Why do people want their children raised by strangers?
Mom and Dad can hardly wait for school to start again.
The other day I happened to be driving on a major road in the relatively early morning—I work from home so that’s a comparatively rare time for me to be out—when I got stuck behind a school bus loading up a bunch of kids. You have nothing to do when that happens but wait. It was a crowded suburban school stop and I could see tons of kids getting on the bus while their parents stood there and waved at them. On the one hand it was a nominally sweet sort of nostalgic scene, very American, recognizable and affecting in its own unique way. On the other hand it was just so bizarre. These kids were getting on the bus and disappearing from their parents’ lives for the next eight or nine hours—and they do that every day, five days a week, at least eight or so months of the year, for years. For like a solid twelve years these parents barely see their children for most of the year.
Of all the mainstream cultural impulses surrounding children, maybe the oddest one to me is this one, the sheer determination that most parents have to put their kids as far away as reasonably possible very early in their children’s lives. Many parents are searching for childcare for children as young as six weeks old; others are determined to get their children into daycare when they are a few months old. They do this most often because they want to return to work and need someone to take care of their children, to feed them and change their diapers and teach them things. Daycare or not, eventually of course nearly all of these children will go to school of some kind, where they will spend the majority of their waking hours from the ages of about six to 18.
This is a very strange compulsion on the part of parents and I have to say I simply do not understand it. The weirdest thing is that everything thinks this is the normal approach to child-rearing. We never really stop to question the abnormalcy of wanting to put your child away from you as soon as it’s feasible to do so. It’s odd. You have to ask what the point is of having a child in the first place, if you are essentially outsourcing about 60% of your child’s existence to strangers.
That certainly goes double for conservatives given that nearly all of the educational economy is controlled by progressives who are singularly determined to turn your child into another progressive. It never fails to amaze me how willing so many conservative parents are to send their children into an environment that is comprehensively hostile to their own values. But it’s also an odd thing for progressive parents, too, and so-so liberal parents, and “moderates.” It just feels odd up and down the board. Why did you have a kid? What was the point of having children if you really don’t want to be around them that much, if you would rather that a rotating group of strangers do the job for you?
I guess the most commonly cited reason for shipping your children off like this is that you have to work, you need to make money and you can’t do it if your kids are around. For single parents I guess this is true. (The adviso, as ever, is wherever possible to avoid being a single parent.) I think married couples are considerably more capable of arranging their lives so that they don’t need to push their children out of the house at the earliest possible opportunity. Sure, you might take a hit on your two-earner income if one you decides to stay home with the kids after you start having them. Then again, there are a million ways to work from home, and flexibly so. That’s always been the case and it’s doubly true now. You might have to hustle to do it. Or you might not. The modern economy is dynamic beyond what anybody thought it capable of even just a decade or two ago. You can get a job online, or you can get a job you run strictly out of your home, or a million other things in between. It’s not at all that hard. Do this and suddenly you can spend a lot of time with your child—the little human being you decided to create and whose love and well-being and proper rearing are directly and distinctly your responsibility.
Often parents will also express fear that they can’t properly educate their children. “How could I be expected to teach my kids everything they need to know? I need teachers to do that.” I have written elsewhere of the bizarre, almost schizophrenic quality to this type of argument—how strange it is to be so determined that your children learn subjects and lessons that you yourself have apparently comprehensively forgotten. It doesn’t sound like that mode of education was really all that effective or important if you yourself can’t remember any of it! But in any event it has never been easier to both teach your children, and arrange for them to be taught by others, while still avoiding the send-your-children-away-for-eight-hours-a-day paradigm.
Most parents will nevertheless opt to put their children away from them. A world in which children disappear for most of the day is normalized. It’s abnormal now to see children at any time other than getting on the bus at 7:30am and getting off it at 4:30pm. That’s deeply weird from an historical perspective, but it’s even weirder from a parenting perspective. I just do not understand it. Why did you have children? What drove you to do it? These are not rhetorical questions; they are worth asking if for no other reason than that the answers might be interesting. If your response is, “I wanted to have a child because I knew instinctively that doing so would be psychically and spiritually gratifying, because I wanted to create someone as an act of preemptive love who I would then love forever,” well, that’s great, that’s really the right response, but then it’s puzzling that such a deeply meaningful decision would then be crammed onto a school bus and shuttled off to school for eight or nine hours, every day, for years and years. You don’t get those years back. They’re there and gone, so quickly. Doesn’t this seem odd? Why do so many people feel the need to do this? The answers to that question might be really interesting as well.