As if there was no choice other than both parents continuing to work full time jobs.
Of course some people do this. But it's hard.
This is a long way from 10 hours a day of outsourcing when the kid is only awake for 12 hours.
Childcare is for the benefit of the companies who can then extract value from more workers.
I was lucky with my kids, we don’t live somewhere like London, we could book 4 hour periods a couple of times a week and didn’t need two full time workers.
Trying to raise an infant or toddler without other people caring for them at least some of the time will make most people slowly go insane.
The excitement when school started was real. Same when my wife and I realized leaving them by themselves for short periods of time was probably doable.
I noticed I was pretty triggered when I heard a friend complain "it's hard to go a weekend without supports". She meant her parents. Sure, you should try a decade...
I find that, if anything, there is little to no stigma to getting your child in daycare ASAP after maternity leave ends and going back to working full time. That's "infants in daycare for 8-10hrs/day".
That's a different problem that would be better addressed by mandatory paid parental leave and universal healthcare - so new parents can afford not to work while their child is an infant.
I think Covid showed pretty definitively that avoiding illness through extreme social isolation is not worth the costs in emotional and social development.
Unless the child is immunosuppressed, outside of a novel pandemic scenario, a vaccinated child is not likely to contract a very serious infection beyond the common cold or flu by being in childcare. Much of that can be mitigated by giving parents the flexibility (sick leave) to keep their children home while ill.
> I work on the top floor of a building that has a YMCA daycare on many of the bottom floors, and I often get sick passing through there on the way to work.
Perhaps you are uniquely susceptible? I don't think this generalizes to most people if they practice public hygiene habits like washing your hands when arriving at the office.
Outside of society being oriented around having my wife work and sending our son to daycare rather than having her raise him at home, everything's going great so far, one year in.
Probably just the common cold most of the time. My nose was runny through most of my childhood too. And kids are snotty - always have been - it's not necessarily a condition that needs to be fixed. If it's bothersome to you, then of course avoid group childcare.
Also, some diseases like chicken pox are preferable to contract as a child and gain immunity to then - since they are far worse symptomatically to contract as an adult.
I'm not as close to my sister in law as I am my sister, but I know that when my niece started daycare they knew some kids and parents from the playground already.
It doesn't strike me as bizarre that someone would know people in their community who are in a similar life stage.
After a couple months? If you don't know the other kids by name and some other parents, you may have a bad daycare full of people who do not care.
My sister ran a fairly renowned daycare for over a decade. She ended up the caretaker for the children of many friends, and gained many friends of the children she helped raise. The daycare was a massive part of their community. It allowed the parents to function in modern society while ensuring their child was in the care of, essentially, an expert.
Having kids in childcare is not the downfall of society, and in some ways is similar to The Way Things Used To Be. My youngest goes to pre-school childcare where he gets to interact with kids and parents from his local community whom we see outside of childcare as well. He sees his “teacher” when he walks with me and his older brother to his school because her daughter goes to the same school as his brother. The people who work there are part of the community as well.
Childcare can be the modern form of the village collectively caring for the children so that not every parent is busy with child-rearing all the time.
It’s also good for kids to spend time interacting with people who aren’t part of their immediate family.
Not every childcare program is created equal, but there is a place and need for good ones.
Not once has it ever felt like “dumping him in an institution”. Your kids do not need you 100% of the time, and usually it’s better they’re not with you 100% of the time.