Daycare is Normalized But it Ain't Normal

Fling yourself onto the third rail of motherhood with us!

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This is always a tough topic, and is frequently taken as a criticism of working moms. Radical Moms Union criticizes systems and not women- and the systems that funneled us millennials into prioritizing corporate achievement and saw motherhood as “less than” is still something worth discussing for me. Being a mom is awesome, important and when we lift up and support mothers to be with their babies for the first four years, our entire society will reap the benefits.

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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?

I wish someone would have told me, "You do not."

Here's what they said instead:

"It's hard at first but you get used to it!" and "It's good for her to see you working!" Now, divorced from that reality, I realize how batshit crazy that sounds. A 6-month-old baby isn't thinking, I'm glad my mother is so committed to her career that she's leaving me with a stranger who has a disturbingly large collection of porcelain dolls. Huzzah, mother!"

Modern Solutions to Modern Problems

Daycare, the third rail of motherhood, is abuzz in the momsphere thanks to an explosive episode of the Spill Over podcast that featured a guest who said all the stuff that working moms fear: “When you leave your baby at daycare for 8 hours, they think you died.” Then the internet went nuts.

To quickly recap:

• Alex Clark, the #cuteservative host of the Spill Over Podcast, interviewed Dr. Erica Komisar, a licensed clinical social worker who was unflinching in her descriptions of the way daycare can harm the development of a child. Komisar argues that the reason for the astronomical rise in childhood mental illness over the last two or three decades is because non-parental childcare has become the norm. This leads to a host of later-in-life emotional and attachment disorders, since these children were deprived of a consistent parental presence during early childhood. A clip from the interview went viral.

• Our favorite problematic economist Emily Oster weighed in to say that the studies that track early childhood outcomes have found that the quality of daycare may have a minor impact on your child’s well-being. But overall, nothing to stress about.

• Renee Reina, host of The Mom Room podcast, found Dr. Komisar’s comments to be disrespectful to the dedicated “teachers” who work in daycare centers and how much her son loved his teachers.

A quick aside to say two things. First, the average daycare worker makes $14 an hour, that’s less than many fast food workers—not a very “respectful” wage! We’re asking A LOT of people who make very little.

Second, we do not believe women who put their children into daycare are bad parents. The relentless economic and social pressure exerted on women to participate in the labor force as a way to have a legitimate identity outside of being a mother makes the decision to put a child in daycare all the more complicated. What’s worse, there are so many women who want desperately to stay home with their children and are not able to because of finances— that is a societal failure.

Is daycare (under 3) really the best for babies? What is your gut feeling when it comes to dropping off your 6-week-old at a facility with 8 other screaming babies? How does that feel? Forget the research (it exists) for a minute.

For babies under 1, the science is clear: “daycare likely damages cognitive skills and children’s later behavior at school is even worse. There is no boost to social skills.” The two factors that lessen the ill effects of daycare, according to research, are: 1) the age the child enters daycare, the older the better. 2) high socioeconomic status can offset negative impacts.

And what of children needing to be around other children their age to be ‘socialized’? As if the pinnacle of a healthy child is their ability to stand in a line, raise their hands, and hand over the fire truck they were playing with without a full-scale tantrum. According to this large study, that’s entirely a myth and actually, more time in daycare is linked to WORSE social skills in elementary school. Researchers found that children spending long hours in any kind of out-of-home childcare are more likely to have “elevated levels of aggression”.

Part of the conversation with Komisar that hit me the hardest is when she said (paraphrasing): when we tell women to ignore the guilt they feel from leaving their babies to go to work, we are telling them to ignore their most nurturing and empathetic trait, which is what a child requires for their survival.

I remember doing just that. I listened to the platitudes of people telling me not to feel guilty while I obsessively counted up the hours I actually got to be with my daughter and compared them against the hours she was with the sitter. I didn’t plan it this way. I just assumed, like every other girl I knew, that my career goals and motherhood goals were one in the same, that one wouldn’t need to be sacrificed.

This is the typical status quo for young women: go to college (amassing crushing debt), start a career (to service that debt), get married, wait 3 years, have a baby, get a house (more debt), and go back to work like nothing even happened.

Maybe in religious circles, the idea of being a “homemaker” has some appeal to the young, but for the rest of us, “staying at home” sounds like a deferred dream. Who dreams of staying home? When all you want to do as an idiot young person is go out, stay up, and go out, OUT, OUT!

Trad Wives are Eating the Rich

Millennials, more than any generation, regret their student loans. Many millennials I know don’t even recall our parents or anyone else explaining the reality of having thousands of dollars of debt loans and the implications of that decision on your life. It was just… something you did. You filled out that FAFSA!

Here I am, post-50K college degree, post-babies, finding myself, and starting an entirely new career that I decided to start with my brain, which now boasts a fully developed frontal lobe.

I wish we could reach young women before they become first-time moms. I want to deprogram them from all this bullshit before they even fall down this path. I want to say: What kind of career can you have where you can leave it for (at least) three years to be at home with your children? I know you think you don’t want that now, but you most likely will. You are hardwired to want to be close to your infant. Your brain changes when you become a mother. Your priorities change. And that’s a good thing. The status quo encourages women to fight against their instincts, and we are all worse off for it.

The Relatable Mom Economy is Deranged and Poisonous

I also want to tell them: Men and women are different; plan accordingly. You will experience parenthood differently, and in no world will it ever be 50/50 with your partner, because a mother is a whole universe to her children. He can leave for 8 hours a day with little consequence if you’re at home. I didn’t make the rules I just blog about them! SORRY!

In all seriousness, why do we lack such imagination for what the life of a mother could look like? Is this the best we can do? Why are we trying to justify the tight conceptual shackles that society places on us instead of re-imagining new possibilities for ourselves? This is why I bristle at screaming for more maternity leave. Sure, more would always be better. But maternity leave still conceptualizes a woman as a worker first and a mother second. It also relies on the government and corporations to create a system for mothers. Can we do it ourselves? Can we do better than this?