A couple SROs that I’ve found personally frustrating:
- Leaving your kid to sleep in a public place or even in the car at all. There have been so many times I tried to run to the grocery store and my kid(s) fell asleep en route. All of a sudden the 30 min errand has to now take 2 hours because we have to wait.
- Parks without fencing to block kids from going into the street. It’s not unreasonable to have kids going to the playground to play by themselves (although this can get you a CPS call in many places), and older kids can keep an eye on younger ones within reason. But I also think it’s hard if you have kids in a range of ages when the design of a place requires hyper-vigilance to prevent tragedy.
- The household employee limit for tax filing being $2300. Let’s say I wanted to do something common in centuries past - hire a teenager to help me with household projects or simple tasks. I’m not talking a full blown maid. I’m saying like 10 hours a week of chores (dishes, so on). With minimum wage in our area of $16, I can only hire someone for 14 weeks before I have to report them for taxes. Now I have to get a payroll company, file with the EDD, and pay unemployment if I fire them (even with cause). We have basically stripped away a middle tier job option to allow teenagers to learn to work, and that would make child-rearing significantly easier. Given the increase in the cost of living and so on, it makes no sense to me that the limit for reporting to the IRS isn’t higher - say $10k. Call it a paperwork reduction act!
- Most controversially, car seats. It takes so long to get 3 small kids into car seats compared to the way they used to pile in. If you believe some economists, there’s little evidence that car seats do much to save lives after the first 1-2 years (maybe longer rear-facing). This is kind of related to 1, because it’s a lot more frustrating to pop out for a 5 min errand someplace when it’s going to be 10 min to load everyone in and out of the car.
The tax one is particularly galling because you could hire any other self-employed contractor, and just pay the bill, the person fills out a schedule C, done. (Using free tax software this is very straightforward for the individual, and also allows a deduction for any legit business expenses, which freelance babysitters may well incur. My 18. y.o. did this last year, nbd.)
Curiously, one of the IRS's tests for whether it's a contractor or an employee is whether the worker or the payor determines how the work gets done. Reality in childcare: The person caring for the child is absolutely winging it every time, with producing far more unexpected scenarios that cannot be micromanaged than, say, a plumber or an electrician deals with (and those trades get their share of surprises, heh). Indeed the one absolute standard for whether someone should be left to care for children is: Can they handle this one their own, without needing instructions if something comes up?
Plus one to being able to leave kids in the car. My car has a setting called “dog mode” that keeps the climate control on while the car is parked, it’s perfectly safe, but it’s illegal to leave the kids in the car. It’s so frustrating.
It’s illegal in the U.S. as well. There are cases every year of children dying being left in cars, but most articles about these cases indicate it was accidental and are intended as a public service announcement. It’s a great PSA and a terrible law.
It’s context dependent as to whether it is prudent. Obviously you shouldn’t leave a kid alone in a car if it’s 100 degrees out. But that’s exactly why the law is so horrible. It penalizes everyone even if the situation is objectively safe. It’s just as criminal if it’s 65 degrees out as if it’s 100.
I’m also not saying you should lock the car. In other words, you can leave the situation so that another adult could intervene to help if the child woke up and panicked or appeared too hot, for example.
There are like a thousand different iterations on this situation. You should probably be fine to walk in and order a premade coffee (1 min task time) but obviously you shouldn’t go to an hour massage. A ten minute grocery run is probably fine, but you’d want to be careful that you didn’t accidentally run too much longer. The law strips away your ability as a parent to judge the context and criminalizes all of it. In a culture as car dependent as mine, it makes what was once a simple task extremely onerous with children. You can no longer function normally during the first 2ish years of their life. I would go to argue that it criminalizes a completely normal aspect of parenting. We are expected to basically have an adult on top of our children 100% of the time. This makes the burden on those with one child extremely laborious. By itself, it doesn’t seem make or break, but it’s adding to the straws of car seat laws and cultural expectations around negligence that have broken the camel’s back and resulted cumulatively in below replacement fertility rate.
