Please insert “daycare that is crappy” for “crappy daycare”. Reading it out loud several times before publishing it, I thought that was clear.
When I was very young my parents lived in a singlewide trailer that looked a little something like this.
Source
They were working day and night to build up a farm from scratch with no outside help other than some massive bank loans (something that’s incredibly difficult). Working outside the home wasn’t a choice for my mom, they were doing everything they could to survive. For them, and many others, daycare and preschools are literally lifesavers.
As with all things though, there is a wide spectrum. Some facilities are fantastic, others are deplorable. I was trying to explain these kids weren’t spending time in the deplorable ones.
December 2nd, 2011 on 1:15 pm
You poor thing! Seriously, that’s how I took your post in the first place. WHY are people so defensive of their child care choices? Work if you want to work, stay home if you want to stay home (obv these choices have other factors that go into the decision), but by all means STOP defending your choice. Make it and move on. Live your life and be secure that you are making the best choice for you.
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Jackie Reply:
December 2nd, 2011 at 2:47 pm
Here’s my opinion as a non-mom (but as someone whose mom stayed at home and who plans on working outside the home) about why people are defensive about their child care options:
I think SAHMs often articulate their decision to stay at home not as, “I like staying at home better,” or “it’s the right decision financially” but as “I feel this is better for the child.” So WOHMs here that as “because daycare is worse for the child.” It’s kinda the logical conclusion…if staying at home is better, what people are really saying is its better than daycare.
I think maybe it would help if SAHMs express more specifically why they choose to stay at home. Because they enjoy it? Because a kid has special needs that will be better served at home? Because you have a degree in early childhood ed and would rather use that degree having to only worry about 2-3 kids rather than 15?
*But* if it really is because SAHMs think that staying at home is better for the kid, then I don’t think they should really be surprised when a WOHM is offended. And maybe WOHMs can try to take things not personally.
Really its the truth with all choices. We make a choice because we believe it is better, and so we are essentially proclaiming to the world “I think this is the better way.” I don’t think there is a right or wrong way to raise your kid (as far as daycare vs. staying at home goes)so I don’t think that we have to view these chocies as moral statements.
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Erica Reply:
December 2nd, 2011 at 3:16 pm
I stay at home with two kids and it’s the best choice for me and my family. I don’t think my kids will be “better” than those kids whose mothers work and go to day care. I truly believe that ALL moms make the best choice they can and I really do believe that happy moms will equal happy children. I don’t fall into either of the categories that you said above ie special needs, early ed degree. I just don’t want to work and am lucky enough that I had a choice in the matter. I know a few ladies who would like to stay home, but can’t and I also know a few who could stay home, but don’t want to. We all make the best choices for our family, plain and simple. Staying home is the better choice for MY kids because it makes me happy and because I am happy, I am able to be a better mother to them. If I were miserable or my family couldn’t afford for me to stay home, then staying home wouldn’t be the better choice for my children. I wish that we could just get to a place where saying what your personal choice is isn’t an automatic dig on someone whose choice may be different. Why can’t we state what’s best for us without offending someone who made a different choice?s By defending the choices we make all the time and searching for opportunities to be offended and defend those choices, it makes it seem like we as women are not comfortable with their choice. If your babies are happy and healthy and you’re happy and healthy then who cares what a blogger chooses for her child, who cares what your next door neighbor chooses for her child, who cares what the person at the grocery store, your church, your book club chooses. I just think this mommy wars thing is ridiculous.
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Jackie Reply:
December 2nd, 2011 at 3:28 pm
“Staying home is the better choice for MY kids because it makes me happy and because I am happy, I am able to be a better mother to them.”
I think this is a great point!
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Chrissy Reply:
December 6th, 2011 at 11:54 pm
I would think that both WOHM and SAHM would probably say they are doing what is best for their child and you should just try not to take offense either way. When you’re a mom, don’t you think you will say you are doing what is best for your child?
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December 2nd, 2011 on 1:21 pm
Agree with Erica, above. Maybe it’s because I’ve heard you speak and know your intonations… But I had to re-read a few times to see it any way other than as you intended.
