Thursday, June 24, 2010
Some Personal Thoughts on Putting Your Child in Non-Parental Care (Confessions of a working mom)
10:24 PM | 
Posted by
Amanda J. Moreno
Before you read this post there are two things you need to know about me:
1) My professional position at the Marsico Institute for Early Learning and Literacy revolves primarily around finding ways of improving the quality of experiences that children receive in child care and preschool;
2) My older child started part-time center-based child care by 17 months and full-time by about two, and my younger child has been in full-time center-based child care since the age of eight months, and is in full-time/full-day preschool currently.
My name is Amanda, and I’m a working Mom.
So clearly, both professionally and personally I am the opposite of a child care opponent. But, I’ve had C-sections too, and I don’t go around promoting them as the best way of delivering your baby, because they just plain aren’t. Similarly, despite my wishes to completely assuage my guilt and yours, putting a child in full-time non-parental care isn’t the best way of raising your child. There – I said it.
Wait – before you accuse me of going all Dr. Laura on you – hear me out. There are a lot of BUTs here, and I’ll try to mention every one I can think of (and hopefully you'll add plusses of your own). But before I do, I want to explain why I use the term “non-parental care” as opposed to “child care” or “day care”:
The decision to put our second baby in full-time care as in infant was an agonizing one. I had applied for a job months prior and forgotten about it by the time they called me for an interview. I clearly remember explaining to the woman who called, when she asked if now was a good time to talk, “Actually, no, I’m in the middle of nursing.” I was not really on the job market actively wanting to change what I was doing. I was my own boss, and could come and go as I pleased, and work at home as I pleased. At the time, Waverly was 7 months old, had never been in the regular care of anyone but myself or my husband, and never tasted a drop of formula. But the position was unstable and grant-funded. The offer of stability, not being primarily responsible for others’ salaries, and of course, my own salary eeking itself just beyond the laughable range was enticing. They told me I could pump breastmilk at my leisure.
At the time, my sister (who lucky for me lives close) was still in the middle of her extended leave from teaching, which she did to be at home with her second child. Naturally, those I agonized with about “putting my baby in child care” suggested that I ask my sister if she would watch Waverly. She was more than willing to help, but as we continued to work out the logistics it became apparent that the situation would not work for us. So I agonized some more about the fact that she would have to go to **child care**.
But then I realized, even care provided by a loving aunt or grandparent is still not ME. They would be the ones caring for and enjoying her. Their love for her is certainly a valuable and precious thing that we'd be unlikely to find as easily in a non-relative, but child care from family members is still multiple hours of not parenting. That is my long story for why I use the term non-parental care. But the story also leads to what I did next when I realized (or, more accurately, had the punch-in-the-gut brand of revelation) that anyone besides myself or my husband was really just a substitute.
My priority became finding a child care location that was within a mile of my job. That way, I could spend every lunch hour with her, and nurse her as well. I visited her every day until she was 18 months. Thus, I rationalized to myself, Waverly never went without me for more than a 4-hour stretch. That sounds a lot nicer than “infant in full-time child care”, doesn’t it? Did these visits benefit Waverly? I have no idea. I can tell you that I do not detect any attachment difference - she is neither more distanced nor more clingy towards me than my older daughter. Probably more importantly, it made me feel better. It made me feel as though I was doing what I could to compensate for a situation that I knew was not the ideal.
So, when friends want my brutally honest opinion about putting their child in non-parental care, here is what I say:
· If you can avoid putting your child in the full-time care of someone else before age two, Mazel Tov. I think that is a good thing.
· If you cannot avoid it, the longer you CAN wait, the better. Early development including attachment is so rapid in the first year of life, that delaying even by months IS worth it. If you can work only part-time, then do so.
· My rationale for the importance of the age factor is thus: The less a baby is a baby and more like a child, a professional caregiver becomes more of a teacher and less of a parent substitute. Starting at around two, socialization provides more of a benefit to children and child care teachers start to offer things that I don’t offer at home – a water table, for example. I know that may sound silly, but I think there is a benefit to children to be in an environment where Mommy isn’t worried about the carpet, and getting messy in finger paint and play-doh is a regular occurrence. There is value in developing an early sense of community – taking care of things and each other - that isn’t quite identical to what can be learned within one family. Most importantly, (and to the extent I and my compatriots accomplish our professional mission), high quality child care providers know a lot about children, how to build on their strengths, and how to help support them through their challenges. They have ideas, tips, and tricks that sometimes don’t occur to you as a parent.
