Karen I. writes:

The article about children left in cars turned my stomach. Imagine the torment of the poor forgotten children. Children are being sacrificed for money, plain and simple. 

We have one vehicle, which is one of the many “sacrifices” I make to be home with my children. Even though it is a fairly new car in excellent condition, that I can take for the day whenever I want, people tell me they cannot imagine being a one-car family and they act as though I should be working so I can have a car of my own. As I drove my husband to work today, I passed at least six daycare centers on the busy street. They are all on the way to a major city where many professionals work. Countless mothers who need their own cars, fancy homes and designer clothes pull into the parking lot of those centers daily, drop their kids off without a backwards glance and speed off to important jobs. They truly believe they have no choice because how else can they pay for all those things they need? Sadly, I can see where a parent with this mindset would “forget” the child because the child is not seen as a person, but as a chore in the busy morning routine. Drop off the dry cleaning, drop off the child…it’s all the same, right? Until a tragedy reminds us otherwise.

You are so right about what is happening to the children who do survive, about the daily impositions their parents’ busy lifestyle places on their lives. My little daughter, who attends public school, keeps getting sick. The problem is not anything we are doing, but the fact that children in her class are constantly sent in sick to pass their germs on to others. Mothers and fathers can’t take time off from their jobs to take care of them, so they dose them with medicine and hope the kid gets through the school day. My daughter tells us at least once a week about seeing another child vomiting and more than once a week about children putting their heads down on their desks and falling asleep, too sick to finish the school day. 

As I am writing this, Kate Gosselin sits on the Today show defending her decision to leave her eight children so she can go on reality shows. Her ex-husband has the nerve to accuse her of being an absentee parent. Even though she admits to working very long hours, “In my heart I am in my kitchen baking with my kids,” Gosselin said. Disgusting.

                                    — Comments —

Lisa writes:

My husband and I (single income family with stay-at-home mother) often comment on the irony that his primary IT consulting client is a very upscale daycare that won’t call itself daycare because “it’s above that” (combined daycare/private school) and takes children from tiny infants to elementary students, who are also their private school pupils. Parents can log on to their computers at work and watch their babies sleeping in their cribs at designated naptimes, check on the children’s latest scores in areas behavioral, physiological, and scholastic, and interact with a teacher who has made all sorts of notes about the child throughout the day: last bottle, last diaper (and what was in it), last nap (and how long), for example. The parents, the ones that bother to take all this in, feel like they have “bonded” with the child because of all the clinical, digital, and virtual information at their keyboarding fingertips. As far as “daycare” and private schools go, it is very nice, but at what true cost?

Nurse Bee writes:

Not all of us working parents are that bad….it’s easy to lump us all in together. I work therefore I must not care about my children, I must be living a lavish lifestyle, I must be selfish, etc. etc. I get so sick of it.

Laura writes:

The examples Karen gave were of people who could clearly afford to do otherwise. She spoke of those who placed their children in daycare despite being well-off and despite the harm to their children. Are you a defender of Kate Gosselin, who is wealthy and yet is leaving her children?

If I had to work, I would fight tooth and nail to challenge societal standards so that such a thing wasn’t normalized and accepted. Some mothers truly must work and many of them will do a commendable, even heroic, job. The question is what society views as ideal and what it openly promotes.

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