The care work I have experienced in my life has been through both of my parents and from outside help from cousins, grandparents and hired babysitters. For the first ten years of my life, my parents worked opposite hours, my dad during the day and my mom at night. The overlapping hours of their jobs, between 2 and 5 is when my brother and I would be home from school and need dinner and looking after. I know that we were lucky because my mom has a huge family so she had nieces and nephews that were old enough to watch us. Of course not many 16 year old teenagers want to watch their young cousins five times a week so they split the time between my grandma as well. Even with all my cousins, some lived too far away and eventually they got older and were too busy so every once in awhile my parents had to search for hired babysitters to take on the task. My brother and I never went to a day care but we were always taken care of a few hours each working day by outside help.
Now that women are working a lot more in the public sector, society needs to accommodate the working caretakers. In the UK, they experienced a large influx of female workers so they are trying to make it easier for them to still take care of their children or elderly. Society should be more like Canada where they allow women to take six months off after the birth of their child with 60-90% of their pay intact. There also should be childcare offered at places of business. If companies want to work their employers 9-5, they have to understand that school gets out around three in the afternoon. How can they expect mothers and fathers to take care of children when they are forced to work restricting hours? Society needs to also accept that mothers need to work to support their families because the cost of living has continuously been increasing around the globe. People cannot afford to have a family unless both parents are working and to suggest stopping the creation of families would be telling the human race to force extinction upon itself. If everyone just works together to help each other out and realize that an employee is more than a profit but a mother, a father, a husband, a wife, a caretaker, a sister, a brother, then all of us could benefit in more than just monetary gain.
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Your childhood description of having other family members look after you while your parents were working reminds me of my cousin. They have a similar situation and my grandparents help them out a lot. I think this is the best option over having to hire a nanny or a complete stranger to raise your kids. It's a shame that not everyone can have that choice. Do you feel like if you had not had your family around that you would have turned out a little different?
ReplyDeleteThat's an interesting question, kind of a nurture versus nature lesson. It is hard, impossible actually, to say if I would be different if I grew up in daycare instead of around family members. I think my personality would more or less be the same but I think I might have a different attitude towards family. I might be more inclined to not be as close to my family because they weren't really around. Maybe I advocate that families need to spend time together because I know how much I appreciated mine compared to friends I have that seem more indifferent towards their family.
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