The Belief that Providing More "Quality Care" is Our Only Realistic Option
Almost everyone agrees that day care of any kind is not the optimal way to raise a child. Yet, the full-time care of a loving parent - once thought to be every child's birthright - is now being derided as a Utopian dream. Day care may indeed be a "second choice" way to raise children, asset the "experts", but we should nonetheless be prepared to face reality. Since so many work, and since most of them "must" work, child care has become something unavoidable - a necessary evil we must learn to live with, like root canals and taxes.
What experts do not take into account is, that as far as rearing their children is concerned, most mothers believe they should have more choice than second choice. Why, they want to know, are we doggedly heading toward an uncontested, clear second best solution to the current child care crisis in a country that has always pledged that its children deserve the best? If most mothers truly regret their need to work, why do we insist on making it easier for them to do so? Why aren't we concentrating our efforts, our time, our funds on making it easier for them to do what they want to do instead - spend more time with their children at home?
We believe the child care crisis can be solved without spending billions of dollars annually and without encouraging the kind of child care that mothers do not want. Suggestions have poured into our organization from parents across the country - parents who know firsthand the sorrow of having to leave their children, parents who have thought deeply about what is best for their families, parents who are not afraid of innovation and creativity when it comes to solving a national problem of serious proportions.
Reprinted from Welcome Home, a monthly
publication of Family and Home Network, 9493-C Silver King Court,
Fairfax, VA 22042.