Collectively it makes people NOT want to have more children, even though it gets much easier as you have more (when the older ones can keep an eye on the younger). Again, parenting the way I was parented or my parents were parented (and was basically normal) is essentially illegal today. The standards have just skewed so far in so short a time.
It is totally disproportionate to the point of injustice. You can have an investigation opened and have a child taken away by CPS because you left them in a situation that was by any objective measure safe.
Omg. So mych to say here. Im in the midst of going through the process to open a daycare and i've also built and managed affordable housing using section 8. I wrote a piece for Comment on raising density standards (and lowering standards overall) in housing and i could write a similar piece on childcare, but will wait until we've been open a year. so many hoops. We've already burnt through one employee who was helping us with the process because she couldn't handle the incessant webinars, trainings, and janky web interface ...but i think shed be a great child care worker.
That said we've visited centers that are rated 5 stars (our quality rating system) but the places are dark, kids are crying and workers are scrolling on phones. So its not lower standards i want, its less hoops and better check points.
On the topic of lower standards in parenting, i definitely did not go for any special vaccines schedule, though it was popular in my social circle. Public schools are where we started including free preschool (although we later changed to a Catholic Montessori for the sake our children having more joy in their lives) Also i was all in on medicated child birth and 6 months of breast feeding, as opposed to year(s). I typically only do 1 dentist appointment a year per kid, though 2 are recommended. Im pretty lax on screen time, though i can be convinced by anxious generation style arguments, and haven't allowed social media. Shared rooms, yes. One of my kids was in a closet for a while. Mostly used clothes. No sports before 3rd grade. Old mini vans. I gave up car seats at age 3. Ive appreciated Emily Osters guidance on the "what really matters" questions... And car seats are so so after the infant stage.
I do think, to change this parenting arns race, we have to stop crafting motherhood as a professional job for college educated women, who dedicate all of their ambition toward their children; left with this framing the bar is always rising and yes, younger onlookers are like "no way do i want this."
I love this idea. The idea the kids need the best of everything, everything new, the best sports teams, etc, make parenting seem very daunting.
PS. My three kids all share a room. It’s the compromise we make to live in a neighborhood that we love. And for a long time we had 5 family members and a 5 person car. You don’t need a big car to be a happy family!
We started ours sharing at around age 2-2.5. We have kept the youngest with adults for longer to keep the peace.
Our best parenting investment so far has been the Cradlewise crib. It’s like the snoo but they can stay in it until age 2 (on paper… in practice it’s still going OK at 2.5). It cost a pretty penny but has paid for itself in terms of our ability to function / do paid work.
Ours started sharing at age 2-3 as well. They’re getting older now, but for many years either my husband or I stayed with them until the more restless kids were asleep. Bedtime took a long time!
What about this one as an impossible parenting standard? The serious consideration of criminalizing having your baby sleep next to you, on the grounds that some mothers rolled over on their babies. Consideration of the factors of drink, drugs, and overly soft sofa cushions, were set aside for a blanket rule.
It actually came up in Wisconsin, and some sensible person, I think in the DA's office, refused to threaten prosecution for something that mothers had been doing across all cultures for thousands of years. I'm old enough now that it's too late to come after me for doing it , but since I know that I tucked the baby up next to me as a choice between that or falling asleep sitting up, I know it's a survival strategy for a busy and exhausted young mother, (translation: all young mothers) and I was phenomenally irritated that I had to even consider some lawyer's point of view about it. I never rolled on the babies, and I woke up at the tiniest squeak since the baby was right next to me, so it wasn't incredibly restful, but at least the baby went back to sleep. If I put the baby in the crib, the baby did NOT stay asleep. At a certain point of sleep deprivation, you start understanding why it is such an effective torture.
"Where have you made the choice to fall short of an ideal form of parenting for the sake of something you could sustain?"
... Everywhere?... Though I wouldn't call how things are going lately "sustaining" – it's not sustainable.
