Daycare Facilities and Divorce Rates Affected by Dragging Economy?

Unfortunately, I have a habit as of late of listening to the news on the radio at night before I go to bed because I don’t have a lot of time during the day to catch up with the world.   I end up going to sleep, usually mad as hell by some of the so-called “news” I hear.

So, I guess the number of divorces in the Chicago-land area have decreased because people can’t afford to get divorced this year.  Gosh…now we’re being forced to live with each other and actually work out differences, workplace affairs, expensive vacations, greed and money crunches for the time being instead of being graced with the affordable convenience of filing for divorce whenever we just can’t take it anymore.

And affordable daycare facilities?  Since when is daycare affordable?  And shouldn’t it be expensive?  If you can’t swing it, maybe that’s a good hint to you.  It’s a pity.  A pity for the extent of the burden that having a child seems to have become. 

Daycare is nothing short of a chicken coop or hog pen as far as I’m concerned.  I don’t care how much you’re paying.  What could the inability to afford daycare mean for our children?  For their future?  Unfortunately, this means we are left with changing diapers and feedings more often than we’re used to.   Maybe this means our child could get our own undivided, less harried attention instead of the chopped up moments and discombobulated eyes of a daycare worker. 

And like every other “necessity” or expense you have when the bills roll around every month, it’s just another necessity to accompany the necessity to live beyond ones means.  A good daycare, if there is such a thing, will cost you.  It will cost one of the parents something and I’m guessing, on average, at the least a third or more of their income.  And if it isn’t costing you much, maybe you should be worried. 

I really like kids, personally.  They are the only thing I can think of at the moment that symbolize hope.   Of course, parents who put their children in daycare from infancy will act like they do by bragging, doting, and giving their child any thing they want.  Children are an amusement.   A living being worthy of digital snapshots and infrequent weekend trips to the zoo or park.  And even those parents who find within themselves to muster up some actual quality time with their kids on the weekend, it takes everything in them just to make it to Monday.  How do I know this?  Because I heard from the lips of parents.

I worked in a better than average daycare in Chicago for a while.  But I have to tell you, some daycare facilities might be clean, they might be posh with infants starting at around $1200 a head, but no daycare is worth the first three or four years of a child’s life…critical years your child and you will never get back.

What’s three or four years in the bigger picture?  I can hardly turn around before one year of my life is up.  Daycare took a lot out of me mentally, emotionally, and spiritually.  I came home many nights crying and feeling worthless, not just from the exhaustion of five or six kids to my one set of hands, but trying to divide my attention between those 10 infants who really needed undivided attention and with only two women in the room.  Oftentimes one woman was missing half of her teeth or couldn’t even write her name, and that woman wasn’t me.

Parents never think of what all that responsibility does to the daycare workers.   Many women can’t even handle the weeks before they put their child in daycare.  I mean, really, if you can’t handle the first six weeks on your own, how the hell do you think a daycare worker is managing 5 or six to herself?  Sure, most basic needs are being met like clockwork, but the real attentive needs take a back seat because someone else is sick again, needs his diaper changed, a nap, is sad and crying or one is waking from a nap and needs her lunch.

I guess I just can’t understand it.  It may have something to do with my, thus far, inability to have a child of my own.  Am I envious and bitter?  Maybe.  But more than that, I’m just heartbroken.  It’s one thing to send your 4-year-old to preschool, but I just can’t muster respect for women (other than single-parent women who have absolutely no choice) who throw their just out of the womb infants into the arms of a daycare facility for someone else to attend to.  I remember distinctly rocking a six week old preemie and thinking, this could be mine.  Would I want someone else rocking, perhaps the only child I’ll ever have, to sleep while I deal with the stress of ringing phones, disgruntled clients, bitchy co-workers and pressing deadlines?

