When our oldest was born, I was in graduate school and Mark was working as an engineer for Medium-Sized Wholly Owned Subsidiary, Inc. MSWOSI had a generous flextime policy, and my thesis advisor was willing to be creative with my fellowship, so Mark worked part-time while I (essentially) went to school part-time. Meanwhile, we juggled care of our son. Those were difficult, stress-filled years, and I know many folks thought we were nuts for not simply using day care at least a couple of days a week.
A day or two ago, I read a reflection that summed up perfectly the reason why we did that then, and why these days I’m forgoing my outside career indefinitely:
No matter the skills or personality of the caregiver, placing the child in the care of someone outside the family almost guarantees that the relationship will be severed at some point, without the shared grief and social rituals that would attend the death of a family member.
As I see it, non-familial child care involves a catch-22 situation: either the child doesn’t form a strong attachment, and is cared for by someone who neither loves her nor is loved in return, or she does form a strong attachment, which is highly likely to be broken abruptly and prematurely, without the appropriate support that grieving rituals and shared emotion provide. The world (the way things operate, if not the parents themselves) will tell the child that it’s no big deal, to move on and forget about the person she loves and who she thought loved her.
To me this is tragic because it teaches the child that love is temporary and conditional, that people can’t be counted on and that in return they are expendable.
But I think it’s equally tragic for a child to spend more than a small amount of time alone with someone whose relationship with him is not based on love.
That was posted by Susan Manning on the Continuum List, where readers of the book The Continuum Concept by Jean Liedloff discuss the topics it touches on and their application in our own families. (That’s a dry way to put it; here is a succinct summary of the principles.) I asked Susan for permission to post her reflection here.
So many arguments for or against institutional day care have to do with "outcomes:" do institutionally-cared-for children perform better or worse in school? do institutionally-cared-for children suffer more or fewer ear infections? do institutionally-cared-for children exhibit more or less violent behavior? These kinds of questions should, of course, be considered and studied, because the answers to them are measurable. It is the stuff data is made from, and it is important and useful.
Susan’s argument has to do simply with people, very small, developing people, and with what they crave most: secure attachment to someone who loves them, and protection from attachments to someone who does not. Without secure attachments to one who loves them, or with attachments broken, remade, and broken again, children will grow stunted and deformed, perhaps invisibly, perhaps irreversibly, within their hearts.
Parenthood gives us a terrible power to bestow or withhold this kind of attachment by choosing the people who surround our child during their waking hours. Family and close friends of the family, people who grow to love the child and commit to the child? Or someone for whom child care is their job?
It doesn’t matter how much they’re paid, what their credentials are. Remember: It’s their job. They do it for money. There is nothing wrong with doing one’s job for money, mind you. But if you have ever worked for pay, in any kind of capacity, think back over your jobs. Think about being exhausted at the end of some days. Griping to your spouse about some of the people you work with. Venting to friends about how you had to pretend to go along with some higher-up’s harebrained idea, even act cheerful about it. Looking at the clock and counting the minutes until you could go home and turn on the TV or curl up with a book or something.
Not every day was like that, and maybe you really liked your job. But every job is something like this. If it weren’t, they wouldn’t need to pay you.
Child care jobs are like that too. So are teaching jobs. I know; I was raised by a kindergarten teacher. I will never forget how she came home one day, singing with relief and happiness, because Billy had gone home with the chicken pox and would not darken the door of her classroom for at least a week. Or how she laughed bitterly at the end of the first day back from Christmas break, recounting how she’d lied to all the children: Oh, I missed you too!
The institutional managers who sell child care to parents talk loftily about their staff’s commitment to quality care, but remember, that’s not all that different from the commitment of your local plumber to quality service. What their staff cannot deliver is commitment to your child. Many of the people (mostly women) who work in child care entered the profession because they "love children," and this may be true in the abstract; but which of them have loved a child?
And the most important question: which of them will love your child?
The answer: Only those who would have loved your child anyway, without the paycheck. The ones who love your child already.
Tiresome obligatory concession to diversity: Yes, some people must use institutional day care, for a variety of economic and personal reasons, blah blah blah blah blah. I would move heaven and earth to avoid it. I’d drop below the poverty line if I had to. Everyone with kids should try.
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