Did you see the recent twist on universal daycare?

Here is an article about Warren’s proposal

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/19/us/politics/elizabeth-warren-child-care.html

Here a copy of Carlson’s show you saw:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yQIXjby5wKo

The argument from conservatives, as I can tell, is that this is pushing society in the wrong direction. It is an idea that says “we can give you free day care for your children so that you have more time to go work a job and earn money”. The idea is not geared supporting the family raising the children. The conservatives see that there are fewer problems with children overall when they are raised by their parents instead of daycare. The ideal would be supporting an economic effort that allows a single income to support the family allowing the children to be raised by the parents. This proposal is allowing the parents to spend their time supporting society, not the reverse.

Now in this show: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8MYxu-W2ozs Carlson points out that 15 years ago, Elizabeth Warren put out a book, “The Two-Income Trap” that points out exactly the idea of how a two income based society is tearing apart the families and is leading to all sorts of issues. Now she is flip-flopping, working to add to the “two-income trap”.

I have mixed feelings about this. I was a single parent through most of my children’s formative years. I had to use daycare for some of that and it can be expensive. So on the surface Warren’s proposal has appeal. But then I think back. There are many, many rules surrounding how a daycare operates now….standards for quality if you will. Yet many of the daycares are pretty sketchy. Stating that the daycares would have to meet federal guidelines for quality isn’t saying much…they already have to meet quality standards and many meet bare minimums.
Then I look at our public education because one of the benefits she says will be realized is that the daycare providers will be doing the job of teachers. Our public education system is poor. So, again, it comes down to what are we saying are acceptable standards? Our government accepts low standards, so why would this be any different? Our public schools have no discipline, many parents send their kids off to school and are not involved, expecting the school to raise their kids while they are there. But those same parents don’t want to empower the schools so they are failing. Education is a key to prosperity, health…pretty much everything good in our lives. But we are cranking out generations that are progressively getting more illiterate. We are one of the richest countries in the world and rank 15th in reading, 25th in math and 18th in science

https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2010/dec/07/world-education-rankings-maths-science-reading

So saying our daycares are going to meet standards and are providers are going to be like teachers doesn’t give me a warm fuzzy feeling. Personally, my kids did better when I took them out of daycare and had my sister-in-law watching them while I was at work. Being in a family setting seemed to be best for them.

March 6, 2019, 10:06 a.m. I agree with most of what @seawulf575 says. Some
parents have to have duel incomes just to be able to live day to day. These are the parents this should be helping.

@chyna I’m marking the date and time on my calendar…“Chyna agreed with me on something”
;-)

Worst case scenario, a chance for the state to indoctrinate kids.

When I was in college, I was active at the United Methodist Student Center which was right next door to a liberal church, Prescott Baptist.

The daycare (3–5 year olds) on a carnival day had its main event throwing eggs and tomatoes at pictures of Reagan and Bush.

Funny, yeah—but do you really want adults indoctrinating kids this way?

Daycare is THE #1 biggest hurdle to overcome to being able to work, especially for single mothers.
Sure they may want to stay home with the kids but who the hell is going to support the family?
Not working is not an option and they need some relief.

Yellowdog….I was a state licensed daycare provider for 3 years. No tomato throwing on my watch. They did play in the mud though.

@Yellowdog Let me get this right.

The lliberal dayschool was run by Baptists?

The Baptists were throwing tomatoes, with young children, at pictures of Reagan and Bush?

You’re worried about the government running daycare.

Somehow that all doesn’t make sense to me.

It’s also almost comical, except that I find having children throw tomatoes at a photo of our president despicable, even when I was not very fond of that President.

The childcare situation is just another of the realites around my argument that it is the inequities of capitalism which force the country toward socialist solutions. It is unfortunate that societal changes proceed like the proverbial frog in the pot. We rarely notice as the temperature rises. And for every one of the economic quicksand issues conflicting American families the trend is the same. Take your pick: Health care, homelessness, childcare, college expenses—why were these virtual non issues 50 years ago yet the defining landscape of today’s America? Why is it no longer feasible for a man to work while his wife cares for the kids and looks after the household? Why is a college education the same price as as a mortgage on a house? Why is an army of homeless people now deployed on the streets of the richest nation in the history of the world? Where’s the money?

I never thought of a Baptist church as being a liberal stronghold!

@JLeslie The Daycare was at Prescott Memorial Baptist at Mynders and Patterson at the University of Memphis. I don’t think it is still there. But it is not a Southern Baptist church. Probably American Baptist.

The church property was at one time a nice historical church building but got bought out or condemned by the university. They have a dinkier and dumpier new facility near Getwell and Park Avenue now.