I agree in broad strokes with Ozy (I kinda hafta, if I deserve life).
The ideals it hurts my heart most to fall short of are in basic music education and basic literacy. All of my kids have *ability* to read that meets standards for their age, but none *like* reading. None will do it for pleasure – or even let me read to them very much for pleasure. Because I haven't trained them to. (I'm often too exhausted to put up with their shenanigans during bedtime reading.) My kids see me read plenty – but on a screen, and they don't think of screens as *for* reading. They also see their parents do *some* musical activities, and we joined a church that at least *has* children's choirs that they're joining as their age makes them eligible. But the kind of music literacy that permits music as at least a serious hobby – what my husband and I could take for granted in our own childhoods? Phphphththt!...
Catching up on those was supposed to be this summer's project, but so far I'm stuck indoors, at home sick. And when we do go make it to the municipal library, the first thing I'll hafta do is pay to replace a DVD that's just about the only thing my kids have checked out of the bookmobile, and which they say they returned, but the library says they haven't...
As a mom of 4, I definitely relate to the concept of lowering standards for the overall feasibility of having a larger than average family.
A big compromise in my parenting standards has been using the TV as a babysitter a couple mornings per week so that I can devote more hours to my hourly WFH job on the days I don't have childcare for my younger kids. Finding a way to make money without needing to pay for full-time childcare makes affording four kids much easier than it would be on a single income. My husband reminds me that we both watched hours of TV with family and sitters while our moms worked and turned out okay.
Two SROs that I see:
1 - car seat regulations and norms. Turning children forward facing earlier and switching to booster seats earlier have both made parenting easier at different points for us (wedging a toddler into a rear facing car seat while suffering from chronic back pain during pregnancy is no easy feat).
2 - Breastfeeding and co-sleeping recommendations. I breastfed all my kids for varying amounts of time, but weaning before a year when I was exhausted by it made it much easier to be open to more babies. Also, not following co-sleeping recommendations to the letter made it easier to get sleep in the newborn stage.
The main compromise I made intentionally was having children as soon as I felt I had a bare-minimum community - a handful of people I was engaging in shared planning and problem solving with - rather than the level of community I wanted. Then most of that community moved away around the time the baby was born! So of course I don't have the level of attention needed to provide my children with anything like an optimal social environment, and I do what I can to fill the deficit (playing in shared spaces like the children's floor of the local library, bringing them to synagogue), but I don't do anywhere near as well as I'd like every day. Sometimes they're lonely and I don't have the wherewithal to provide better company than a good television show. But I'm still glad they exist and I think they are VERY glad they exist.
This is essentially Thomas Sowell’s argument against a statutory minimum wage, as applied to childbearing and parenting - that the true minimum wage is zero, and that we will get more people earning zero if we set the minimum wage too high above their skills.
I think there’s great value in his point that a bunch of people who claim to be “pro-natalist” hold parenting-minimum-standard opinions that are contrary to “more children”.
That said, I think the great challenge we have isn’t standards that are too high but our total lack of support and education for parents, especially new ones. The fact that we don’t send parents home post-birth with a short, 5th grade reading level illustrated guide to good basic practices & ‘this is normal, really’ for 0-1 continually astounds me! And my parents greatly benefited from an at-the-time well funded public program, Early Childhood Family Education, which has had its funding slashed since the 1980s. Parents got together for classes while kids were cared for in another room. We need more of that, not less.
I also embrace the idea that individual families can/should have different standards that they want to hold themselves to, that they consider important (but not a minimum threshold for all). For instance, I do think screen brain rot is real. But our winters are so long! And I get so tired! And I like watching shows and movies with my kid! And he enjoys solving puzzles in his video games! My compromise is we do “no screen summer” where all screens (minus my phone & work computer) including the TV get stored away. We both love it, although the transition is a bit painful. And I’ve kept the same small TV for over a decade, so it’s a little less immersive and enthralling.
