KAREN writes:

My friend posted on Facebook this article in The New York Times about families “crushed by the cost of child care.” She frequently complains about how our country is not fair to working women because there isn’t enough flexibility in work schedules for working moms. What bothers me most about this article is how many of the women interviewed make next to nothing in income after child care, yet still insist on working. Why not just stay home with your children instead!?! The worst part is the comment about the woman who just wishes she could get back to work and tells the reporter her woes as her two year old “wails in the background,” as if she is being oppressed by her own child!!!! Poor kid probably just wants mommy to get off the phone and take care of her.

Laura writes:

“Affordable child care” is a totalitarian euphemism. It stands for Marxist destruction of the family. Here is the kicker in the piece, written by Alissa Quart:

“As we have resisted institutionalizing the day care system in this country, ordinary workers on their own have created D.I.Y. child-care networks,” says Kathleen Gerson, a sociologist at New York University who is now studying these networks in Silicon Valley. “What is our strange commitment to seeing care as a purely private individual act rather than one embedded in the larger community?” she asked.

How strange that people prefer not to hand over their children to collectivization. Gerson has not the slightest understanding of the mentality of the home. She’s an academic barbarian in love with her utopian schemes. To her, the family is a weird, incomprehensible invention and the idea that children have the right to be nurtured in a personal setting by those who naturally care for them is primitive. If the family is weakened even more, the world will have much more need of academic planners and schemers. This raw self-interest simply escapes the average dim-witted reporter.

Real affordable child care was invented eons ago. It’s called motherhood. A better term for what academic Marxists such as Gerson envision is affordable child neglect — and they wish to force it on as many people as possible because in order to obtain “affordable child care” many people without children or those with children at home would have to bear the cost, whether in “flexibility” for women or tax-subsidized day care, and would have to provide moral support for such institutions. And it would always be lousy care. Those with money would avoid it like the plague. Only the most elite child care workers under ideal conditions and with good pay can be induced to care truly for someone else’s child, and even then they are rarely interested in the child’s moral and spiritual formation. The greatest paid child care in the world cannot provide a true home. Quart writes:

The difficulty of obtaining good, affordable day care is well known as a problem afflicting the working poor. But increasingly, middle- and upper-middle-class parents are finding that day care is hard to find or access and that even when it is available it is startlingly costly. Among the mothers I spoke to, one sent her daughter to a day care proprietor where the owner secretly had another woman mind all eight babies all day long; another signed up for a slot at a local day care when she was newly pregnant. Her daughter is now 5, and she is still on the wait list.

“Startlingly costly.” What would she expect? Day care centers are not kennels.

She continues:

The cost and the scarcity of day care has helped create what the sociologist Joya Misra calls “the motherhood penalty.” While women without children are closer to pay equity with men, women with children are lagging behind because they find that working doesn’t always make sense after considering the cost of child care. When women earn less than their partners, they are more likely to drop out of the work force, and if they do so for two years or more, they may not be able to get back in at anything approaching their prior job or earnings. The cost of taking care of one’s children outside the home is now so high that many women cannot be assured of both working and making a decent income after taxes and child care costs.

Women drop out not just because it is not economical to keep working but because they want to care for their own and know they have duties. The “motherhood penalty” is, and always will be, self-imposed, not the result of some conspiracy against women.

The rest of the piece is just whining by those who think motherhood is unfair because it imposes costs. It’s just another shameless exhibition of greed and resentment. These women are proof that the worst thing about day care is that it weakens maternal attachment, not just on an individual level but collectively. They clearly view their children as burdens.

— Comments —

Laura C. writes:

I thought it very interesting that a common solution mentioned in the comments to this “costly daycare problem” was to simply delay or forego having children altogether!  I don’t understand why it is so hard to comprehend that having one parent at home is a viable solution.  The article itself seems to draw from the premise that it is impossible to live on one income or that to feel like a fully functional adult one must have a job, regardless of children.

