The baby crawls now! It's an army crawl and appears to take a great amount of effort, but he's getting where he needs to go. And where he needs to go is always, always over to his brother so he can try to grab whatever toy he's playing with.
Despite being a younger sibling, I never appreciated how different it is to be the second kid until I had one myself. Gabriel reads Jonah's books, he plays with Jonah's toys, he watches Jonah's shows. He has skipped right over almost all the baby things. When you're second, you live in your sibling's world right away. They're very cute together. Gabriel loves Jonah so much and laughs at anything he does. Jonah lays down next to Gabriel on the floor and crawls with him.
When Jonah was eight months old we were just moving to Princeton. The previous couple months had been super stressful — we had been kicked out of our rental house in Michigan and I got a new job and we had to find somewhere to live on extremely short notice. Seems insane I was doing all that with a baby! Very grateful we're not in a similar situation now.
I remember that the first thing I did after accepting my job at Princeton, even before signing a lease, was secure a daycare spot. I remember being so relieved when I found a place that would take Jonah on the date I needed. I was thinking about that when I read this essay in The Point, where the author seems to think that daycares are even worse than McDonalds: "A Big Mac tastes the same from Orlando to Omaha, but fast-food chain equivalents of McDaycare vary dramatically."
I have a feeling the writer hasn't been to McDonald's in a while. Possibly ever. But she's not wrong — not all daycares are alike. The first daycare I took Jonah to was insane about covid — they made me wear gloves to drop off my baby, even though I wasn't allowed to enter the building. Every time I handed him over I wondered if they knew that he was a human being and not a piece of sanitized plastic.
But the McDaycare my kids go to now is very nice. The same ladies who take care of Gabriel took care of Jonah when he started. I may be raising them in a "collective" but everyone on staff knows my children's names. The teachers get paid vacation and sick time, and I get to have reliable childcare every day except for some federal holidays. When we are not all struck down by norovirus, it works.
The writer of this essay seems to live in New York City, where apparently McDaycare costs more than double what I pay. This sucks for her, but I bet her rent is double what I paid, too. New York is expensive: is this breaking news? And like all essays about childcare, hers throws a lot of stones ("We were just back from the better part of a year abroad that had spared us the rigged American childcare market") but provides no actual solutions.
Actually, that's not true. Her solution is that instead of making baby Big Macs, you should consider parenting her way: with a part-time Portuguese nanny. This would be lovely, really, if only my work were part-time and my house did not double as my husband's office. Basically, it would work great if my life were entirely different.
I love reading parenting essays, though, because everyone who writes them seems to think that parenting is somehow a shared experience. It's not. It's shared in the same way as, say, puberty. We've all been through puberty, and the steps were similar, but the actual experience is singular. No two puberties/parentings are really the same. All we can do is trade stories and commiserate.
So here is my parenting essay/haiku: If you love your child and do your best to keep them safe, you are doing a great job. Congratulations.
7 comments:
In the end, the essay wasn't that anti-daycare, although it didn't really have much of a point either. "I happened upon a Brazilian lady who agreed to watch my kid part-time along with her kids" is called "home daycare." It already exists. The part I liked was about how daycare was all data-fied, and they send all that annoying info every day about like how many grapes your kid ate and what times he pooped. I do sympathize with the sadness of McDaycare - the daycare we sent Mimi to when we first moved to Cville was like that (she also doesn't mention the constant sickness these places engender, even if the workers are good), and it dissuaded us from infant daycare forever. It wasn't even terrible, it was just sad.
But I also didn't understand what stigma surrounding nannies she was talking about that made daycare seem more socially acceptable. I have never come across such a stigma. To the degree that people worry that nannies are exploitative, such people tend to also believe that minimum-wage childcare centers are at least equally bad. I mean, some people are jealous of rich ladies who can afford full-time nannies, so maybe they disparage the practice on those grounds, but not b/c they wouldn't prefer to BE those ladies.
Yeah, I'm surprised second kids are not much smarter and more successful than first borns tbh b/c this phenomenon is universal - they get exposed to everything sooner and skip the introductory stuff. But all studies point in the other direction. (Sorry.)
Yes, the essay is anti-daycare. Just calling it McDaycare kind of tips that off, but the pointedly depressing descriptions really drive the point home.
And the essay did have a point: to make parents who send their kids to daycare feel bad about it. To suggest that there is a better way, and the better way is to do it how the author does it. You are not the target audience for that, since you and the author already agree.
To be clear: I don't find infant daycare sad. I really like my kid's daycare. If I didn't, they wouldn't be there.
But daycares do vary. Ours was just an actual McDaycare. Mimi had like 6 different teachers in one year b/c there was so much turnover. I'm certain that not a single employee of the entire center was still there by the time Leon would've been old enough to go. Hence my sympathy, and my desire to find ways to avoid infant daycare after that. So I agree that bad daycare is bad, but I don't have much of a view about daycare as a whole, other than that it's probably on balance worse than staying home for infants. But everyone can't keep infants home, so oh well. But since the author also disparaged every other form of childcare while also implicitly opposing being a stay at home mom, it's hard to say what her point actually was. The Brazilian lady sounded like just an ad hoc solution to a precarious situation, and only for like two hours a day. That isn't reasonable for anyone in her audience. Maybe the point is we should become like Portugal, but Portugal is poor and sad too.
“it's probably on balance worse than staying home for infants”
Why? I know we’re shitting in Emily Oster, but there doesn’t seem to be any evidence that babies or kids in daycare are worse off, on balance. And anecdotally my kids don’t seem to get sick any more frequently than anyone else’s. Jonah is 3.5 and has never needed antibiotics. The horror stories I heard about daycare have no resemblance to my actual experience. Gabriel is tired when he gets home, but that doesn’t seem to be impeding his happiness or well being.
I have no problem with people preferring to keep their babies home! I totally see why that would be great. But why does that decision require every other option available to be depressing and detrimental?
I don't know if they're worse off in the long run, but in the short run, Mimi was sick constantly, had endless ear infections, had to get ear tubes, and after that, I was not interested in trying again. We also didn't really have any daycare options around us that were noticeably superior to McDaycare, so it's not clear where we would've tried. Leon had a much healthier first 16 months at home. But it's of course possible that he was simply less sickly and would also have been less sick at daycare. I can't know. I guess the question would be, is there any specific benefit to daycare over staying home? We sent Mimi to daycare b/c we had to work, so the benefit was mainly for us, which I think is a perfectly good reason for people to do it, but then if you could still work and have a nanny of some kind instead, what would be the reason to prefer daycare?
My infants were not in daycare and were still sick basically all of the time, until maybe about six months ago. I think some kids are just sick a lot. I am FLABBERGASTED that Jonah has never been on antibiotics.
My whole point was that your mileage may vary, and that’s true for most things in parenting. I prefer daycare over hiring a nanny and paying for her vacation time and sick time and finding back up care when she can’t be there. I prefer daycare over buying a bigger house that would fit an au pair. You have made another fine choice and decided to keep your babies at home. These seem equally good to me, given our preferences! I don’t know why making these choices requires us to write essays about how people are leaving their kids in depressing basements.
Alex: I know, it’s CRAZY. Jonah has had lots of viruses. It’s not like he’s never sick! I’m sure he’ll need antibiotics this month now that I’ve written this.
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