Friday, June 19, 2009

"I love day care..."

I dunno, I just found this news story to be slightly nauseating. If I understand this California program correctly, it involves giving welfare recipients assistance in job training and job hunting - as well as subsidizing care for their children.

But with the severe budget crisis in California, the state government is now considering paying parents to...stay home and take care of their own children. California will actually save money doing this! (Man we screwed up in this country somewhere along the line...)

When I think of how hard my husband and I worked to avoid putting our kids in daycare - a dirty word in our household - it makes me impatient with those who "love daycare" because "kids learn so much." (Sounds to me they just want to get rid of their little brats.) Sheesh, why the hell did you have them if you don't intend to raise them?

Look, I know things are tight in this economy and people have to make hard choices. We've lived close to the poverty level for sixteen years, so don't give me any guff about how much people are suffering financially. We've been-there-done-that. We still are, for that matter. But because we never considered daycare an option for our family, we've moved heaven and earth to keep one of us home at all times (usually by working alternate hours).

Choices, people. It's all about choices. If something is rock-solid unacceptable, you'll find alternative ways. To us, daycare was rock-solid unacceptable. The alternatives we found were extreme frugality and working different hours.

Those "choices" (ahem) also include not having babies out of wedlock. Gee, what a lot of pain to society could be avoided with that choice...

5 comments:

  1. wow, i know just what you are saying. some of our choices involved trying to limit the number and spacing of children (some successful, some not so successful-sex has a way of leading to babies), but we also worked very hard in order to keep one of us home (mostly me as the mom) and to not accept government monies either by food stamps or bail out! lol

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  2. As usual you are right on the money! My wife has stayed home ever since we had children and we also struggle to make it month to month. Our investment is in our children who we homeschool. It is more important to us to raise them with the right values and give them a quality education than to have more things and a huge bank account.

    Steve from NC

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  3. Patrice, I can see some of what you are saying, and I believe that children should be cared for at home by a Mommy if at all possible. Alternate family care would in my mind be the second choice. Sometimes it isn't possible for whatever reason. I provided day-care in my home for many years so that parents could have a loving-caring environment for their children while they tried to obtain the necessities in life. I loved each of them as my own which i know is not the same but the best they could do. I believe the difference is, are they working for real necessities or for "bigger, better or more". Priorities come into play here and " bigger, better,and more" won't be worth anything when your children are grown. I applaud the parents who struggle to keep a parent in the home, we did, but I also realize that some really don't have a choice.

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  4. I was in daycare from age 6 WEEKS(yes, that's right!) or babysitters until I was 10 and then I left home alone as a "Latch key child".I hardly ever even SAW my single working mother and basically raised myself. I grew up not being nurtured, loved or attention paid to me but felt like an unwanted inconvenient burden. I now have 11 kids of my own and they have NEVER been to daycare of had sitters(except for Grandma, and even then only rarely).I have always been a stay-at-home homeschooling mom. I think it's awful people farm their kids off to be indoctrinated and raised by either strangers(daycare) or the State(Public school). Why even HAVE kids if you couldn't be bothered to raise them?Sadly, that's the norm today.

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  5. You know, I "loved daycare" once. I was young and stupid and still drinking the Kool-Aid, and put our oldest daughter in daycare part-time (about 4-6 hours a day, 3 days a week) while I worked on finishing my bachelor's degree (Yes, stupid decisions, lesson learned).

    I LOVED the fact that she was exposed to different teaching styles and expectations of behavior (at least, until I had a three-month argument with a teacher over her verbal capacity-- my opinion as "just a mom" was obviously worthless-- until Oldest decided she had something to SAY). I was DELIGHTED with having a chance to pursue "something meaningful for me" (until I realized that those horrible, weeping pangs of missing my child that forced me to excuse myself from the classroom were not, in fact, a mental illness). I was THRILLED with the fact that she was being exposed to "diversity" (until she got head lice for the third time in six weeks, and the daycare employees informed me that it MUST be my failure to deal with the issue-- meanwhile I had destroyed our budget buying insecticides, Nixed the child's head until her hair was falling out, and nit-comber her hair so many times she didn't bother resisting any more).

    THAT was the end of the experiment. DONE. I had the good sense to stay home and raise the rest of them entirely myself.

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