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>parents should stay home with the kids and play. That interaction with parents teaches kids far more than a lowly paid preschool teacher will.

Do you have kids? I have a 2.5 year who has been in a small day care setting (about 10 kids) for 2 years. The effect it has had on her social (and even academic) skills have been pretty amazing.

She is learning so much more about how to deal with other people, social interactions, ect than she ever could staying at home with me.

>[One parent staying at home with the kids] was done for centuries.

Not really. Preindustrial revolution life was much more communal and based around large, multi-generational family units.

What would you recommend to parents who don't want to assign their very young (.5-1 yr old) children to what most folks think of as old school traditional daycare? Do you think daily structured group dates supervised by a rotating parent or guardian would have this same effect? What were the key ingredients that you think made your child have a good experience and concurrently gave you as parents confidence in the process?

Assuming your request is genuine and not rhetorical if you live in a decent area the well funded local library has seemingly continuous story reading and kids activities, all completely free (well, free aside from being rich enough to buy a house in that area and pay the related high prop taxes), and when they need to get out and run, the muni parks and rec dept has a fairly staggering variety of classes for minimal to zero fee for residents ranging from formal classes to playground games and toys. Parks and rec has or had a mandate that part of the building code was no house is more than a couple hundred feet (maybe a thousand feet?) from a free muni park, basically every subdivision has a park with kids actively in it, however minimal the park may be.

At the very low age you specify the selection is somewhat limited and usually they demand a parent participate with the kid WRT bathroom issues etc. When the kids get older there is more fun to be had, (semi-)organized sports and minecraft night at the library and movie night at the park (they use a projector and screen) and after school clubs and stuff.

A condo downtown means the kids will have nothing to do, but the burbs are a lot of fun as a kid and also as a side effect of the cost of entry, they're also relatively safe.

Even a few generations ago, 4+ year olds wandered the neighborhood with the other 4+ year olds lightly supervised and played games in the woods. Today that never happens.

And in those large family units, all the kids played with each other constantly and barely bothered the parents to do anything.

That doesn't happen anymore? Man it's sad to think I was probably the last generation to wander around outside with my friends and play.

Well at least in Canada and the USA in many spots. I don't know about europe and other parts of the world.

It is pretty sad.

I think you're taking littletimmy's comments too directly. The goal is that parents need more time, in addition to socialization given by preschools. These days with dual-income families this is hard. With 3+ kids, it's even harder.

The real concern is whether families have the choice to keep their kids home a bit more (i.e., say not every weekday) rather than force them to use daycare because they don't have time not to.

I don't agree with your last paragraph, as I have different values, but as far as your first one: this is the essence of 'hypercompetition', and it's bound up with our winner-take-all system / superstar effect.

Anyone who hasn't read "Twilight of the Elites" and "Average is Over" should do so.

Winner-take-all society: http://prospect.org/article/talent-and-winner-take-all-socie...

The superstar effect: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/26/business/26excerpt.html?_r...

Non-stop retraining: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/22/business/to-stay-relevant-...

My personal preference would be to accept this as the new reality and give better societal supports to allow people to compete (as Twilight of the Elites makes clear, you need more equality of outcome to enable equality of opportunity vis a vis education, tutors, etc.) like debt-free college and retraining programs, GBI, a more comprehensive unemployment system, etc. Rather than trying to roll the clock back, we should instead embrace it and allow people who want to be part of the race to have the tools to compete, while allowing those who would rather not to step away without starving and becoming homeless.

> This is one part of a much larger trend of dismantling all niceness in American life.

Maybe you mean "quality of life" instead of "niceness"?

I find that niceness is incredibly overemphasized, especially in early childhood education and media. Often things are unpleasant, but good to do.

I don't think you and OP commenter are talking about the same thing.

I think so, yeah. I was saying there's probably a better way to describe OP's take.

> It does not take a genius to figure out that this is not a sustainable system.

Or it's a more sustainable system. The American lifestyle in the past was mostly propped up by slave labor, both domestically and abroad. The reason the standard of living for the middle class is lower now is in part because of increasing equality. (Ignoring the massive wealth gap domestically, which almost certainly will be unsustainable in the long run.)

Some argue that the "system" exacerbates inequality because rich (maybe including middle class) people can afford to hire people and services to cover for when their personal desires interfere with their kids' development.

That is, rich people can hire nannies, drivers, coaches, tutors, move to safer neighborhoods (less time spent on teaching Junior how to not get mugged or killed), and install security systems. They can upgrade old-and-maybe-not-safe foods and products with expensive better-safe-than-sorry alternatives.

Even given the premise that all of this is the middle class coming down to Earth, going forward, it's another question entirely if families are generally better off with an at-home parent.

We really lack the labor demand in modern times for a return to feudalism. Arguably the current system is better for the wealthy than feudalism was.

It's funny to see so closely spaced, the two observations:

- Two-income households are struggling to make ends meet

- We don't need all the labor we have

The two statements would seem to support eachother. But what if all households switched to single-income? Then we would need all the labor we have. Presumably pay would rise to match.

That's a bit of a prisoners' dilemma, isn't it?

Considering that our civilization is greatly advanced over what came before, looking to the past for "what works" seems sort of silly.

Appeals to tradition don't provide a very compelling basis for arguments with people who prize reason.

To be fair, neither do appeals to abstract things like "progress" and "modernity". You need somewhat objective improvements for something to be better. Both "it's new" and "it's old" are fallacious reasons to prefer something.

I would assume oldmanjay is referring to the objective increase in life expectancy we have seen since the industrial revolution. However, it remains the been seen whether or not this is a valid example of "progress" considering the on going process of ecological self destruction of the human race and/or the imminent threat of nuclear holocaust.

>Before our white brothers arrived to make us civilized men, we didn't have any kind of prison. Because of this, we didn't have any delinquents. Without a prison, there can be no delinquents. We had no locks nor keys therefore among us there were no thieves. When someone was so poor that he couldn't afford a horse, a tent or a blanket, he would, in that case, receive it all as a gift. We were too uncivilized to give great importance to private property. We didn't know any kind of money and consequently, the value of a human being was not determined by his wealth. We had no written laws laid down, no lawyers, no politicians, therefore we were not able to cheat and swindle one another. We were really in bad shape before the white man arrived and I don't know how to explain how we were able to manage without these fundamental things that (so they tell us) are so necessary for a civilized society.

-Lame Deer

Why (particularly the mom) should stay home with the kids and play ? Why not dad?

Or one of two dads/moms. All kinds of variety in families.

why not both stay home ? :)

Looking at the divorce stats and custody stats and child support payment stats, major societal and legal changes would be necessary if you want the kids to stay home with ex-dad instead of going to day care while mom works. The related cultural issues are more complicated than the change itself.