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.