Full-time Daycare Is A Necessary Evil

...but it's still evil.

This article is going around twitter. It argues that universal day care is a good, that it makes the world a more tender place. Some choice quotes:

As a mom, I call bullshit on the belief that our kids are so special that only we can be trusted to care for them.

Silence the voice inside your head that has internalized the patriarchal belief that children are best loved at home, exclusively by their mothers.

Because in America today, there are only two types of mothers of young children: mothers in crisis and mothers experiencing neoliberal Stockholm syndrome.

Before I explain why full-time daycare is evil

I have enormous sympathy for parents (both mothers and fathers) in situations where full-time work is a necessity who have to put their children in full-time daycare. I cannot imagine how hard that must be. I personally believe in flexible hours and arrangements, and that employers should use the lessons of the pandemic to better facilitate work-life balance. This is not that difficult — kids are only very young for a brief period. The first five years of life, before school starts, is a finite period, one crucially important for that child’s brain development and emotional health throughout their life. Five years out of anyone’s career trajectory is a sacrifice and is not trivial, but it’s also not that big of a sacrifice. Parents should be willing to die for their kids. For people who can make it work, taking a less-enjoyable job with flexible hours, making arrangements with close family members to trade care of each other’s kids, or other less-than-perfect situations that maximize the nurturing of kids is the bare minimum kids should receive.

Juggling the logistics of time and career management for the first few years of a kid’s life in order to facilitate the emotional health, brain development, and other important aspects of proper nurturing in the early years—this is something that parents should be willing, able, and prepared to do or they shouldn’t be parents.

As someone who hopes to be a foster parent one day, I am making conscious choices to develop skills that can make me employable for remote work because I want to be able to do both well — be a good employee who contributes to meaningful work and be a good foster mother, present with my foster children for however long I have them to make a difference in their lives. That possibility is a privilege that not everyone has, and I recognize this. What I’m writing is meant to tell the truth in order to help readers deal with the truth, not to shame people doing the best they can with difficult situations.

Why full-time daycare is evil

Before I moved to New England for school, I was a full-time nanny for a little over a year. The little girl I took care of went from not quite two years old to just past three during the time I worked for her parents, a busy two-career couple.

I was a very good nanny who provided extremely high-quality care. Having lacked for love in my childhood, I was determined to be a loving, stable presence for her. I never once parked her in front of a screen or ignored her for my phone. Every single day, I read books to her, taught her colors and animals and shapes, helped her learn to get along with the other kids in the playgroup I faithfully took her to, taught her to draw, involved her in everything in an educational way (“here’s how we cook lunch….get our clothing clean…pay for our groceries….”), potty-trained her with patience, and otherwise gave her absolutely everything I had to give.

And you know what? I didn’t love her. I thought I did, and certainly felt affection for her, enjoyed her, and cared about her well-being. But I didn’t love her. I realized that when I drove home after the last day. I cried for the first ten miles, and then I was done. Within a week, I barely thought about her at all.

When I read that article, it took me a few seconds to remember her name.

Think about that — the little girl got a top 1% experience. She was in her own home. She had full-time one-on-one care, from someone who was well paid and highly motivated to provide extremely high quality care.

And she still was not receiving parental-quality love and nurturing for the vast majority of her waking life.

Daycare, in most circumstances, is nowhere near the experience I gave her. Daycare is people who make a lot less money and are, in most circumstances, significantly less motivated to do a great job—having a roomful of kids to manage all at once.

Evolution gave humans incredibly long childhoods because childhoods matter. We are not blank slates, but we are the blankest slates in nature, to quote Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying. We did not evolve to be tightly attached to our parents and offspring, a species so needful of emotional connection that solitary confinement is literally (and legally recognized as) torture, in order to be handed off to strangers to be managed full-time.

Do I think daycare kids can’t turn out well? No. Obviously, some do. And I think there’s a very big difference between full-time daycare and part-time. A kid who goes to daycare a few hours a week, or for a full day once a week, etc., but is with parents or family the rest of the time, is likely getting their needs met just fine and the daycare experience is novel, stretching, and potentially positive.

But the idea being preached in that article— that “full-time daycare is a poor substitute for parental care” is a patriarchal dogma? That, my friends, is total horseshit.

A note on language:

Yes, I’m saying “parents” and not “moms.” Why? Mostly because I believe fathers are crucially important to kids, and more kids would benefit from more hands-on fathering. We have mountains of data showing that fatherlessness causes all kinds of terrible difficulties. Of all the ways I’m screwed up, the lack of a loving father is far and away the biggest and most far-reaching problem. Having said that, biology is a thing and during the first year at least, the reality of breastfeeding (which is ideal, when possible) makes moms more important and that’s another reality I refuse to deny, erase, or pretend isn’t real.