I generally need more public spaces where people aren’t like “your children are wandering around ma’am.” Yes I know they’re wandering around. This mall/ hotel lobby/ whatever is full of people wandering around. That’s what you built it for.
This is a delayed comment, but something I've been thinking about since first reading this - in response to this bit: Some cities (cough Washington DC) have made it illegal to employ preschool teachers who don’t have college degrees. That reads as a banning-SROs move to me. But I don’t have finely grained views on e.g. different carer-children ratios. I’m hoping to develop them.
Before staying home with my 3 children, I worked in and around Early Care and Education. I think the intent here is good, but has negative, unintended consequences. Across the field, elevating the early childhood workforce is a goal. Requiring degrees is one way to change public perception about the importance of the role of child care providers. This creates leverage for higher pay and benefits, therefore making childcare a more desirable profession to pursue. One summer, my research responsibility was to wade-through and summarize Illinois' credentialing system for Early Care and Education. The state was trying to create "equivalencies" for people who had been in the field, providing care and education, for several years, with no formal degree, to those who newly entered the field with Bachelor's degrees (becoming more common). Ideally you would provide pathways to people entering this field from different levels of education, rather than make it illegal to employ someone without a college degree. Continuing education and experience count a lot in this field in particular.
Also - not yelling at your kids is actually the lazy parent tactic. De-escalating the situation resolves your problem faster and reduces future problems.
Yelling at your kids makes your job harder in the short term and long term.
100% agree on car seats. Aside from the economists' argument, the physics of a front-facing car seat (it restrains the child with a seatbelt connected to a large piece of plastic that's connected to another seatbelt) don't suggest any gain in safety over the vehicle's seatbelt alone.
A couple SROs that I’ve found personally frustrating:
- Leaving your kid to sleep in a public place or even in the car at all. There have been so many times I tried to run to the grocery store and my kid(s) fell asleep en route. All of a sudden the 30 min errand has to now take 2 hours because we have to wait.
- Parks without fencing to block kids from going into the street. It’s not unreasonable to have kids going to the playground to play by themselves (although this can get you a CPS call in many places), and older kids can keep an eye on younger ones within reason. But I also think it’s hard if you have kids in a range of ages when the design of a place requires hyper-vigilance to prevent tragedy.
- The household employee limit for tax filing being $2300. Let’s say I wanted to do something common in centuries past - hire a teenager to help me with household projects or simple tasks. I’m not talking a full blown maid. I’m saying like 10 hours a week of chores (dishes, so on). With minimum wage in our area of $16, I can only hire someone for 14 weeks before I have to report them for taxes. Now I have to get a payroll company, file with the EDD, and pay unemployment if I fire them (even with cause). We have basically stripped away a middle tier job option to allow teenagers to learn to work, and that would make child-rearing significantly easier. Given the increase in the cost of living and so on, it makes no sense to me that the limit for reporting to the IRS isn’t higher - say $10k. Call it a paperwork reduction act!
- Most controversially, car seats. It takes so long to get 3 small kids into car seats compared to the way they used to pile in. If you believe some economists, there’s little evidence that car seats do much to save lives after the first 1-2 years (maybe longer rear-facing). This is kind of related to 1, because it’s a lot more frustrating to pop out for a 5 min errand someplace when it’s going to be 10 min to load everyone in and out of the car.
The tax one is particularly galling because you could hire any other self-employed contractor, and just pay the bill, the person fills out a schedule C, done. (Using free tax software this is very straightforward for the individual, and also allows a deduction for any legit business expenses, which freelance babysitters may well incur. My 18. y.o. did this last year, nbd.)
Curiously, one of the IRS's tests for whether it's a contractor or an employee is whether the worker or the payor determines how the work gets done. Reality in childcare: The person caring for the child is absolutely winging it every time, with producing far more unexpected scenarios that cannot be micromanaged than, say, a plumber or an electrician deals with (and those trades get their share of surprises, heh). Indeed the one absolute standard for whether someone should be left to care for children is: Can they handle this one their own, without needing instructions if something comes up?
