The problem of daycare
I've been working with and around schools for a long time. I taught in high schools while in college, taught full time high school for five years after I graduated, then did a doctorate in education. Now I'm teaching people who work in schools about school, specifically education policy and law and social context. So it was, to use a technical term, a mindf**k for me when we dropped Thisbe off at daycare for the first time a couple weeks ago.
She's almost two, a pandemic baby, born in May 2020. She hasn't known a world outside of the shutdowns. She doesn't know about restaurants or stores or big parties (aside from what we've been able to do outside). She also doesn't really know what it's like not to be at home with us. We've traveled and visited family, but the majority of our time has been at home because we've parented with the perpetual fear that Thisbe will contract a novel coronavirus and get sick, maybe have to go on a ventilator, maybe die, maybe give it to us and make us very sick, maybe give it to people we love who will get sick and die. They call it pandemic parenting. You get used to it.
The whole childcare situation is overwhelming and full of fodder for thinking about how society could be different. Here's what I've seen and felt.
The daycare hierarchy
Before she ever went to daycare, there was the process of getting her a spot in one. It was a shitshow; one that was invisible to us before we started thinking about it. Like so many things in our society the options are hierarchically arranged in a competitive, racialized, and tragic array. There are the storefront daycares, some quite close to us, that initially looked good. Friends visited one we'd heard was okay but they described a small facility with a concrete back area where a dog chained to a post in a neighbor's yard was barking angrily. That wasn't appealing. We got another recommendation but when my partner visited that center the teachers weren't masking and all the kids in every group were eating altogether rather than being kept in more intentional germ pods. Also didn't feel great about that. These daycares go for about $300/week (one of them only took cash) and have spots available more often.
Then there are the daycares that everyone in our network of mostly professional class white people know by name. These are more expensive and very hard to get into. It turns out that when couples get pregnant and want a spot at these daycares, they sign their unborn child up for the waiting lists there. You can do that. By the time the infant or toddler is ready to go, there might be a spot.
After signing up for the spot, you have to call periodically every month or so to see where you might be on the list. If you get a call that your name has been chosen, it's like winning the lottery. If you get that call but your baby isn't ready, you pay for the spot so you don't lose it. These daycares usually go for $500/week and more. We have resources like money, time, and networks to take advantage of these daycares. So we're in a position to enter the competition.
The unspoken thing about these two sets of daycare is that working class people of color go to one kind and professional class whites go to another. Only certain people can afford to do the expensive competition thing. Of course, the racial categories don't map very well: there are many professional class people of color who go to the expensive daycares and I've heard of some professional class white parents who go to the working class daycares. But there's a preponderance of racialization and class difference you can't ignore, while it's also hard to pin down. The 'people of color' category is underdetermined. The class category is underdetermined. Neither of them quite get at what's happening in the race/class/gender differences that are so vividly there. So like almost everything else in this society, there are walls everywhere that no one talks about but everyone feels; walls that separate us from one another, causing injustice and bad feeling and keep the whole oppressive/exploitative system churning as everyone tries to make the best of it for their kids.
Something positive in this mess is that Philadelphia has a local subsidy for childcare funded by a tax on soda. The way this works is that every daycare center--the professional class and working class--have funded spots reserved for working class people. This is something, but it could be way better. When we visited friends recently in Montreal, we got a glimpse of one of the best daycare policies I'd ever heard of. Every daycare center is free and paid for by the provincial and city governments. There's a public website showing available spots. It's easy to sign up and get into these centers and it's easy to change if you want a different experience. Of course, the taxes are higher in Quebec. But you get a program that serves everyone. Sigh.
Waiting and getting the call
We signed Thisbe up at all the professional class competitive places when we decided we wanted her to go (but not right when she was born), particularly after we got vaccinated and it looked like the Delta variant was waning. That was mid-2021. At first we did a nanny share with another family in the neighborhood and Thisbe spent some of the week at their house.
We set up the nanny share both because we were afraid of the variant and we didn't have a spot at any places we were excited about. Using the National Domestic Worker's Bill of Rights that Philadelphia recently passed (organized by friends of ours, for which we did a bit of organizing too) we wrote out a contract allowing for breaks, paid time off, sick days, bonuses, and vacation as well as stipulating expectations. We felt proud that we were doing the right thing and resentful that we were trying to compensate for societal-level failure. All told, we paid about $600/week for that arrangement. It was fine, but annoying to act as employer, facilities manager, and parent all at the same time.
Throughout the fall we called six daycares every month asking about a spot. We got pushy. We have the time and resources to do this. In December we got an email from one of our top choices. There was a spot! Thisbe would start there just as the omicron surge appeared to be peaking. Inhale, exhale. They had protocols we trusted. We were excited and scared and annoyed and angry and happy and sad. She started there mid-January.
Institutions
I experienced this milestone in a few registers that went from small to large-scale. The first and most vivid were my feelings. I was sad! The separation was intense. Here was a little human I'd helped conceive and seen born and been with at home basically all the time for her first year of life (I taught from home until this past fall). The connection to her is unlike anything I've experienced before. So when we dropped her off and she wasn't in the house there was this epic absence. I think it's a good thing she's at daycare. She was clearly getting bored with us and our house and needs to make friends, learn new things, etc. Also childcare is hard. It takes a lot of energy, creativity, and putting a lot of what you want to do aside. It's hard on the body too. So her going is good. But still.
That moment of dropping her off is so heartbreaking. Something all-enveloping, my love for her, gets sundered. I don't know how else to describe it. It's a tiny world cracking somewhere deep in the core. I know I'll see her again. I can pick her up and take her back home if I want. I could even watch through a window throughout the day. There's even an app that tells us when she pees, sleeps, and eats. They send us videos of her dancing. Despite all this, the experience is rough and, well, sad. There's a loss.
After that sadness, there's a frustration verging on resigned anger. After all this energy creating family life with her and now she just leaves? What? We bring her to someone else? Full day daycare means seeing her for a bit in the morning, dropping her off, then picking her up and hanging out in the evening a bit before she sleeps. I felt like some absurd version of an empty nester: I never see her anymore! Silly, but I still feel it.
This feeling gets me thinking about the nuclear family structure in our culture, the messages we get about how kids are 'ours', like we own them, and how family/school institutions are set up in our society to facilitate and encourage that sense of ownership. Thisbe isn't mine. I'm responsible for her upbringing along with my partner and our network of friends and family, yes, but couldn't we set up institutions and practices and thus our ideas around that responsibility differently? I keep thinking about how Ursula K. Le Guin writes about daycare and school in The Dispossessed, like a kibbutz on steroids.
I also maybe felt a little guilty for a sense of relief at someone else taking care of her out of our house. The sound of her being around the house, as joyful and lively as it is, could also be distracting.
The distraction I mean is largely referring to distraction from focusing on work, which starts to scale my reaction up into the more political and economic angle on daycare, syncing with the thinking about social structure. While so much about school focuses on kids learning, a big social upshot of kids going to school is that parents can work and know more or less what kids are up to.
A fancy socialist way to say this is that education is socially reproductive: it makes production possible. In this case, daycares take on the carework role that parents have in the family so they can sell their labor. Malcolm Harris tweeted recently about an anecdote from Selma James. Apparently, when she dropped her kid off at school she was mad that it felt like capital was stealing her child. I kind of felt that way too.
Thisbe still cries when I drop her off. I feel and think all these things all at once and I tear up too.