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December 2nd, 2011 on 1:49 pm
Jenna, I am one of the lucky few that straddles the worlds between SAHM and working - I work 2 days a week, and my son is at a mommy’s day out at an accredited early childhood education center, and the few nights and weekends I work he is with his daddy. Folks are so hyper sensitive - I do a little of what everyone thinks I should be doing (working, not working) and am still judged pretty harshly. People are going to think what they are going to think. Good luck to you and T1!
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Celeste Reply:
December 2nd, 2011 at 9:36 pm
Also, finally tried sock bun; am now 150% more awesome.
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December 2nd, 2011 on 2:07 pm
Jenna, I am so sorry that you have to put up with such nonsense from some of your readers. I totally understood what you were saying. As a working mom with a child in daycare, I didn’t take any of what you said to offence. I really felt you needed to know that. I’m done now.
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December 2nd, 2011 on 3:08 pm
I thought it was pretty obvious what you meant.
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December 2nd, 2011 on 3:16 pm
I admit that phrase - “crappy daycare” - gave me pause, as I can understand how and why some people would find a generalization about all daycare to be offensive. But I figured you meant it as “daycare that’s crappy” and continued reading.
I’m glad that you clarified though! It’s so interesting how one tiny word choice can set off such upset! I found people’s comments on that post to be so interesting. And I think it’s always valuable to get both sides of the work-outside-the-home vs. stay-at-home mom coin. I find it fascinating.
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December 2nd, 2011 on 3:18 pm
I bristled at it, then decided to play Pollyanna and assume it was badly written, not badly intended. That said, you’ve made it clear you feel it’s women’s role to raise kids, so I don’t think it would be too big a stretch to think you meant it that way, but I don’t think you’d be careless enough to say it out loud either way.
Regardless, thanks for the clarification.
Our day care is awesome and they are WAY better at playing with babies than I am.
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December 2nd, 2011 on 3:56 pm
You are a classy lady. As always. Love you.
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December 2nd, 2011 on 4:01 pm
I took your first post to mean what you said.
And I”m the type of woman who fully plans to stick her kid(s) into an excellent daycare and work.
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Emmie Reply:
December 2nd, 2011 at 10:15 pm
Me too.
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Jenna Reply:
December 2nd, 2011 at 10:26 pm
Well you guys are awesome, so that’s no surprise.
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December 2nd, 2011 on 6:47 pm
Thanks for clarifying, sometimes it takes extra effort to avoid the mommy wars. Motherhood must be the most critiqued calling on Earth, and it’s not surprising that parents - of all stripes - react defensively sometimes to implied criticism.
I sympathise with your struggles with T1. One of my beloved nephews had speech delay - and then started speaking in full sentences with advanced vocab. He’s now classified as “verbally gifted” and a strong reader and writer. Another two of my beloved nephews, speech delay turned out to be early signs of more serious problems. One had early intervention, one didn’t, and the difference is marked. It’s a hard and complex situation, experts are not always right and not always wrong, and no-one commenting on a blog is going to know the answer.
I think you;d really like Lise Eliot’s Pink Brain, Blue Brain. It’s a thorough assessment of much of the child development research - peer reviewed and double blind - and it has tips for parents to strengthen cognitive development. It’s more research focused than a parenting book, and Dr Eliot appreciates greys - something from your posts I think you’d relate to. It’s not designed to tell you what to do - it is designed to give you info so you can decide what to do.
Good luck!
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December 2nd, 2011 on 8:12 pm
Jenna, I just want to give you a BIG OLD HUG. I didn’t misread your first post at all. <3
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December 2nd, 2011 on 10:39 pm
While I wasn’t offended and understood what you meant, I do think that it’s a reasonable source of confusion especially considering that many of us have gotten the impression (and I think that impression is probably correct) that you think women belong at home with their children.
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December 3rd, 2011 on 12:04 am
As a working mom of a 14 month old who goes 4 days a week at an awesome daycare, I’ve decided I can’t let myself get worked up about this debate, whenever/however it comes up. I really can’t waste time worrying what other people think of our choices. I know we did our homework, we picked a place where we LOVE the teachers and know our son is getting a play-based curriculum with regular developmental conferences with us. We chat with the teachers every day and have parent teacher conferences every six months.
