Last year one of my sons texted me a photo and said, “And then THIS happened.” He was showing me the results of his red heeler “knocking up” a friend’s aging beagle. I saw on my phone screen nine nursing pups with eyes yet closed.
About a month later, this was the scene…
This morning I went to search a certain biblical story on YouTube, but became distracted with the first link that showed/was suggested in my customized feed (the one at the end of this piece about daycare). The title grabbed me, and I decided to listen.
It brought back a number of personal thoughts I had on this subject going back to the early/mid 1980’s. During college and afterward I worked regularly in a church-run daycare. And it was managed in a good way by good-hearted people, and seemed to provide a needed service in the local community. I believe many families were helped and blessed through this ministry, and it was an opportunity to share Christian love and values to others who might have otherwise obtained childcare in an even less optimal situation.
However, I was not without general thoughts on the subject of the rising use of daycare back then, and child development. During my last two years of college I attempted to switch into a community and family services major, which required various course work relating to children. I think I personally gravitated toward all of this through my own experience and interest in working in the daycare, my love and enjoyment of young children, and my own desires to one day become a mother.
One of the most obvious things known about daycare (which is just one thing that is so well-addressed in the video below) is the issue of so many children of the same age without one-on-one caregiving.
I remember at the time during college, writing a paper where I raised the point that God did not design humans (by nature) to care for more than two–maybe three–children of the same age at one time. Human mothers have been specifically designed with two breasts/nipples. Unlike my son’s puppy fiasco in which the mama beagle had enough nipples for each puppy at once, something is inherently different about the needs of a human child.
When I became a mother, I strongly wanted to stay at home with my son. And it was with that in mind that I attempted to use my art skills from home to earn money, and continued developing those over the years as financial needs inevitably grew. Eventually, the same thoughts and desires led me to homeschool both of my sons for a significant number of years.
Obviously trends in the last fifty years have heavily moved the tide toward normalizing women in the work force and the usage of daycare. Swimming against this current in the 1980’s was difficult, but not nearly as difficult as it has now become, in the 2020’s…
My thinking about having so many of the same-aged children together in a nurture/social situation back then eventually extended into my views of young children in a classroom. In nature, God created a family to have at least about a year or two between siblings. And one hundred years ago, the school house was often a multi-age situation. My older son was in public school through mid 4th grade, and had benefited being in an elementary school which was testing the “multi-age” classroom theory.
Between his kindergarten and third grade, he had the same teacher. Mrs. Phillips at Brookside Elementary School taught kindergarten/first in one classroom. Then, she moved up with the same students, teaching them first/second together. And next, she moved up with the same students teaching them second/third together. And then, third/fourth. She taught all subjects (math, reading, social studies, science) in the same classroom, and utilized the older students to help the young ones practice and learn, as I understood things. Because she was such a good teacher (an older woman, too) my son seemed to bond with her in a very positive way. As a mom, I also got familiar with Mrs. Phillips, and it seemed to be a good situation in that school, with little recollection of any significant classroom issues between students or acting out behaviors.
We moved during my son’s fourth grade to a school which required switching classrooms for every subject, multiple teachers, and a higher ratio of students per classroom. It was a difficult adjustment, and eventually resulted in my son being homeschooled after the winter break, up through 12th grade. As the decision to do this was being weighed, I recall utilizing the option to go sit in the classroom and observe, as I parent.
I remember my own schooling in the 1960’s-1970’s with fondness. I quite benefited from being in school for a number of reasons, and cannot fathom what homeschooling would have “looked like” in my particular upbringing.
Even with my own sons, I still wonder/consider whether it was right/wrong or good/bad that they were homeschooled. I believe overall it was a good thing, though this whole subject of both daycare and public education is a very difficult one and there is no perfect solution. Surely it is problematic regardless of the vantage point, and there are many things in our current society which increasingly make it difficult to go against the tide.
I believe as a society we need to preserve parental rights of all sorts, including the right to educate their children at home. Many parents also may not know that their homeschooled children are still entitled to participate in various public school offerings (speech therapy, sports and even online curriculums) but I am sure the laws/conditions vary from state to state and have likely changed since the years friends and I homeschooled.
When I consider what is happening in our world today in terms of deeply harmful indoctrination and conditioning of young children (on up through college classrooms into young adulthood) in ways that seem to threaten the existence of the human race and what it means to be human, my mind is quite troubled.
Some people can think, “well, my family is keeping our own kids generally safe” in certain chosen ways, but the truth is that the vast number of young people are being raised by the state and exposed to various things that ultimately will form and create them into the bulk of the children of the future. And we cannot shield our children forever from being forced to integrate into a society and world that is being formed by such inhuman things. These children of our future are a force that will be reckoned with in various ways. They will grow up to make new laws and to teach our grandchildren; they will become the caretakers of us when we are in our old age. Children truly are and have always been the hope of the future.
The video speaker does a good job in speaking about why daycare itself is not a good thing for a child and was originally intended as a last resort, not to be a normalized practice/expectation. It is a very hard message to hear, and considering the current fabric of families and society, raises deep questions about how a family might do otherwise.
As I think about daycare in the 2020’s and young children, I cannot help but also think of the very detrimental and inhumane practice in this setting that went even a step further toward deprivation of essential developments nurturing/social needs that resulted through various mandates/reactions/responses to the man-made covid pandemic.
The practice of forcing young children to wear masks during a significant portion of their early development will have far-reaching effects into the future. (As will the routine, intrusive public or private nasal swabbing of young children). In one hundred years we may find society yet talking about the sociopathy/psychopathy of grandparents who were forced to mask as toddler or in early grade school and its effects on their human development and later relationships of many sorts.
Impact of masks on children (from Livestream Q&A #85)
Does masking harm children? (from Livestream Q&A #92)
And then, add to that, the delusional teaching of preschoolers (on up) that there is “no such thing as a boy or a girl.” Any honest/objective research on the topic of gender ideology indoctrination will reveal it is a social contagion. And this social contagion spreads exceptionally fast-and-easy in classroom settings where there are thirty young children (or teens) in one room with a “trusted adult” leading the charge of such harmful teachings. In a family learning situation of one hundred years ago it would be unthinkable that a five-year-old could be brainwashed to believe there wasn’t some inherent difference in older male/female siblings who were naturally part of a family system of care that involved a number of relational roles and activities that were utilized and modeled, that had a deep basis in biological gender/sex differences.
For example, my father’s youngest sister told the story of how she and her sister were helping their mother make cherry pies when my grandmother, Orpha, had to leave the kitchen and go upstairs. The local midwife showed up at their family homestead and hours later came down and told the others, “you have a baby brother.” There was no nonsense about any of it, nor the basic facts of life. My grandmother wasn’t taking male hormones that gave her a beard, where she could somehow claim she was a “pregnant man who gave birth.”
The older sisters were working alongside their mother in the kitchen, right up to the time she was in labor with one of the youngest of the eight children. No one would have conceived of suggesting that the midwife (or anyone else) “assigned the sex” to the newborn male sibling. There was no such thing as ultrasound, and when a child entered the world in the way children have entered the world since Adam and Eve, there were physical cues by which my grandmother and those who were with her declared that which Eve said as recorded in the book of Genesis 4:1: “The man Adam knew his wife Eve intimately. She became pregnant and gave birth to Cain, and said, “I have given life to a man with the Lord’s help.” (CEB)
If I were a young mother today, there is probably no way that I would not withdraw and homeschool my children–for the sake of all that is good, right and holy in this world.
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