I remember doctors, lawyers, consultants, dentists, teachers, etc coming to pick their kids up in the late hours of the afternoon around six or seven.  “This is it for us…one is enough.” “Well, come on kiddo…time to get home and get you to bed.”  I’m thinking, what a couple of  selfish wussies they are.  Between both parents, no doubt, making $100-$200 grand a year.  As it stands, they have only the weekends with their kid and I doubt they can hardly handle that now that they’re used to daycare handling five of those seven days for them. 

And what an injustice.  I mean, parents make a choice to bring a child into the world and then don’t even have it in them to take care of the child themselves.  It’s all easy come, easy go.  The truth is, raising a child, educating a child in the early years and showing that world, the world as you know it and being a part of that world, is a lot harder than any job you could ever have.  But I’d think it would be a lot more rewarding.  God forbid if you should learn something eye-opening or surprising besides how to consult a client or run a copy machine.  I watched my own mother with five children and not much money or resources.  But she did it, and she did it well.  God bless her.

These days it is a rare thing for any woman to admit to any reward that comes with being “just a mother” for the time being because this is the 21^st century…we women are beyond just motherhood.  Being a stay-at-home mom is nearly shameful, lazy, thankless.  It’s always comes down to not being able to cope, where’s dad, why can’t he do this?  Why must it be me because I’m a woman or I’m the mom or whatever?  The kind of job a mother has never gets you anywhere.  We can have it all.  And you’re right.  We can have it all because all or nothing is what we’ve chosen.  However, as far as I’m concerned, having it all is having nothing, if you can’t be there for the first few years of your child’s life.  I guess it is unfair to expect one parent to stay home and “sacrifice” while the other one follows his or her career dreams.  And so, it’s only logical, fair, that we dump the only child we may ever have, at a good local daycare.

Why even have a child?  Chances are, like a lot of the parents I knew when I worked in daycare, you’ll miss all their first times.  Surprisingly, I found that many parents thought all that through (or maybe they didn’t) and were ok with that reality because for them the acquisition of a child was just another addition to the home, another expense.  Some parents were heartbroken when they didn’t get to see Brian or Carly’s crawl or sit up for the first time and you could see it on their faces because they hadn’t really thought it through, or maybe they thought they could handle that reality when it hit. 

I can’t imagine carrying a child for nine months, the emotion, the physical discomfort and labor only to turn around and leave them in a strange place while I go back to my Career/desk job.  I don’t know how you can just turn that all off and walk in the direction that best suits you.  I don’t care who gave labor.  Someone, surely has some parental instincts here.  But what do I really know?  I’m not a parent.  I’m not grappling with all the expenses that have to get paid every month.

It just seems unfair that we have as a society chosen to invest in careers, homes, SUV’s and other pieces of junk that remain, even as we die.  We just can’t seem to invest in each other.  We’re always competing with one another and at the expense of others.  I know…we’re in hard times now…everybody needs the money these days.  For the typical middle or upper class family, one salary isn’t enough anymore.  These days one parent shouldn’t have to give up his or her career while the other one has to stay home and take care of the kid?  Seems unbalanced, seems unfair.

The fact is that it always comes down to the fairness of the adults and everything else but the child.  It always comes down to our own need to “find ourselves” pay the mortgage or the car payment, save for our kid’s college or cello lessons, the endless dining out because everyone is too tired to cook a meal much less chew our pre-prepared salads together.  Rarely does finding oneself ever happen in our own lifetimes, let alone the early childhood years of our own.

It’s funny how still, after eight years of living in the shadow of a materialistic, greedy president all we know how to do is point our fingers at the Bush administration for our economic mess, but we sure aren’t going to take any responsibility for ourselves and our own greed and insensitivity.  This is America!  Here we can do anything and have everything!  And with both salaries we can rest comfortably at night with the idea that our children will have all of the things we have and more. 

But right now, when it matters the most, they don’t have us.  At the expense of everything we still don’t have much because we’ve forfeited what really matters.  Our children learn from us and what we have found most valuable, and the greedy cycle continues.