Plus one to being able to leave kids in the car. My car has a setting called “dog mode” that keeps the climate control on while the car is parked, it’s perfectly safe, but it’s illegal to leave the kids in the car. It’s so frustrating.
#3: https://thezvi.substack.com/p/on-car-seats-as-contraception
Re #1, surely that’s context dependent - here in Australia, leaving a kid in a car is illegal because it can, and regularly does, kill them
It’s illegal in the U.S. as well. There are cases every year of children dying being left in cars, but most articles about these cases indicate it was accidental and are intended as a public service announcement. It’s a great PSA and a terrible law.
It’s context dependent as to whether it is prudent. Obviously you shouldn’t leave a kid alone in a car if it’s 100 degrees out. But that’s exactly why the law is so horrible. It penalizes everyone even if the situation is objectively safe. It’s just as criminal if it’s 65 degrees out as if it’s 100.
I’m also not saying you should lock the car. In other words, you can leave the situation so that another adult could intervene to help if the child woke up and panicked or appeared too hot, for example.
There are like a thousand different iterations on this situation. You should probably be fine to walk in and order a premade coffee (1 min task time) but obviously you shouldn’t go to an hour massage. A ten minute grocery run is probably fine, but you’d want to be careful that you didn’t accidentally run too much longer. The law strips away your ability as a parent to judge the context and criminalizes all of it. In a culture as car dependent as mine, it makes what was once a simple task extremely onerous with children. You can no longer function normally during the first 2ish years of their life. I would go to argue that it criminalizes a completely normal aspect of parenting. We are expected to basically have an adult on top of our children 100% of the time. This makes the burden on those with one child extremely laborious. By itself, it doesn’t seem make or break, but it’s adding to the straws of car seat laws and cultural expectations around negligence that have broken the camel’s back and resulted cumulatively in below replacement fertility rate.
Collectively it makes people NOT want to have more children, even though it gets much easier as you have more (when the older ones can keep an eye on the younger). Again, parenting the way I was parented or my parents were parented (and was basically normal) is essentially illegal today. The standards have just skewed so far in so short a time.
It is totally disproportionate to the point of injustice. You can have an investigation opened and have a child taken away by CPS because you left them in a situation that was by any objective measure safe.
Omg. So mych to say here. Im in the midst of going through the process to open a daycare and i've also built and managed affordable housing using section 8. I wrote a piece for Comment on raising density standards (and lowering standards overall) in housing and i could write a similar piece on childcare, but will wait until we've been open a year. so many hoops. We've already burnt through one employee who was helping us with the process because she couldn't handle the incessant webinars, trainings, and janky web interface ...but i think shed be a great child care worker.
That said we've visited centers that are rated 5 stars (our quality rating system) but the places are dark, kids are crying and workers are scrolling on phones. So its not lower standards i want, its less hoops and better check points.
On the topic of lower standards in parenting, i definitely did not go for any special vaccines schedule, though it was popular in my social circle. Public schools are where we started including free preschool (although we later changed to a Catholic Montessori for the sake our children having more joy in their lives) Also i was all in on medicated child birth and 6 months of breast feeding, as opposed to year(s). I typically only do 1 dentist appointment a year per kid, though 2 are recommended. Im pretty lax on screen time, though i can be convinced by anxious generation style arguments, and haven't allowed social media. Shared rooms, yes. One of my kids was in a closet for a while. Mostly used clothes. No sports before 3rd grade. Old mini vans. I gave up car seats at age 3. Ive appreciated Emily Osters guidance on the "what really matters" questions... And car seats are so so after the infant stage.
I do think, to change this parenting arns race, we have to stop crafting motherhood as a professional job for college educated women, who dedicate all of their ambition toward their children; left with this framing the bar is always rising and yes, younger onlookers are like "no way do i want this."
I would like to be able to let my 7 year old walk to the store, around the neighborhood by himself without people criticizing me.
