Daycare is Normalized But it Ain't Normal

Fling yourself onto the third rail of motherhood with us!

When our baby was turning five months old, my husband and I toured local daycares. I remember going to one larger facility that was highly recommended: against one wall was a row of uniform, bolted-down highchairs, and against the other wall were pack-and-plays lined up in front of a big-screen TV.

The woman running the place gave us a spiel about routines and regimens and handed me the book On Becoming Babywise and said she’d prefer if my baby was on this schedule before she started at the center. The book promoted an infant-management system, based on a rigid eat-play-sleep schedule and a sleep training regime that promised to give my infant “the gift of sleep” from as early as nine weeks old (the book is authored by two men).

I walked away with a pit in my stomach. The whole thing grossed me out. Especially getting an assignment to make my baby conform to a schedule that existed not for her benefit but to make her amenable to the daycare workers. After five months of maternity leave from teaching junior high school, I was faced with the agonizing choice: what type of stranger would I entrust my baby to.

I ended up connecting with the mother of a former student of mine who offered to watch my baby in her home. She had her own toddler and told me she would just follow my baby's lead. I felt such a sense of relief that I came to find everything about this woman endearing: she decorated her dining room table according to the season, had an 80s-style blowout, and regularly posted glamor shots on Facebook. Her kid was one of the most polite, soft-spoken 14-year-olds I had ever met, with a solid group of friends and straight As. Clearly, she knew what she was doing. I would just have to suck it up, drop my baby off, and trust this kind, glamorous stranger.

I Don't Want to Send My Kids to Public School Because I Used to Teach at One

I kept telling myself I was lucky. Five months is a lot of time off! Some people get 6 weeks! Even though we didn't use daycare, I still felt some sort of invisible pressure to "get her on a schedule" so she wasn’t too much trouble. I had some false narrative built up in my head, to which the lady from the other daycare had contributed. My daughter took to the sitter well. There weren't any tears at drop-off, the day went by fast, and the smile I got when I picked her up was everything.

At family gatherings, when I'd update everyone about what going back to school was like as a new mom, my cousin would remark, "I could never let somebody else raise my kid while I go raise everybody else's."

Ouch.

Must be nice, I'd snort to myself. There was no other way. It felt predictably awful and every cell in my body did not want to have someone else raising my baby. I had to do this, I'd assure myself. But did I?