I know one shouldn't question orthodoxy, but it seems insane to me to have children and then dump them all day, from a young age, with strangers. What's the point of having them if you're not raising them?
Children being alone at home vs. being with lots of other children in daycare has many benefits.
First, over the years I've seen a lot of kids that stayed at home with mom that were not socialized well at all. Being in a group is how we evolved. It's natural and normal. Being at home with one parent all day is not normal at all.
Aside from socialization, being in the "home bubble" doesn't do a child's immune system any good. They need to be exposed to lots of stuff early in childhood to develop a strong immune system.
Also, the kids being raised by strangers have behavior problems, not because they aren't socialized, but because there is a fundamental breakdown in the family structure.
We could debate this all day, but it probably isn't relevant for most here and no one way works for everyone.
Our kids are among the best "socialized" (as if that were the ultimate goal of life!) I've run across.
Yes, having a single child would be tough on that child in terms of learning to deal with others and their needs.
We educate them at home, or, rather, give them the tools & guidance to educate themselves, which is the only way it's ever going to happen.
It's been good that I've been working from home for 18+ years, running a "lifestyle" small software business (5 people distributed around the country).
The problem now is, there's no village. The older children are segregated in separate schools, and most of the adults are at work. Daycare is, in effect, the closest substitute we've been able to invent for a village on this axis. It may not be the final answer. Which is why lisper's comment is so funny; it's not a problem society has even solved, let alone individuals.
He talks a good amount of growing up in Des Moines, Iowa where all the kids used to just go out Saturday morning to a nearby field, meet new kids, and spend the entire day there before coming back home to dinner. Right now it seems the kids are too focused on their tvs and computers to go out and actually partake in the backyard baseball games.
Based on my own observations, I think that what the kids spend their time doing is largely a function of the parent's need to have them do something.
I fondly recall spending escapist afternoons digging into the dirt underneath a bush with my Star Wars action figures and creating my own world.
I don't think it's as much parents are trying to just get the kids to do something so the kids won't be around as the parents trying to improve their kids education and life.
There are numerous articles describing how even pre schools are becoming more and more competitive. In such a world what can you do as a parent?
My wife ran a daycare centre, and she's staying home to raise our kids. The best solution is to find the social activities in other places. Daycare is far from the end of the world, but I dont see it as the preferable option, just an easy and not the worst option.
It surprises me how rarely this gets said. It seems kind of obvious to me. In Canada a few years ago one party announced billions of funding for government-run daycare centers, while the other party (who won in the end) wanted to give the money as tax credits to parents. Seemed like a no-brainer to me, but I recall quite a controversy about how the latter proposal was "anti child care".
Perhaps the discourse is this way partly because of economics. Postwar economic growth was closely linked to women entering the workforce. A mass exodus of parents back into the home could have negative macroeconomic effects (that's the perception at any rate). From a conventional point of view, the "answer" is to prevent that from happening and commercialize child care itself.
The controversy was that the latter proposal was anti public child care. The rival proposals were pushing in different directions the economics of the decision of staying home with children vs. working and putting them in daycare.
Here in Slovakia, the most common way to solve it is that mother will stay at home for two or three years (it is also called "mother's vacation"), and then resume her career. I think that in most cases, this is the most sane option. Some mothers would stay at home for 6 years - but even in this scenario, it doesn't mean the abandonment of the career, does it? Can't she return to work after a few years and resume where she left?
I believe the first years of a child are most magical for the parents to watch...and those moments will not return: if your wife will miss them by being in the workplace, they just will be missed forever. So take care and enjoy being with your kid as often as you can afford!
In reality, the men are not keen on staying at home, and for good reason - you lose your marketability, and poetic ideas of parenthood aside, it's not all that magical to take care of a screaming, pooping kid who is too young to engage in activities that adults find interesting.
If am probably coming across a little harsh but having grown up female in the Eastern Block, I am predictably annoyed that the men from my part of the world are quick to preach to women what they don't want to practice themselves. If you think staying at home is so great, why do you immediately say David's wife should do it?
Austria, where we are now, is similar, and we've both taken several months "off" (or as much 'off' as I can force myself to do:-) to spend time getting used to the new situation, and enjoying her. It's difficult to say that it should be entirely the woman's responsibility though, especially as my wife is also quite talented in her field, and taking something like three years off might put her permanently behind the curve.
Without a doubt, though, we both firmly believe in spending as much time as possible with her!
There are a lot of difficulties when raising kids, and both parents are well educated, and can have potential good careers. I don't have kids, but my sister has, and she decided to stay for half a year home, then they got a nanny. She had to find a job that had flexible hours, so she could be home early enough, and she works hard. She has a masters in finance, and an MBA, and she decided to get a job that pays less, but that has better hours, and a lot of her salary goes to the nanny.
Before having kids, their planning was different, that they were going to send the kids in day-care, but the local options were not that good at all, and my niece was getting sick very frequently, so they had to change the plans, and for a month or so they were in a dilema on what to do.
Your comment had a very arrogant tone, and it came out preachy and self righteous. Maybe you didn't mean it, but that's how it came.
We've done our best to think about the future, but it's unknowable.
The fact is, finding a perfect solution for taking care of small children in an industrial society is probably an insoluble problem. And if so it's not one you can solve before having kids, or after them.
Looking at it again, I hope that he wrote quickly without really thinking about what his words meant.
