Catching Up With France on Day Care

[Karmadillo]

I came across this after looking at the story about the mom who was first arrested and then fired from her job at McDonald's for letting her nine year old play in the park while she worked. Had she lived in France, there's a good chance this never would have happened. Once you read about France's system of state-run day care centers, you understand why our elites work so hard to make us dislike the French (a theme of Michael Moore's Sicko). If Americans knew what Europeans were getting for their tax dollars, we might actually be able to have a competitive socialist party. Interestingly enough, the author ends her piece identifying one instance of socialized day care in the USA--a program run by the Department of Defense. Figures.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/01/opinion/sunday/catching-up-with-france-on-day-care.html?_r=0

Catching Up With France on Day Care
By PAMELA DRUCKERMAN
Published: August 31, 2013

PARIS — PRETTY much from the moment I got pregnant, neighbors and friends began urging me to apply for a spot in one of France’s state-run day care centers.

I’d just smile politely. I figured this was another of those foreign habits — like eating horse meat — that I’d observe from a respectful distance. I couldn’t fathom government employees changing my baby’s diapers. And I couldn’t really fathom day care in general. Didn’t it cause attachment issues, or worse? I planned to hire a nanny.

Eventually — propelled by curiosity, a looming book deadline and the fact that everyone else was doing it — I applied for a spot in the “crèche” (rhymes with “mesh”). It was a long shot anyway; in our area, only one in three applicants got in. I heard that it helped to sound desperate. So once my daughter was born — my first child — I sent a follow-up letter with my sob story: a full-time job, no family in France to help out, and a 5-week-old baby who, tragically, was hearing almost no French.

Strangely, this worked. She got a spot for the fall, when she’d be 9 months old. Before long, I was dropping her off at the crèche around the corner four days a week. To my surprise, it wasn’t a baby gulag. The people who worked there were caring and capable. It was subsidized by the state, with a sliding scale based on income, so I could afford it. My daughter seemed delighted. And I was getting my work done. Six years later, I’ve sent three kids through both the crèche and France’s free universal public preschool and come out converted.

[elleng]

1. Good one.

'None of this means that French-style crèches will soon be popping up in American cities. American solutions will have to be home grown. Still, one pocket of America already has a program that looks a lot like the French crèche. Babies are accepted from 6 weeks old. Fees are subsidized, and charged on a sliding scale. Quality is carefully monitored. There’s usually a big scramble to get a spot. It’s the Department of Defense, which runs one of the country’s largest networks of day care centers, for the children of American servicemen and -women. I bet that, like me, they had no trouble getting used to it.'

As I recall, other federal agencies also have/had child care centers.

[TBF]

3. We used a federal daycare when my

husband worked for a federal judge. It was a well-run center and our child seemed very content there

[BrotherIvan]

9. I have told many people of my time living in different countries

Whenever anyone complains that Europeans or Canadians are taxed too much, I point out all the things you get. The problem is, Americans do not see a return for their taxes and so they don't want to pay any more. Education is cut, there is no daycare or efficient, clean, and safe transportation. I used to get mail TWICE a day in Canada and never had to pay a doctor's or dentist's bill in Denmark. Oh, and they didn't have guns, so the cities were much safer. I read the author's book and her description of childcare in France would make any parent swoon. But they also have a very different idea of raising a child. It's well worth the read.

[elleng]

10. I think you're right,

Americans don't see a return for their taxes. Are too foolish??? to recognize how things work? Of course, repugs encourage existence of an uninformed electorate, its how they garner support.

[BrotherIvan]

11. It's because "soshulism"

The Republicans have had a very long range plan. Put into effect starting with Reagan. They may be at the end of it as the Tea Party eats them. But at the same time their ideas have been so pervasive, even Democrats accept things like business demanding impossible profits, soaring education and perpetual debt, bankrupt cities as everything gets privatized, guns everywhere, even in schools and churches. They don't like them, but they accept these things as "reality" rather than what it actually is. They think it's reality that a minority party is governing this country. It's reality that we can't sell single payer health care that this country needs, when there are a million ways to pay for it. We should be selling all the positive liberal accomplishments in advertising and news such as California and Vermont. And we need to stop appeasement and fight.

[Demeter]

2. We should live so long

I LOVE your non de plume, Karmadillo!

[Karmadillo]

6. Ha. Thanks.

[demigoddess]

4. my dad was in the military in the 50s

stationed in france when my brother was 3 we were living right down the street from a french elementary school. All the neighbor ladies encouraged my parents to send him to the school and he actually attended for several months. not much of a language problem as even grade schoolers were taught english in those days, and probably now also. The kids there started school at age 3 not 5 or 6 and went longer days than we did.

[Starry Messenger]

5. Gah.

"This isn’t the first time Americans have urged the government to do more. In the early 1970s a sweeping national child care bill made it to President Richard M. Nixon’s desk. But he vetoed it, pushed by conservatives who claimed that if it was too easy for women to work, the traditional American family was doomed."

I think this is the philosophy they still operate under.

[Karmadillo]

8. Your post made me think of "The Way We Never Were" by Stephanie Coontz

It's somewhere way back there on the reading list, but I remember the line from a review where she said something to the effect that Leave it to Beaver was not a documentary.

https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/stephanie-coontz/the-way-we-never-were/

Placing the American family in its historical, cultural, economic, and philosophic context, Coontz (co-ed., Women's Work, Men's Property, 1986) identifies the myths--and their sources, functions, and fallacies--that Americans generate around family life, as well as the terrible burden these illusions create. Violence, abuse, poverty, ignorance, alcoholism, dependence on government support--in brief, all the social ills attributed to the breakdown of the family--have in fact been a part of American social life since Colonial times, Coontz says. She further argues that our ideal of family life is primarily an invention of the 50's, projected in TV sitcoms such as Leave It to Beaver, and is an ideal as pernicious as are the social problems it supposedly prevents. Families always have been diverse and fragile, shaped by a community of interdependencies and reciprocities easily lost.

more...

[Starry Messenger]

12. That looks really good.

I'm fascinated with the cultural obsession that the RW has with the "holy family" (in the Engels sense), which I think does go to their anxiety about politics and the economy and the need to control. I've been digging around Dominionist writers (ew) and they write quite a bit about capitalism, which I've never seen really explored in an left-wing journal, though perhaps it is out there and I've missed it.

People tend to highlight their religious nuttery and bigoted social legislation, and not see what role it plays in their economic ideology.

[Karmadillo]

7. Here's the science-fiction daycare link from Sicko in case someone missed it.

Take the four trillion we wasted on our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and this would be easy to pay for.