· My biggest revelation in being a working mom was that, outside the 40 hours of working was NOT the time to catch up on ANYTHING except being with my kids. In addition to the daily visits, we found other ways that we had to be different from other families in order to hold sacred our time together as a family. So other things get sacrificed. We almost never go away on overnights without our kids, almost never get babysitting on weekends, rarely have time to talk on the phone with friends or family, hardly ever have weeknight playdates (my kids have plenty of socialization), and often have a messy house. I had to come to terms with these imperfections in order to allow our available parental face time to not be sacrificed.
If you have had a child in non-parental care, did you make similar sacrifices? If you are contemplating this reality in your future, how can you imagine changing your routine or adjusting your schedule to maximize togetherness? Can you accept not “having it all” in order to give your child the gift of time?
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6 comments:
This post reminds me of how incredibly lucky I felt (still feel!) to have had you in our "play group" for the first year we had Soren. Thanks, Amanda!
amanda, i'm surprised you's so down on nonparental daycare--as much as i've struggled over the decision, i have much more positive impressions than you.
i think the biggest drawback is germs--all of which are important in the long run, but perhaps harder in the short run when less medicine is advisable.
the pluses are many, though. they include:
* simulating a sibling environment for children who are first/only-borns
* acclimating children to trust more adults and environments than they would otherwise
* having the benefit of adults that usually have years more experience raising kids than the parents (who also can help parents identify issues/concerns/positives in comparison)
* saving the sanity of the parent(s)
Brooke - You're making me blush!
Athena - Absolutely! That was exactly what I was hoping you would do - identify other benefits of non-parental care that I hadn't thought of. And I agree with each of those you identified! I hope that I conveyed my agreement with your "more years of experience" issue too, just in the general sense that good child care providers know lots of things that can be helpful to parents.
Also, this post was not a comment on how good quality child care can be - THAT is a whole other can of worms. Research shows that average child care environments are just that - average. That is why I do what I do for a living - and put my children in child care because of it! But IF quality is good (and I'm working on changing that from a big IF to a little one), I'm absolutely not down on it and apologize if I conveyed otherwise. And, I think great parents find great child care - regardless of financial issues - they find a way.
I was hoping to convey a bit more of a vulnerable side - my personal struggles with the realization that I was searching for a substitute for me. If I ONLY said that "my kids are fine and haven't suffered from being in so much child care", that would look like a rationalization. So I wanted to admit that I had to move other pieces of the puzzle around in order to get as close as possible to what I believe my evolutionary doppleganger would have done.
Ultimately, what I hope a conversation like this will do is allow us to talk more openly about all of the potentially "non-ideal" aspects of our family lives so we can work together at finding solutions, workarounds, "the bright side", and most importantly, not feel alone. Thank you so much for contributing to that process here!
Beautiful post - thank you for articulating the complexity of this choice so well. My own two cents is that, while it is painfully true in most families in the U.S. that any non-parent family member is "NOT ME", this is not *equally* true everywhere in the world. True, Grandma or Auntie still doesn't smell like Mom or Dad, but in extended-family households, I think the overall parent/other loving family member difference is not quite as different as here.
Erin - Agreed. I thought about that, but didn't write about it because of all of the other huge differences between our culture and other world cultures where "passing the baby around" is the norm. Child care is certainly not the cause of any of the things in our culture that forces distance between ourselves and our bioligcal instincts, but merely a consequence.
Nevertheless, although there can be a very positive context for baby-sharing, I would imagine that part of what makes those contexts adaptive is at least in part, the sheer proximity of all the "others" to the primary parents. In other words, that sort of baby-sharing is positive, in part, because it actually allows more seamless transitions between all of life's important activities, thereby allowing parents to parent more. So, in the sharing, there is also support of more independent parenting too. That's how it works in my imagination anyway!
don't know how i missed this one! that not-going-longer-than-four-hours stretch sounds as ideal as can be in the context of choosing/needing to go back full-time... totally relate to needing to let so much go, even as someone who doesn't work full-time
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