For years, realists have pointed this out to mothers who choose to work outside of the home while their children are still in need of home care, during their early years and after school while they are still too immature to be left alone. (Latchkey kids left alone too early generally did not turn out too well, history showed us.)
But today, it's not a feminist "I CAN have it all" wonderwoman making the pitch, but a man, baby, proudly in touch with his feminine side: Mr. Farhad Manjoo, himself a liberal NYT columnist (that's the only type left standing today, it seems...) and his wife, a doctor.
Manjoo wants to vacation by the pool, and have federal taxpayers pick up his daycare expenses and children's education costs too. As a professional family in America outsourcing their in-home needs, they WILL have it all...
As a respite from a chaotic spring spent under quarantine,
my family booked a weeklong vacation last month in a cozy, remote house
in the California desert. While the kids cannonballed into the
saltwater pool and my wife sped through several novels, I spent my time
in the sun doing exactly the sort of thing you’d imagine an opinion
columnist might do on summer vacation: I read two hot new books about
macroeconomics...
In the last few years, and especially in the hellish last couple of months, the United States has come to feel like a failed state. The coronavirus is spreading, the economy is crumbling, society is fragmenting, our infrastructure is falling apart, health care is inadequate and costly, child care is impossible, and life expectancy is declining.
The
federal government is not only often unwilling to help, but seemingly
incapable of it. To get just about anything done anymore, Uncle Sam must
go hat in hand to the behemoth private companies that now rule much of
our lives. Please, Google, will you create a coronavirus testing website? Please, Walmart, will you set up in-person testing sites?
And
whenever anyone is brave enough to suggest that the government itself
should provide useful services to Americans — whether big-ticket items
like health care, child care and college education, or smaller things
like an upgraded electric grid or a national broadband service — the
first reaction from many on the right and the left is one of defeat and
resignation. “How will you pay for it?” they ask.
Manjoo is of the newer immigrant stock that came to America and saw monetary resources to exploit. In previous columns, he has told us about the "tummy troubles" both his mother and himself suffer, that leads him to special accommodations that include working from home, where he can indulge himself in his needed aromatherapy that co-workers likely would not tolerate in the shared workplace.
He's written about how he and his wife -- both professionals but amateur parents it seems -- have previously relied on the grandparents
to raise their children while they work. And he's even disclosed that his children are ... not very disciplined, to put it kindly. (He is one of those parents who throws up his hands on an airplane when the child is mouthing off and kicking the back of your seat, say, "Kids. They're like this! We can't control them, at home or here... Sorry, suffer along co-riders.")
You see, often when children are not fully parented at home: with expectations set, about bedtime, behavioral issues, and common-sense consequences -- they run the roost, become little unmanage-able hellions. Nttawwt, the Manjoos might say. Our children are "American!", liberated -- the boys and girls too -- running wild and free...
Which is wonderful, within bounds. But sometimes, an undisciplined child not being taught proper behavior in the home is just that.
Federal daycare is not the answer, in fact, think of how it will contribute to the societal inequity that is being protested against today. Underpaid workers will be forced to care for the professional people's children. People who have the money to vacation in pandemic time, while griping that childcare is just "impossible" to find...
Maybe today, other families who have had their mothers work outside the home for pay raising other people's children, are just not interested in doing that work at rock-bottom wages? Maybe, they want to stay home and care for their own -- the Hispanics and other recent working-class immigrants know the value of a mother in the home during the child's primary years. Maybe, unlike African-American women who had to bade their own goodbye in the morning and be paid by the professionals -- some of whose wives remained at home, but needed "help" still in raising the children -- the Manjoo family will indeed find that replacing the obligatory grandparent "help" will be more costly and "impossible" to find than they imagine.
That's the market at work, especially in risky pandemic times. With your own, you CAN discipline them, and teach them to wash their hands, respect the rules, be smart about safety. The Manjoo children, this father has revealed, are the types who run their bikes and scooters into dangerous, injury-prone situations, and then, with the father's seeming encouragement and applause, makes them into column fodder when he just goes out the next day, and hurts himself in the same manner, again. "Kids, what can you do with them?"
Maybe you can start by conserving your resources, and not expect the federal taxpayers to ride to the rescue. Be honest: if both parents are "working" -- even from home, where standards are slack -- something will give. Either the children will get less attention, or the work will suffer.
Manjoo is not alone here. The
daughter of one of my former law school professors (her mother was the wife of a sociology professor on campus, and started working full time when her daughters were raised) herself married a now-tenured professor, and the two decided that he (
with grandma and her landlord lover's help) would be watching the children from home now that their Montessori daycare preschool was closed for the pandemic.
Guess what?
Daddy missed his deadline, and offered up to his collaborators that he was tasked with caring for the children. The wife ranted on social media that her husband was called out for overextending himself, "Our husbands can't do daycare?" But of course, that's not it.
These are just the men, falling into the formerly feminist trap of thinking they can "have it all". The jobs outside the home (where sometimes it doesn't really matter if the work is left undone: they are not "essential workers" like that, where if they screw up and don't show up and get their work done, it really matters to others in real time...); the childraising, even with the grandparents (and kinfolk) generous daily help!. and meeting the basic childhood needs: good nutrition, healthy outdoors time with other children, strong sleep schedules, education to ready them for the primary school years.
Usually, we don't much judge others, parents especially. You do yours, raising them with your cultural and religious values, and we will raise ours as we see fit. But...
Now the professional parents want working taxpayers, who prioritize having one parent home to do the full-time job of raising healthy citizens and students, to subsidize their choices, by providing guaranteed jobs for (often minority and lower-income) women to take care of their children while they choose to work outside the home? Sorry sons.
Like with the ladies, your family really cannot have it all, on the backs of others. You can call this "running up deficits" but most of us simply call this: poor planning. Indeed, overextending yourselves and not prioritizing your children first: their needs, why Daddy is working outside the home to provide, and Mommy is finding fulfillment with her children and community, and using her education in ways that directly affect the individual family: planning, prioritizing, budgeting time and money, and teaching the basics so the children can sleep at home, eat at home, and learn the basics of how family life works, at home.
Institutionalize them early, if you must, but please don't expect others to pay your "daycare" needs, or for those future educational bills that plenty of parents are already saving for... Not everyone treats their children to "cannonballs in a saltwater pool" but sometimes weekend vacations at the lake, evenings together at the public park, and daily life in the home -- including daily shared dinners -- are really what is best to raise healthy, stable and disciplined children who can then go on and recreate those families of their own.
Good luck to the Manjoos -- may they count their blessings, and learn that spoilt children who run the household young only bring bigger "accidents" and injuries to bear in their teens and early adult lives. Nobody wants to discipline your children in public, so we bite our tongues, tolerate your ways, but understand in the end, it's your children who pay the price when you think, men or women, that you really can... have it all! in a free-spending America today.
On deadline for the Sesame Street News. Note the coffee pot at the right hand...