And while I could choose to feel weird about my baby kissing and hugging his teachers (and seeing him hugged and kissed back), I actually smile and cheer and clap, out loud when it happens. That someone else loves him and he loves them, well that is a BLESSING. It makes me feel like we really picked the right place
I didn’t take offense; it was a strange-ish comment, but I figured Jenna meant daycare that was sub-par. I know we saw a couple of these “crappy daycare” places when we were touring places for our kiddo.
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December 3rd, 2011 on 7:28 am
Even though I never planned to work after having kids (at least while they were babies and toddlers) I must say that for language development, I really like the temporary time Kyle spent in full-time daycare when we first moved here to OH. I know I’ve written this before - Grant’s last speech therapist reccommended putting Kyle in some kind of daycare/preschool either full time for just a month or so, or long term a few days a week just for the peer language acquistion.
It really did work for Kyle. In the short 3 weeks or so that he was going there, he began using words that I hadn’t heard him try yet and even doing some short sentances. Obviously this costs money and may not work for everyone, but the peer component for Kyle really seems to effect him.
Does T1 get any kind of oral-motor therapy - meaning, do they work on him actually forming his mouth correctly to speak or is his therapy mostly focused on directing and engaging him so he can expand his word base? Grant definately gets both since he struggles with mouth position, muscle movement (for obvious reasons) but Kyle’s is more the engaging/encouraging part, and being with peers has definately helped that.
I don’t want to do daycare full time forever (then I’d be home alone all the time and that would seem weird right now!), but I do need to get him into some kind of system again - twice a week maybe for a few hours. Not just for him, but hey, it would a great time for me to do some cleaning or shopping!
Oh, and I totally got what you meant. If someone else had written ‘crappy SAHM life’ I would know that they were talking about those SAHM’s that aren’t very good, not that all of (us) fall under that category!
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Jenna Reply:
December 3rd, 2011 at 3:07 pm
Right now we seem to be focusing on imitation. Encouraging him to make any sound at all, whether it’s the correct one or not.
We’ve been spending a lot of time with a family that live 4 floors below us. It’s true, it’s helpful for him to see how much his friend talks, and helps him feel braver I think.
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December 3rd, 2011 on 10:31 am
I appreciate that this was your intention and that you have clarified that, and I apologize for my misinterpretation of your intention. However, that was not how the original post read (structurally/grammatically), so I don’t think people were wrong to take it as it was written. I don’t have any children and probably never will so I honestly wasn’t in any way personally offended by your statement and I don’t have any stake in the debate over stay-at-home verses day care, but for what it’s worth, I did read your words as implying that day care verses staying at home was a crappy option. Thank you again for clarifying.
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Jenna Reply:
December 3rd, 2011 at 3:09 pm
I usually try to leave this stuff alone, but I don’t agree with the structurally grammatically thing.
If my friend was pulled over, and I said “He had expired plates, it’s not like he was pulled over because he was driving a fast car.”
or
“He had expired plates, it’s not like he was pulled over because he was in a car that goes really fast.”
Would I not be saying the same thing? And how is that different (structurally/grammatically) from what I said?
I say the problem here was the interpretation, not the sentence itself.
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Turtle Reply:
December 3rd, 2011 at 3:31 pm
This eventually become moot because language is a slippery thing, but actually that example doesn’t work. In both of the above examples you include the article “a” which signifies that it is a singular instance of car (or in the other case daycare) that you’re discussing. It not is not phrased in the same way as the phrase in your original post, which was article-free. “Crappy daycare,” which makes the adjective noun combination read as a generalized claim rather than a specific case. The use of the determinative clause using “that” does, in the case of the day care example, clarify the specificity of the noun adjective combination in a way that is less necessary in the car example.
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Jenna Reply:
December 3rd, 2011 at 3:35 pm
Grammar has never been my strong suit. I didn’t use an article because I wasn’t referring to any one facility. So could an equivalent sentence be “My friends who got tickets were driving with expired plates or light out, not because they were driving fast cars.” or vice versa “My friends who got tickets were driving with epired plates or lights out, not because they were driving cars that were fast.”