You said you were facing a certain problem "now", 2 months after the child was born.
You could have made your decision about how to handle it prior to the child being born. If you'd done that, you would not be facing the problem now, it would be decided. But you didn't.
He asked about why you didn't decide in advance. You got offended by the implication that you hadn't decided in advance. That was something you said yourself, so it's unreasonable to be offended by it, or to blame him for noticing you said it.
And, BTW, if you and other parents can't read it rationally, why should I believe you handle parenting matters rationally? Parenting matters are more difficult and more emotional than reading a simple forum post.
I thought the waterfall development link basically answered the question about advanced planning. I'm mostly interested in the emotional fragility of parents and wanted to see what would happen if I pointed out that logic does not back up his reaction.
= trolling
Can I have my DH rating now? :)
So you didn't really care what people had to say, you were just trying to bait them? i.e. you were being a troll on purpose?
I wanted to learn something. Why did you post?
Obviously, you don't have to answer him in detail, but you could do more than simply scold the guy for asking. I know plenty of couples who never thought deeply about finances before they launched into parenthood.
I don't mind talking about my own job situation, but don't really feel comfortable talking about my wife's.
To keep it brief, my wife and I could live in any number of countries and both of us could find jobs in most of them. With choice comes a lot of thinking and a great weight of responsibility. Live in Italy, make less money, and have the grandparents nearby to help out? Live in the US, make more money at better jobs and pay someone? Stay in Austria with a nice social welfare system, and reasonable jobs? All of those have further variables and derivatives and basically end up being very much impossible to calculate a priori (and there are elements that are private and I don't wish to share publicly).
In any case, I think most parents would respond with some indignation if their commitment to their children were questioned. It's just something that's probably not very polite to do outside of a small circle of friends and family.
For what it's worth, I don't think he was questioning your commitment to your children, so much as the forethought you put into the process. He just didn't do it in a diplomatic way.
It's not like the career question is unforeseeable. Many people put off having kids due to that exact issue. You can be offended all you like, but if you really didn't have a solid answer to that question before you had your child, I do think you were being irresponsible.
Hopefully he just dashed off a quick response without really thinking about it.
Of course, there are extenuating circumstances which can waylay any planning; I never intended to imply that there weren't. Go back and read my post, and you'll see that my criticism was conditional. If you did have a plan in place, and then extenuating circumstances derailed those plans, then fine.
Twice now you've taken statements that were pointed at a specific issue and acted as if they were broad indictments of your parenting skills that amounted to nothing more than ad hominem attacks. False umbrage hardly contributes to a strong and friendly community.
My umbrage was anything but false: the idea that we had taken the arrival of a child so lightly as to not consider and plan for the future most certainly implies negative things about me and my wife, especially considering that people here really don't have that much knowledge of our situation.
pg's response was quite astute: we thought and planned beforehand, but things change rapidly, and in ways that are unpredictable. One small, simple example is that I thought at this stage, since our daughter is basically in the eating/pooping/sleeping phase, it would be easy to get back to work, and leave most of it to my wife, since she has to feed her in any case. However, it's quite difficult to concentrate on work, and I really enjoy helping out and spending time with the baby, even if she doesn't do much. There are plenty of other things that aren't like we'd imagined them either.
Basically, unless you have experience with kids yourself, I think that it's not so easy to understand what it's like.
If you and your partner didn't make plans for your careers before having a child, then suck it up and accept that you were irresponsible. If you did make those plans, then put your reading comprehension hat on and stop with the broken-heart act. Christ.
Then when it was her turn to work, her husband arranged to work part time from home. The kids were self sufficient enough that he could focus on his programming for short stints during the day and for longer periods at night when his wife got home. He was able to do enough work to "stay in the game." In fact, he liked it so much he decided to do it for another 2 years.
At that point the girls were in pre-school, so had about 3 hours each day to get work done while they were gone, could then play with them the rest of the day, and finish his work at night when his wife was there.
The girls are now 6 and in school for most of the day. He's looking at going back to work full time, but given how much he enjoys working from home, he may just keep doing that for a while.
You. The way you made her. The Famous 20% time?
Who else is in a better position to take responsibility and care, than you (& partner)?
How else could you do it if not with love?
Your partner + you: 20% off is 1+1 days a week. Make grandparents happy, that makes +1+1 days. Each of you can take 2 days off a month. And this is even without parental leave for three years.
After that, daycare is your answer: socializing is an essential need for humans.
Implying that only insane (read: ignorant and uncaring) parents would choose to work and leave their kids to play with other kids during the day is just typical conservative scaremongering. I am sure there are bad daycare centers out there, but then there are bad stay-at-home mothers out there also. One is not good and the other is not evil, both are choices made by equally intelligent and caring people.
Smart people I know who don't have children are often a source of great observations about child rearing in general and even specific parenting situations. That's the positive side of your point, and I've used it many times to get a read on what I might be missing.
The mistake they make is not in their observations, which as I said are often very rational, but in assuming that they themselves would do better. What makes parenting hard is that your emotions are involved in a way that is far deeper and more complicated than anything you've experienced before. It's easy to be a "good" parent when that condition is absent, for the same reason it's easy not to get hypothermia in Florida.
I agree with you when it is an entire family of mother/father, grandparents, uncles, aunts, etc. raising children. But I can see how a mother (or father) alone at home all day with children may not be able to provide the same environment as a day care with several adults and many other children.