Booing of Bush and Reagan were also common occurrences—

The United Methodist Student Center, or Wesley Foundation, we ran our own Afterschool Activities program but our kids were school age. We were quite liberal but never political and I like to think positive and affirming. Throwing objects at pictures of anyone I think would make kids insecure or indoctrinate them with hate.

Well the parents need to be aware of what’s going in their kid’s daycare, wherever they send them.
Like I said I was state licensed, worked out of my home and had 0 affiliation with any religion. On Wednesdays we took a field trip.
Why not use my state licensed daycare as an example?

@Yellowdog It’s just terrible. I agree that throwing anything at any image is destructive for the minds of children.

I had a really nice experience in Memphis where children from a school or a camp, I don’t know which, was at the library on Poplar sitting with me during some sort of exhibit on racism or antisemitism, I don’t remember exactly. I sat among them as the story of the menorah in the window in Montana where the community stood against antisemitism to protect their Jewish citizens. You probably know the story. After the presentation the counselor/teacher turned to the kids and asked them if they would help protect Jewish people or atheists, or anyone that might be different than them. That we all need to stand up for each other. Afterwards, I went up to him as the kids walked ahead and told him how great I thought it was that he included atheists.

In Memphis my husband and I were invited to a preschool to talk about Chanukah and also how Mexicans celebrate Christmas. They were so cute.

Diversity and cultural awareness are good for children, and are the essence of TRUE liberalism.
Demonizing one’s perceived enemies makes children insecure, even if they believe themselves to be on the ‘right’ side of us-against-the-world.

@Yellowdog I agree. I think young children should be in a fairly protective bubble about political things unless they literally need to fear for their lives in the immediate. That includes parents not talking about how much they hate our president and keeping talk about the country being ruined fairly quiet. Again, I’m talking about young children, like ages up until 9 or 10. Talking issues is fine, but not scary talk or hateful talk. After that they start learning more about government and politics, as they should, and negative opinions might be shared more.

Feeling secure helps children feel free and confident.

Guess I missed the “twist” on universal daycare.

1. Taxpayer funded universal income for mothers so they can raise their kids,
2. Taxpayer funded daycare so mothers can work and pay the bills,
3. Having a system where poor kids can’t reach their full potential and we have to stop pretending to believe in equality of opportunity. As a society we care about rich kids getting to the top (on the aggregate) instead of the smartest and hardest working ones.

Pick one.

I’ve been to Head Start programs (as a CPS worker) in urban areas and I would never send my child to one of those.

Yet, on the other hand, I know that I used to pay over one thousand dollars a month for day care. Yes, over one thousand and that was about 10 years ago. A small percentage of the population could afford that. The alternative, if someone has multiple children, is they may as well not work.

I can see both sides of this coin. There needs to be more affordable day care, more affordable quality day care. I know what I paid and I was lucky that it was do-able for me. On the other hand, with people in many places paying taxes through the roof, people would probably flip their lids if they were asked to pay more, via higher taxes to pay for universal day care. Where I live it’s not uncommon for people to pay 12k to 20k per year for just a regular house. Not a mansion, just a regular small house on a small piece of property.

In addition, it might have some type of unforseeable negative affect on the whole system, the way Obama-care had on the health insurance industry with people paying tons for private insurance. Totally ridiculous amounts people pay for sucky health insurance now. I thank the universe all the time that I work for the government.

I think part of it is probably a criticism of people having multiple children when they can’t afford it. If daycare is free, then it makes it easier to have more children. I tend to be in favor of the government discouraging more births. At the same time, if the children are here, I want the country to do everything possible to help provide equality and health for those children.

I’m not for universal dayschool if I had to cast my vote today, but I resent the way they were talking about it on the show I mentioned.

I charged $50 a week for daycare.

People do not say “Hey! Daycare is free! Let’s have more kids!” @JLeslie.

@Dutchess_III What if parents got no help for their kids? Or, no help for more than one kid? Then would they say, “hey, we can’t afford more kids, maybe we shouldn’t have any?” A lot of people do that. If they were given lots of free services and extra money to have kids they might have another.

^ stop

I second @hmmmmmm
Most of us are not mindless rabbits.

I love when people lay the groundwork for class-based reproduction. The rich are the ones who can afford to actually have kids, so they should have them. The poor and working class can’t afford it, so they shouldn’t. And the fact that the economic system is designed to create a small amount of people rich and have the rest fighting over the scraps? Tough. Maybe the non-rich can have children in the next life.