This does not mean that all cars are fast. It means that the cars they were driving happened to be fast ones. Just as not all daycares are crappy, but some most certainly are.
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Turtle Reply:
December 3rd, 2011 at 4:13 pm
Article use is one of the most confusing aspects of English- ask TH- I bet as a non-native speaker this was one of the trickiest things he learned. I am no way an expert in it, but I will say that even in your example there you can see how the first fast cars (without the article or determinative clause) is more generic/generalized than the second. Although you might say that anyone with reading comprehension skills would realize that you’re referring to only SOME cars which are fast,if it is not obvious that the speaker knows or should know that some cars are not fast, there is nothing grammatically present to make this clear. Let me try an example to see if I can clarify my own thoughts here. It is like the difference in saying: “The rule is in place because of narrow-minded Mormons” instead of saying: “The rule is in place because of SOME narrow-minded Mormons.” Some is functioning as an article in this case. Can you see how when something is intended pejoratively- the adjective “narrow-minded” in this case- the use of the article clarifies or limits the application of that adjective to a subset of Mormons rather than Mormons across the board. Similarly the use of the determinative clause would help-”The rule is the result of Mormons that are narrow-mided”-but I think, in this case, the use of the article “some” makes even clearer that it is only a part of the Mormon population being discussed. I’m sorry to go on and on about this if you think I’m just nitpicking- I actually really appreciate you challenging me on this because I think it’s a sticky point, and I like thinking it through. I hope you feel the same way.
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Jenna Reply:
December 4th, 2011 at 8:07 pm
Thank you for the great conversation and for making me a better writer! I most certainly would like to avoid misunderstandings like this in the future and I think the way you helped me break this down made a difference. Feel free to call me out on it in the future if y think I’m making the same mistake.
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December 3rd, 2011 on 4:49 pm
I think it was, for the most part, clear that you weren’t try to claim that all daycare centers are crappy. I guess what I find fascinating is that you didn’t feel the need to rule out the possibility that these SAHMs are crappy caregivers for their children when you presented your anecdotal evidence. If you had left the daycare caveat out of your sentence, I think your readers would have been equally unlikely to have jumped to either conclusion (crappy daycare or crappy moms).
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December 3rd, 2011 on 7:01 pm
I saw it, I paused, thought “it sucks that crappy daycare (daycare that’s crappy) even exists” and kept reading. Our baby is due in a week and I’m really looking forward to being a working mom. I like my job, I love the woman who runs the small in-home daycare I found near our house, who comes highly recommended by a couple friends and I think I’ll be the best parent I can be by working and sending our baby to care. But I would be lying if I said I don’t worry that I’ve chosen a crappy daycare.
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December 3rd, 2011 on 7:09 pm
I’ve told my husband that since becoming a mom (in August), I’ve had to eat my words most days. For instance, when my baby was 3 or 4 days old, I said, “I don’t understand why people say that babies generate a lot of laundry - we have NO laundry!?” Of course, I was too sleep deprived to realize our baby was only wearing diapers (it was HOT) and my milk hadn’t come in and spit-up hadn’t yet started… now, I have a 3.5 month old, and I GET IT! Laundry, lots of it.
So now onto daycares. Before I became a mom, I wanted to work three days per week and have our son in daycare. I liked it because it was less expensive than a nanny and because I thought it would be good for socialization and maybe he’d learn things earlier (potty training) to be like the big kids. Then I had our son. And then he turned 7 weeks and I became all about sleep. I turned into a stereotype where the only thing I thought about was sleep routine and schedules - blah, blah, blah. I thought - there is no way daycare would work. I want a nanny so he can be on a specific routine. And now he is 14 weeks old and sleep is going better and I just read the post and people were saying that some daycares have ppl with degrees in childhood development … and then I’m like - hmmm, maybe he should go to daycare b.c. there would be experts…
The point is, we don’t have to make a decision for a few more months and I bounce back and forth but I don’t think there is one thing that is best - not even “best for our family.” I think there are a lot of good options for our family and daycare is one of them. But I don’t want the daycare that is just basically one woman (a babysitter) with 7 kids in her house. But maybe I’ll be eating those words too.
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