I love this idea. The idea the kids need the best of everything, everything new, the best sports teams, etc, make parenting seem very daunting.
PS. My three kids all share a room. It’s the compromise we make to live in a neighborhood that we love. And for a long time we had 5 family members and a 5 person car. You don’t need a big car to be a happy family!
We've got three across in a compact car, too.
What age did they start sharing a room? I'm a little worried about getting the big girls to be quiet for the baby to sleep.
We started ours sharing at around age 2-2.5. We have kept the youngest with adults for longer to keep the peace.
Our best parenting investment so far has been the Cradlewise crib. It’s like the snoo but they can stay in it until age 2 (on paper… in practice it’s still going OK at 2.5). It cost a pretty penny but has paid for itself in terms of our ability to function / do paid work.
Ours started sharing at age 2-3 as well. They’re getting older now, but for many years either my husband or I stayed with them until the more restless kids were asleep. Bedtime took a long time!
What about this one as an impossible parenting standard? The serious consideration of criminalizing having your baby sleep next to you, on the grounds that some mothers rolled over on their babies. Consideration of the factors of drink, drugs, and overly soft sofa cushions, were set aside for a blanket rule.
It actually came up in Wisconsin, and some sensible person, I think in the DA's office, refused to threaten prosecution for something that mothers had been doing across all cultures for thousands of years. I'm old enough now that it's too late to come after me for doing it , but since I know that I tucked the baby up next to me as a choice between that or falling asleep sitting up, I know it's a survival strategy for a busy and exhausted young mother, (translation: all young mothers) and I was phenomenally irritated that I had to even consider some lawyer's point of view about it. I never rolled on the babies, and I woke up at the tiniest squeak since the baby was right next to me, so it wasn't incredibly restful, but at least the baby went back to sleep. If I put the baby in the crib, the baby did NOT stay asleep. At a certain point of sleep deprivation, you start understanding why it is such an effective torture.
All my children survived, by the way. ;)
"Where have you made the choice to fall short of an ideal form of parenting for the sake of something you could sustain?"
... Everywhere?... Though I wouldn't call how things are going lately "sustaining" – it's not sustainable.
I agree in broad strokes with Ozy (I kinda hafta, if I deserve life).
The ideals it hurts my heart most to fall short of are in basic music education and basic literacy. All of my kids have *ability* to read that meets standards for their age, but none *like* reading. None will do it for pleasure – or even let me read to them very much for pleasure. Because I haven't trained them to. (I'm often too exhausted to put up with their shenanigans during bedtime reading.) My kids see me read plenty – but on a screen, and they don't think of screens as *for* reading. They also see their parents do *some* musical activities, and we joined a church that at least *has* children's choirs that they're joining as their age makes them eligible. But the kind of music literacy that permits music as at least a serious hobby – what my husband and I could take for granted in our own childhoods? Phphphththt!...
Catching up on those was supposed to be this summer's project, but so far I'm stuck indoors, at home sick. And when we do go make it to the municipal library, the first thing I'll hafta do is pay to replace a DVD that's just about the only thing my kids have checked out of the bookmobile, and which they say they returned, but the library says they haven't...
Very interesting article.
As a mom of 4, I definitely relate to the concept of lowering standards for the overall feasibility of having a larger than average family.
A big compromise in my parenting standards has been using the TV as a babysitter a couple mornings per week so that I can devote more hours to my hourly WFH job on the days I don't have childcare for my younger kids. Finding a way to make money without needing to pay for full-time childcare makes affording four kids much easier than it would be on a single income. My husband reminds me that we both watched hours of TV with family and sitters while our moms worked and turned out okay.
Two SROs that I see:
1 - car seat regulations and norms. Turning children forward facing earlier and switching to booster seats earlier have both made parenting easier at different points for us (wedging a toddler into a rear facing car seat while suffering from chronic back pain during pregnancy is no easy feat).
