Morning News: A Word on Child Care Costs
Gail Collins is absolutely right.
We aren’t going to solve the problem [of child care] during this presidential contest, but it is absolutely nuts that it isn’t a topic of discussion – or even of election-year pandering.
Do read her column in today’s Times, “None Dare Call It Child Care*.” It got me to thinking. Let’s get out a piece of paper and pencil and try to write down ten reasons why “child care” is such an open sore. Everybody recognizes the cause of the problem (few middle class families can support themselves on one spouse’s income alone), and its side-effects (poorly paid, unlicensed caregivers) are certainly well known. What’s the problem?
(Continue reading at Portico.)
How come I can’t post comments on the actual article at portico?
I’d like to point out something you seem to have missed in your armchair theorizing: a massive difference between badly-funded childcare in the home by a parent and badly-funded childcare out-of-the-home by non-parents is the quality of love and attention that each situation makes or does not make possible. Certainly there are homes in which there are too many kids, in which the mother is too harried and too depressed and simply too poor to give love and attention to her children. But the fact is that a parent can be a better caregiver to small children under adverse circumstances, in general, than a non-parent in a daycare center can.
my point is that while stingy fathers could withhold ‘wages’ to mothers, the mere withholding of wages was more likely to result in a withholding of conjugal relations than a withholding of adequate care to the kids. in the private home, moms are screwed out of their rightful wages because they are slaves to their love of their children, and because what kids need most cannot really be purchased. Good childcare centers are good because they hire people who genuinely love other peoples’ kids, and they pay them well enough and give them the support they need so they are not overwhelmed by the job and are able to attend to and love the kids they are in charge of. Far fewer people love other peoples’ children as a matter of course than are able to love their own children. So out of home childcare is always going to be more expensive than maternal childcare because parents can give care effectively in more adverse circumstances than non-parents/non-relatives can.
the world is built on the unpaid labor of women, whether or not those women are also working outside of their homes, for wages. It is profoundly unfair. The work of parenting is so enormous and so unable-to-be-conceived-of in terms of ‘compensation’ that it calls utterly into question our American propensity to cast everything in economic terms. Not to discuss mothering and childcare in economic terms is to render them invisible and unimportant; and so it must be done. but to discuss them in economic terms shows starkly how utterly inadequate economic terms are.
This has been an unedited, and not very well thought-out rant by your friendly neighborhood women’s studies major.
Also, your comments box needs to be larger, and how come you don’t have a preview option?
Oh boy I may regret jumping in here, but first of all kudos to Amy and a nod to RJ for bringing up the subject — because yes, Amy, the world is built on the unpaid labor of women, and yes, RJ, your generation of men will indeed need to pass on, so that (if we survive as a society) people will forget there was a time when males (white, mostly) so dominated the world they could suppress women and the poor and the disenfranchised and children. Or not. The current regime may still pull it off, and there are even women suffering from Stockholm Syndrome to aid and abet. But make no mistake: the reason they don’t want to pay for child care is the same reason it’s always been: a hatred and fear of the feminine, a desire to repress and suppress the weak and stay in power. Put her in a Burqa or keep her at home cookin and cleanin and havin babies for her good Christian Man, it’s all the same. As for the economics, don’t get me started. The statistics have been so distorted we can’t even see the two-income household w/kids for what it is — an exception to the rule, not a sign of crisis. As exceptional as the “Leave It to Beaver” “Father Knows Best” mom-at-home-with-the-kids dynamic everyone wants to be nostalgic for. It was wishful thinking then and it’s more of a lie now. And when the conservatives declare that people who can’t afford insurance for their children shouldn’t have had them, as they did the other day, the underlying message should be loud and clear: it is a message of contempt and hate, a message from the haves to the have nots. Death threats and hate mail to a family with a sick little boy and girl is the equivalent to the “Let them eat cake” of an earlier elite — although at least that message of contempt and disregard had a certain flair — still, you remember what happened to them. The pity is a similar solution remains so unthinkable to the current oppressed. America’s poor won’t storm the Bastille or walk to the gates of Versailles or let some heads roll, and that in my humble opinion, is the real problem.
Yes, that was a rant. Best regards, GS