One of the worst things about putting your child into daycare is that biology, society, and sometimes even your closest friends tell you that you’ve abandoned your children by letting someone else care for them for most of the day.
My friend Kimma said it best: “Even when you really like the school and the caregivers, it’s hard to escape the feeling that you’re just putting your kid in a box for the day.”
Of course, we know that it’s better than that. We think that the teachers love our kids and that they’re taking good care of them. That they’re not monsters, and they’re watching the kids closely, playing with them, and helping them learn and grow.
But the feeling persists.
I have to believe that there’s a bond that forms when you take care of a child for any length of time—as a biological parent, adoptive parent, or caregiver. It’s similar to falling in love, but the protection instinct is so fierce that you don’t want to let the kid out of your sight—even when you just want to take a shit in peace for one goddamn minute without a toddler crying at the door to be let in.
The urge to make my kid happy often means that I leave the door open anyway because he’s going to cry when I leave the room. My guilt over making my child cry usually wins out over any need for privacy I feel.
That guilt can be pervasive, and it can be overwhelming if I let it.
I often catch myself tallying up how long I get to spend with them. We get the kids up at 6:30 and send them off to daycare at 7:30. I leave to pick them up by 4:45, and we get home around 5:15. We eat dinner, take baths, put them into pajamas over the course of the next hour. Sweet Pea is still only 5 months, so she’s in bed by 6:30. Fishy, who is two years old, stays up until 7:30 if we can make it that long.
So most weekdays, I get 2 hours of wake time with Sweet Pea and just over three hours of wake time with Fishy. In comparison to the rest of their day with their teachers, if I count the hours, I am not the main person in their waking life right now.
What I’ve found in my limited experience with childcare is that the guilt I feel doesn’t dissipate as they grow up. In a lot of ways it gets worse.
I don’t feel bad missing much of Sweet Pea’s day, because she sleeps for about 16-18 hours a day. Fishy only sleeps for about 15 hours a day, and we sleep during most of those hours.
When I start counting the hours like this, I realize again and again that Fishy’s teachers get to spend much more time with him than I do.
Once I have this realization, I can begin to talk myself out of it. Technically, it’s true that Fishy’s teachers spend 8-9 hours a day with him, but they split their attention between 5-11 other kids, as well. My sister once told me to remember that although the teachers spend a lot of time with my kids, I’m still their mother. I know them best. It’s hard to remember, but that little bit of advice goes a long way toward making me feel better.
But those other hours that he’s at school—especially the morning when he’s well rested, running around having fun—feel like a huge loss to me. Weekend mornings we laugh, we talk, and we run around the house, throwing ourselves down on big piles of pillows and pretending to take naps. What a joy he is when he’s playing and learning and exploring the world.
Those first couple of hours of the day he hardly cries, he’s excited about everything, and the world is a beautiful place that he gets to play in. He screams with enthusiasm over everything: an airplane flying overhead, finding a bug in the backyard, or even just hearing a new noise around the house.
For example, he just recently figured out how to step into his own rain boots, and will say “boothfs, boothfs” until we can help him put them on. His pronunciation of boots sounds suspiciously like his pronunciation of “poop,” so often I’m relieved when he only wants to put on his boothfs. Then he grabs his fireman’s jacket, and clomps around with the authority of the shortened chief he believes himself to be.
Who wouldn’t want to spend all their time with an adorable ball of fun like that? Me. That’s who. And I feel bad about that, but I know that I wouldn’t actually be happy playing and learning with him all day every day. So I feel guilty, and I just live with that guilt. It’s real, and it’s also not something that I can wish or explain or rationalize away. What I can do, however, is remember the trade-off.
The trade-off is huge, and I couldn’t live without it. By sending my kids to daycare, I get to do work that I love and that makes me feel validated as a human with a brain who contributes something to society. I can make time for creative projects and extra writing jobs. I can work on projects that make me feel accomplished and independent. I feel like I have an identity outside of Mama.
I also get to show my children that it’s hard to have a family and have a job, but they can do it. I get to show my daughter that she can have a career, that she doesn’t have to choose her family over her career aspirations. I want her to see the difficulties and the struggles that I go through but also the sacrifices that my husband and I both make to build a family and have a fulfilling life.
I wouldn’t be happy staying at home with the kids. I appreciate women who do, and I think they make big sacrifices. But no person is built to devote their entire attention to another human being or give all of their time to caring for them. For much of our history, humans have lived in supportive societies where children were cared for by the collective unit, whether that childcare came from elderly family members, older siblings, or neighbors. Recently, because of American individualism, the rise of the nuclear family, and a society driven by capitalism, we tell parents that it is their responsibility alone to care for their children and earn the income that is needed to support that family. And it’s the parental unit’s fault if they don’t have the money, the community resources, or the time to do both of those things well.
I see this pressure building up for many of my friends and coworkers because of the pandemic. They struggle to provide care for their children, run virtual school, and hold down steady jobs. The lack of affordable, quality childcare means that this pressure is only building because more people feel the pinch.
It’s my hope that the more that we feel the pressure, the more that we start talking about how the pandemic has set women back in life and career (and I plan to talk about this in future articles), and the more that the lack of childcare affects the productivity of American businesses, we’ll start to make changes that help parents and kids. But the first step is to start talking about how our current situation makes us feel. I feel guilty for putting my kids in daycare, but I love the freedom it provides me.
Thank you Tamara for this very interesting newsletter. I know that my daughter feels exactly the same, even though she is not in the states, but the UK. She has to juggle around her work - she's a freelancer - and run from work to day-care, and the precious time she does have with Violette, whose two, is so precious. She also NEEDS the freedom to have her moment for her. Thank you. Jeanne (Pope)