2 - Breastfeeding and co-sleeping recommendations. I breastfed all my kids for varying amounts of time, but weaning before a year when I was exhausted by it made it much easier to be open to more babies. Also, not following co-sleeping recommendations to the letter made it easier to get sleep in the newborn stage.
The main compromise I made intentionally was having children as soon as I felt I had a bare-minimum community - a handful of people I was engaging in shared planning and problem solving with - rather than the level of community I wanted. Then most of that community moved away around the time the baby was born! So of course I don't have the level of attention needed to provide my children with anything like an optimal social environment, and I do what I can to fill the deficit (playing in shared spaces like the children's floor of the local library, bringing them to synagogue), but I don't do anywhere near as well as I'd like every day. Sometimes they're lonely and I don't have the wherewithal to provide better company than a good television show. But I'm still glad they exist and I think they are VERY glad they exist.
This is essentially Thomas Sowell’s argument against a statutory minimum wage, as applied to childbearing and parenting - that the true minimum wage is zero, and that we will get more people earning zero if we set the minimum wage too high above their skills.
I think there’s great value in his point that a bunch of people who claim to be “pro-natalist” hold parenting-minimum-standard opinions that are contrary to “more children”.
That said, I think the great challenge we have isn’t standards that are too high but our total lack of support and education for parents, especially new ones. The fact that we don’t send parents home post-birth with a short, 5th grade reading level illustrated guide to good basic practices & ‘this is normal, really’ for 0-1 continually astounds me! And my parents greatly benefited from an at-the-time well funded public program, Early Childhood Family Education, which has had its funding slashed since the 1980s. Parents got together for classes while kids were cared for in another room. We need more of that, not less.
I also embrace the idea that individual families can/should have different standards that they want to hold themselves to, that they consider important (but not a minimum threshold for all). For instance, I do think screen brain rot is real. But our winters are so long! And I get so tired! And I like watching shows and movies with my kid! And he enjoys solving puzzles in his video games! My compromise is we do “no screen summer” where all screens (minus my phone & work computer) including the TV get stored away. We both love it, although the transition is a bit painful. And I’ve kept the same small TV for over a decade, so it’s a little less immersive and enthralling.
I generally need more public spaces where people aren’t like “your children are wandering around ma’am.” Yes I know they’re wandering around. This mall/ hotel lobby/ whatever is full of people wandering around. That’s what you built it for.
I'm pretty sure that wearing my baby got me free donuts at the grocery store.
This is a delayed comment, but something I've been thinking about since first reading this - in response to this bit: Some cities (cough Washington DC) have made it illegal to employ preschool teachers who don’t have college degrees. That reads as a banning-SROs move to me. But I don’t have finely grained views on e.g. different carer-children ratios. I’m hoping to develop them.
Before staying home with my 3 children, I worked in and around Early Care and Education. I think the intent here is good, but has negative, unintended consequences. Across the field, elevating the early childhood workforce is a goal. Requiring degrees is one way to change public perception about the importance of the role of child care providers. This creates leverage for higher pay and benefits, therefore making childcare a more desirable profession to pursue. One summer, my research responsibility was to wade-through and summarize Illinois' credentialing system for Early Care and Education. The state was trying to create "equivalencies" for people who had been in the field, providing care and education, for several years, with no formal degree, to those who newly entered the field with Bachelor's degrees (becoming more common). Ideally you would provide pathways to people entering this field from different levels of education, rather than make it illegal to employ someone without a college degree. Continuing education and experience count a lot in this field in particular.
I really appreciate your experience here!
Also - not yelling at your kids is actually the lazy parent tactic. De-escalating the situation resolves your problem faster and reduces future problems.
Yelling at your kids makes your job harder in the short term and long term.
100% agree on car seats. Aside from the economists' argument, the physics of a front-facing car seat (it restrains the child with a seatbelt connected to a large piece of plastic that's connected to another seatbelt) don't suggest any gain in safety over the vehicle's seatbelt alone.
The cult of safety is insane. Free range parenting should be the norm. Decriminalizie parenting yo 😆