A few months ago, I was chatting with the mom of a toddler who is the same age as my daughter. As tends to happen when parents of young kids get together, the subject of childcare came up. She relayed that she was happy with their current situation — a nanny share with a few other families — and that it was a welcome change from the day care center they had used previously. One day at their former day care, they showed up at the door and were told to leave: the day care center didn’t have enough staff for the day and was at capacity with kids.
My mouth fell open. “You were turned away at the door? For services you paid for? On a day you were supposed to be at work?”
“Yup, that’s exactly what happened,” she said. I relayed that while there were problems with our day care situation — it was expensive, of course, among other things — thankfully nothing like that had occurred in the nine months we’d been there.
I went home later feeling like we had dodged a bullet. My partner and I had looked at that same day care her family had used, even putting in an application, but we ultimately chose a different one. I may have been patting myself on the back a bit, thinking that our intuition about that place had been right. Turns out the joke was on us.
The history of day care is like the history of oysters: once for poor people, now a luxury commodity. Day cares were originally charity programs, designed to help poor and working-class mothers who worked in urban industrial centers. During World War II, the US government opened the first…
Auteur: Hailey Huget
