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| quote: | Originally posted by venomX
This is pure conjecture on your part based on your view of human nature. Day care attendance for lower income children is related to higher education. Higher education is related to better child care and a better ability to discriminate what the best way to rear your child is. Just because you have no trust in people and you believe they will make the same mistakes over and over again does not make it true. The relationship I just pointed out to you is based on current research on human interactions and early development.
It is not half baked. Proper raising leads to proper development. Proper development and higher education increase the possibility that parents will raise their child properly. Its a continous cycle. Obviously not everyone acts in the same manner, this is on average. This is supported by current research on developmental psychology. Your lack of knowledge on this subject does not lead to my ideas being half-baked. |
Since "lower" income is a relative measure, and the cost of goods and services is relative to the purchasing power of the average consumer, you can't shrink the lower class in the way you seem to be suggesting. Even if some children acquire higher education and therefore economic advancement for themselves, the proportion of the population which is the "lower" class and bears the economic pressures associated with that will not change, nor will the demand for these daycare services decrease. The idea that it will is very much half-baked and a hundredfold less practical than anything I've suggested.
Being raised properly, e.g. not by daycare, is a huge advantage for a child which will give them larger gains than daycare ever will - and not only that, but will provide them with first-hand experience in proper parent-child interaction that they can use
| quote: | | In order for society to change the current trend in the work/child-rearing relationship everyone would have to be middle class. |
It's impossible for everyone to be middle class without making everyone economically equal which is going to be impossible in any successful economic system. In any case, the supposed necessity of everyone being middle-class fails to meet the standard of what we can already observe: there are countries on this planet right now which don't have our current trend in work/child-rearing and where economic disparity is extremely significant.
| quote: | | All the ideas you espouse are contingent on people being able to afford staying home and raising their kid. It is true modern western society puts much pressure on adults to succeed economically and this interferes with the child rearing process. It is true that this is not the optimal setting. It is true that in the global scheme of things a child care program is a patch-up program. But it is one of the most (proven) reliable ways of helping people get out of poverty. You seem to keep forgetting that i am not advocating this program for everyone, im doing so for lower income people who are the ones that benefit for it the most. Even if i advocated it for everyone, I already mentioned that there is an inverse relationship between attending a government funded day care and SES, so in any case the children that would be negatively affected by attending a day care with less then excellent quality wouldnt be attending them anyways. |
For every person you get "out of poverty" another person will drop down into it when the poverty line is re-drawn as it is over and over again. And I'm not really sure why you think a lower-income parent can't competently raise their child to the point where the child benefits more than they would in daycare. It doesn't take a rocket-scientist.
| quote: | | Right, because you have plausible solutions. It's nice to argument that some is of no use and not propose any other possible solutions. I think i've already asked a couple of times for another way around this problem, you have yet to provide any. Your basic premise is that we need to solve the real problem, which is a conflict in current society between economic pressures and child rearing effectiveness, but in order to correct that problem in one fell swoop you would need to correct many others such as poverty and lack of education, lack of access to jobs, racism, all at the same time. What do you think are the chances of that happening? Maybe we should try a revolution, i'm sure you wouldn't mind a couple of years of bloody war to solve are all newfound problems. |
Whether I have solutions to the actual problem or not is really not relevant or even related to whether or not the pretend-solution of daycare is worth implementing. I'm certainly not proposing that we can correct the problem "in one fell swoop" - it will take considerable time, but programs which serve to conceal or obscure the need for long-term fundamental change work against this process.
The topic of the thread is not how to fix the work/family dynamic, but whether or not this particular program is a good one. I've stated repeatedly now why I do not think it is a good one - of course you are free to disagree, but your responses seem to me to indicate that you do not see the bigger picture.
Having the program in place may relieve some of the pressure that the current work/family dynamic is creating. This pressure, while it has some harmful effects, is also something that will help drive more fundamental changes. The cost of the proposed program is not only in dollars and cents, it is in the motivation of the average person to support more important reforms over a long period of time.
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we have a subsidised national childcare system which may have its problems, but at least its giving mothers the opportunity to work at the same time.
