.
The article talks about this a bit but the biggest concern is care that is delivered through family, friends, and neighbors. Yes, terrible things happen in licensed care too but there is at least a system for monitoring and regulating that care.
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Isn’t this sort of like the Gosnell story? For the average reporter, focusing on the inadequacies of American day care “plays into the wrong hands,” by valorizing SAHMs.
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We just had a big fight here in ArlVa about day care inspection personnel. The County is belt tightening, considered cutting the local program and relying on the state. One day care administrator mobilized hundreds of people to bang on the County Board to keep the program, with dread of unlicensed mayhem. So our local program survived.
Was this the right thing to do, compared to other County efforts which have less constituency? Damned if I know.
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In New Zealand (where I live) Daycare doesnt exist as such. Instead we have in home and centre based provision of Early Childhood Education which is strongly regulated and follows the Te Whāriki curriculum framework. Every child gets 20 hours of free early childhood education and the sector is also subsidized for longer hours and younger children (although there will be fees). There is a wide range of high quality provision and you can use either home based, private centre based or nonprofit centre based providers – mixing between them if you wish. All centres have to have at least 80% staff with a degree or diploma in ECE and qualified staff are paid on the same scale as primary teachers. I’m shocked to see that the US is so far behind given current research into the early years and brain development.
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