Jewel A. writes:

The town where I live just tore down its only school. It was a one story building with three wings and a main hallway, with lots and lots of windows. It was a pleasant place, but due to the explosion of immigrant families being relocated into Lancaster County, PA, the school was torn down as the new one was being built.

The new one is ugly. Its windows are tiny slits allowing only enough light into the building to remind the prisoners, that is, the students, that it is still daylight out. It is three stories high and concrete from top to bottom. It looks like a prison. In fact, all the new schools being built look like prisons.

But to the topic of daycare. When I worked for a newspaper in the mid 80s, and took maternity leave to give birth to my twins, premature by almost eight weeks, I used up my leave to visit them in the hospital. By the time they were allowed to come home, I had to go back to work.

Since my job was a low-paid compositor’s job with just a moderate amount of skill, I knew that I could easily be replaced, and so I tendered my two weeks notice.

The personnel directrix was livid, and she spouted all this feminist nonsense about the sacrifices women have made in the workplace and my quitting was a betrayal of their sacrifices.

I was having none of it. Since I was raised without a mother, I found it deeply angering that she should have such contempt for my desire to be a mother to my own children.

Seeking to comprimise with me, she offered the services of her 13 year old niece for the summer if I would stay on. I was shocked, to say the least, since my babies were only 2 months old. I quit working and have only had part-time evening jobs since then.

One of the things I witnessed that is seared in my memory forever is a news broadcast from 1988, when my twins were almost 2.  I was watching a Philadelphia newscast about a fire at an illegal daycare in Camden, NJ. The camera had just captured the scene of a mother, exiting her Mercedes or Lexus, and running in her expensive shoe toward the fire as the firemen were bringing out the bodies of at least six children, all under the age of five. Hers was among them.

That single scene from a ruined woman’s life was the writing on the wall for me, and I never put my children through the hell that is daycare. They thank me for my sacrifices often.

To hell with feminists and their selfish ‘sacrifices.’ They all seem to require the death of children, somehow.

Alex writes:

The role of the New York Times in our era is to lay the groundwork for coming new pushes by the leftist government designed to widen and strengthen the rickety Democratic coalition (blacks, immigrants, single mothers, perverts, urban white liberals). Lately the newspaper of record has been preparing the public for the coming push to normalize transgenderism. The new push for government childcare is designed to flip the large demographic group of married mothers from R to D. The price – even deeper destruction of the white family – is a nice side benefit.

Laura writes:

Alissa Quart probably has little interest in electoral politics. I’m sure she genuinely believes in universal day care.

Mike K. writes:

The act of a mother taking care of her own children at home is a non-taxable event over which the state has no legitimate control. When a mother drops off her kids at day care and goes to work, her time spent at work earning income is taxable and the time spent earning income by the daycare worker is also taxable. The state receives tax money and the resulting control over two people where previously it had none.

Rita Jane writes:

Alissa Quart is a useful idiot who no doubt is very earnest and has the very best intentions in the world. Caring for human babies is hugely labor intensive, and always will be, which is why God made us conceive not birth litters and have bodies that naturally space children at least two years apart. Someone has to do it, and it’s always going to cost a lot of time or a lot of money, because it’s an awful lot of work.

But you can always figure that the NYT is 5-10 years ahead of where the mainstream left sits. The next big push I see them gearing up for now that gay marriage is mostly in the bag is transgendered rights. Oh, joy.

Dan R. writes:

Walking by one of the local retail stores yesterday I overheard heard a snippet or two of conversation taking place on the sidewalk between a young female retail worker, appearing to be in her early 20s, and a teenage boy. The boy was asking where her children were, to which the woman cheerily responded “in daycare.”  And then happily went on to say, “only two weeks left and school begins.”  HAKUNA MATATA!  School is free, daycare expensive. The low-wage worker can continue uninterrupted at her job, which in likelihood doesn’t pay much more than the cost of child care, but she has her job and for the next few months will be free of an onerous cost.  Throw in food stamps, EITC, and other taxpayer benefits and now she can relate to the Hollywood starlets, albeit on a lower scale: subletting the care of her children to others while imagining herself basking in today’s socially-approved female identity of breadwinner.  And the man?  In a town where single mothers abound, one doesn’t even assume him to be in the picture.  The other side of “affordable child care.”

