4 ms·

I'm deliberately not addressing the article as a whole, but I'd like to engage with your smaller point. My parents viewed all day care as "dumping [their] kid i

by eszed 24d ago

I'm deliberately not addressing the article as a whole, but I'd like to engage with your smaller point. My parents viewed all day care as "dumping [their] kid in an institution" and made massive sacrifices so that my mum could housewife for a decade+ with me and my younger sister. My wife and I have made a different choice with our son, and I honestly wish my parents had done the same - at least after we were two or three. Admittedly, my wife and I are fortunate to be able to pay for him to go to an excellent pre-school (though the one local to my parents was similarly good), and I see him naturally acquiring a social fluency and confidence with his peers that I didn't have (if I even do!) until I was an adult. Furthermore, had I been cared for outside the home, my mum would have spent vastly more time with my sister when she was an infant and toddler, which I think would have been a lifelong benefit to her. I also think my mum would have been personally better off getting back to full-time work ~5 years earlier than she did: full-time parenting wore on her, and she and my dad would have been able to retire a few years sooner. Those are all highly-dependent personal circumstances, so I'm not going to draw a universal rule - but I'm telling you this in order to caution you against doing the same. All families, and all individual circumstances, are different. [Second thought] I am going to make one general point: the benefit my son draws is highly dependent upon attending a good school. Institutions absolutely exist where "dumping them" is an appropriate epithet to apply, but there is no reason why that has to be the case. I don't know where you live, but in my country the "pro-natalist" political party is also devoted to policies which make schools worse (cutting funding, lowering teacher pay, meddling with curricula, etc), which seems to me to be perverse.

jimbokun 24d ago
You are citing the results of an experiment that is impossible to perform.
- eszed 23d ago
  Oh, absolutely! But, so are most of the lessons we draw from life experience, instead of, like, science. That doesn't make them unimportant to talk about, so long as we approach them - and each other - with appropriate degrees of humility and good will.
em-bee 24d ago
actually, i strongly believe that the most benefits come from how (not how much) parents interact with and care for their children. i went to kindergarten too, and i grew up spending a lot of tome outside with other kids with plenty of opportunity to socialize, both supervised and unsupervised, but lack of my parents availability (to put it mildly) created an anxiety that completely ruined any social ability that i would have been able to acquire otherwise. so sure, each case is different, and you are not wrong, but you are putting to much value on good institutions. the heavy lifting still comes from the parents. your children are doing well because you care that they do.
- eszed 19d ago
  I do agree with you about that. It sucks that you had parents who weren't there for you in the way you needed. I'm doing my damndest not to repeat the mistakes my own parents made, and we'll see in twenty years or so how that goes. But, that was part of my point above. My sister to this day feels like she never had the supportive and attentive relationship with our late mother that she needed. (For what it's worth, I agree with her.) In my imaginary reality, at least, if she'd been the only child at home for a few days a week, while I was at day-care and then school, maybe she'd have grown up feeling differently. I see good parenting and good institutions - that's schools, but also parks and pools and little leagues and libraries, and, hell, even good policing - as mutually supportive. It's unfair to expect one side of the individual / community matrix to make up for all of the shortcomings of the other, but each can strengthen the other side.

by eszed 24d ago

jimbokun 24d ago

You are citing the results of an experiment that is impossible to perform.

eszed 23d ago
Oh, absolutely! But, so are most of the lessons we draw from life experience, instead of, like, science. That doesn't make them unimportant to talk about, so long as we approach them - and each other - with appropriate degrees of humility and good will.

em-bee 24d ago

actually, i strongly believe that the most benefits come from how (not how much) parents interact with and care for their children. i went to kindergarten too, and i grew up spending a lot of tome outside with other kids with plenty of opportunity to socialize, both supervised and unsupervised, but lack of my parents availability (to put it mildly) created an anxiety that completely ruined any social ability that i would have been able to acquire otherwise. so sure, each case is different, and you are not wrong, but you are putting to much value on good institutions. the heavy lifting still comes from the parents. your children are doing well because you care that they do.

eszed 19d ago
I do agree with you about that. It sucks that you had parents who weren't there for you in the way you needed. I'm doing my damndest not to repeat the mistakes my own parents made, and we'll see in twenty years or so how that goes. But, that was part of my point above. My sister to this day feels like she never had the supportive and attentive relationship with our late mother that she needed. (For what it's worth, I agree with her.) In my imaginary reality, at least, if she'd been the only child at home for a few days a week, while I was at day-care and then school, maybe she'd have grown up feeling differently. I see good parenting and good institutions - that's schools, but also parks and pools and little leagues and libraries, and, hell, even good policing - as mutually supportive. It's unfair to expect one side of the individual / community matrix to make up for all of the shortcomings of the other, but each can strengthen the other side.