The daycare system is really a cluster. A few months after the twins were born my daughter wanted to go back to work. She got a job at Taco Bell, and found an SRS licensed day care provider. Based on her income, the SRS paid the whole day care bill.
The second week the day care provider started demanding more money, like $25 a week more per child.
My daughter managed to cough it up.
The third week the babysitter demanded an extra $50 a week per child! So $150 a week over and above what the state was paying her! That is $600 a month.
Of course, there was no way my daughter could pay that, plus they were scaling back on all the other assistance (rental assistance, food stamps) and she was going into the hole every pay period, by about $100. Who was she not going to pay? The rent? The utilities? The daycare provider?
So she had to quit her job and go back on state a assistance for a while longer, until the kids got a little older and day care was a little cheaper.

When I was doing daycare I remember signing an agreement that I would not charge more that what the SRS was willing to pay for qualified clients. I called them to blow the whistle on that lady, they just shrugged.

@hmmmmmm wasn’t it Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez that said it’s a “legitimate question” to ask whether it’s OK for parents to continue to have children in an age of looming climate-related consequences? She doesn’t care if the people are rich or poor, she just wants no one to have more children, apparently.

@seawulf575 – You’ve stumbled into the wrong thread.

In Memphis, it is pretty common for families on government assistance to have ten or more children

I worked at a private but very generous with scholarships school-age child care program affiliated with a large, fairly liberal church in Memphis. We could find money for just about anyone as long as the families were relatively small.

I never will forget the calls of people on gov’t assistance who sought to be in our program—some had families so large that we’d have to provide single 14-passenger vans just for their families alone. I am not kidding. What saved us was, we could not accept state money. If we did, we’d have to remove every cross, communion cup, bible, religious literature, etc etc just to accommodate these state-fund recipients.

I have nothing against state funds for child care as long as we do not have to literally remodel our places of worship, and ban prayer and the right to have devotionals. I do think it is a little unfair however if some can have ten or eleven children free when others are paying 600 t a month for just two to four kids.

@hmmmmmm I’m sorry, wasn’t it you that started the conversation about rich having children and the poor not being allowed to? I was just responding to that. If that is the wrong thread then I suggest it was you who stumbled onto the wrong thread.

I call bullshit on “it is pretty common for families on government assistance to have ten or more children” @Yellowdog.
You’re just being a hater, making shit up to make poor people look bad AND stupid.

@seawulf575 “she just wants no one to have more children, apparently.”

Your conclusion does not follow from your premises.

@seawulf575: ”@hmmmmmm I’m sorry”

Apology accepted.

@Dutchess_III Ten or more “babies” then.

No one can afford that many children without government assistance, and when there are lots of freebies, tax deductions and refunds, ebt / snap—there is no incentive to have fewer children. At Carnes Elementary (a bad inner city area) in Memphis the average family size was 8.7 children. In Bartlett, a Middle Class suburb, the average family has 1.8 children.

I have to say I didn’t like what Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said. Since I can remember some people have said things like “the world is so screwed up maybe we shouldn’t bring more children into it.” I’m just not on board with that thinking.

As far as mindless rabbits and social class, well, I live in a place where the demographics are fairly affluent. People are retired, many of them own their houses outright. They travel a lot, go to Disney, play all day. They work the system when they can, don’t think they don’t. Lots of people work the system when it is available no matter what social class they are in. I was just talking about encouraging or discouraging behavior through monetary means. That’s what governments do. Countries that need more babies born offer months and months of maternity leave and other benefits. Divorce laws force spouses to split property and wealth to try to avoid one becoming destitute (and on public assistance). The laws are not just to be nice or moral, it’s bottom line money also.

A jelly once write here that he used to go with his mom to help low income people, said he said many of them just don’t think about family planning. That was a long time ago, that has probably changed some. When I lived in Memphis I had quite a few friends and coworkers who were middle class who had grand babies because their teen and young 20’s children got pregnant or got someone pregnant by accident. I saw plenty of it in all the classes. I think part of it was religion, they don’t abort, and maybe they were less likely to use birth control I don’t know.

”Ten or more “babies” then.” That was a dumb comment.
You have NO idea what you’re talking about Yellowdog. Not a single clue. You’re making assumptions and you’re wrong. You don’t know how the system works.

@Yellowdog Some of it is mental illnes. I worked at Lakeside and I remember one patient had 9 children. Her mother was appointed the foster parent and received funds. However, with people like her I don’t think she has more babies because if services provided or to make money. The woman is just out of control and out of her mind. I certainly do want to make sure her kids can go to decent schools, and have food and shelter, etc. it’s so tricky. The only way to try to break that cycle is to provide as good an environment as possible for those children.

My father grew up incredibly poor, and all of his friends from the neighborhood were from mostly 2 children families.