Laura writes:

This is a fundamental violation of the rights of children.

Children have the right to be raised in homes and society has the obligation to support that right.

August 24, 2013

Robin writes:

My husband and I moved into new town homes in a very conservative area of our state this past winter.  On one side, our neighbor is a single mother of a toddler.  This woman’s father and mother, who are still married after a quarter of a century, support her and her young child.  While this woman is young and inexperienced, she possesses a love and commitment for her child which is rare these days:  she stays home with him full-time, as afforded by her parents.  She could easily choose to accept all manner of government subsidies to put her young child in day care all day in order that she be able to work.  Though it has been tempting at times to escape the monotony of motherhood sans the child’s father (he was too selfish to raise the child with her), she chooses instead to humbly and graciously accept her parents’ offer and give the gift of motherhood to her son.

On the other side of our town home lives a woman who wishes with all her heart to be pregnant once more.  She has one son, elementary aged, whom she has given to his father (full custody with part-time visitation rights for her at her home with her boyfriend.)  Her second child is a daughter, preschool aged, whom she voluntarily chooses to ship off to day care whether or not she is working.  She is employed part-time, but says that her daycare provider (an illegal operation in our State) “makes” her pay for twenty-five hours per week minimum, so she has to “use them or lose them.”  She chooses to take her daughter to daycare so that she can clean her home, because she “cannot get anything done” when her young daughter is home.  No wonder!  The child wants attention and she is desperately trying to have a mother who is physically, emotionally and mentally present when she’s home!  Once, she complained to me that she couldn’t fold her laundry while her one child was home (she had the gall to complain to a mother of many little ones under the age of five).  I suggested calmly that she ask her daughter to fold the laundry WITH her.  Perish the thought.

The single mother pines for a godly husband, often seeking the advice of my husband for how to achieve a successful dating-leading-to-marriage relationship.  Though she makes mistakes, she desperately desires to be a wife and mother and even hones her cooking and domestic skills daily.  She is excellent at motherhood and housekeeping, cooking, budgeting her small allowance from her parents, and other domestic chores.  She will make an excellent wife if the man comes along who is willing to parent her young child well.

On the other hand, the feminist on the other side conceived the child she so desperately wanted a few months ago, and quickly (and now she knows – foolishly) chose to abort the baby early in the pregnancy.  Though she is still a woman on the inside and desires what we as women desire, she has destroyed herself emotionally.  Both my husband and I think she is too emotionally unhealthy to receive the blessing of another child; a thought that is confirmed by this woman’s OB/Gyn.  This woman cannot understand why she isn’t blessed immediately with a “replacement” child for the one she so selfishly aborted.  Sometimes I wonder what she would do with the “new” child…stuff the baby in daycare at six weeks so she can clean and fold laundry without children around?

We have far more respect for the single mother supported by her father than we do the partnered feminist.  She has “affordable” daycare – it’s affordable because it’s illegal.  She wants to begin working full-time.  Then, she says she will place her child in the absurd establishment of “4K” in the mornings, daycare at the same school in the afternoons (free, of course, because it’s at the public school) and her boyfriend will pick the child up at five p.m. when he’s off work.  She will then spend a grand total of two or three hours with her child before the child goes to bed at eight and she goes to work at ten o’clock p.m. for the night shift she wants to work.  When she comes home at six thirty a.m., no doubt she will go to sleep immediately as her child will be shipped off to 4K by seven.  This must be her idea of “perfect” motherhood.

Talk about affordable child care – provided by the public school system and her boyfriend, whose child she murdered in her womb.

Laura writes:

There have always been bad mothers, since time immemorial — and we all have our failings. But child neglect hasn’t always been considered a good and even noble thing.

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