As a candidate in the 2003 provincial election, I had the opportunity to participate in a number of all-candidates meetings. Unfortunately, most of the issues were agenda-driven and every effort was made to avoid the more controversial moral issues such as abortion and homosexual marriage. Besides the usual spending promises, the NDP candidate discussed how her party would implement a ten-dollar per day day-care program. This promise caught my attention because a few days earlier the media reported about a day-care workers’ strike in Quebec.
Quebec, as our readers may or may not know, has a five-dollar per day day-care system. Although it is often touted as a major success, the facts prove otherwise. Outside of the devastating impact on children, the system has become so costly, that the Quebec government has had to withdraw funds from the Quebec pension plan in order to keep it afloat. While this fact is certainly scandalous in its own right, it pales in comparison to the message that it sends about the importance of parenthood.
For the sake of argument, let’s assume that all of the day-care centers in Quebec could house sixteen children. Sixteen children times five dollars is eighty dollars. If each child had two parents, there would be thirty-two parents in each program. Next, if you take eighty dollars and divide it by thirty-two parents, you get two dollars and fifty cents. In essence, the day-care industry in Quebec is saying that parenthood is worth a couple of bucks and some change. The message here is that parenthood is something that you can put a price on. It is the commodification of parenthood taken to its extreme.
It is not my intent to bash day-care. Some parents truly do need day-care programs in order to work and make ends meet. These parents, however, are clearly in the minority. In my opinion, there is no excuse for middle class or wealthy, dual income couples to put their children in day-care centres.
I make a modest living and my wife is a stay-at-home mom. We have seven children and we are regularly asked just how we are able to make ends meet. What I usually tell people is that children are born with a loaf of bread under their arms. Our Lord himself said that He would provide for us. We must depend on providence and trust that God will give us what we truly need (Cf. Lk. 12: 22-32).
My wife was a preschool teacher for the first two years of our marriage. She worked for a very professionally run day-care program that could accommodate a maximum of sixteen children. I can remember with vivid detail the stories that she used to tell about the damage done to children who attended her day-care. For example, a number of children would cling to the legs of their parents while crying and begging not to be dropped off. After a few weeks, these children would develop a hardness of heart as a result of the stress associated with the separation and feelings of abandonment. Parents would report that on weekends their children would say things such as, “I miss Lindy” (my wife’s name is Melinda). Other parents would report that their children actually dreamt about the caregivers. The saddest of all were the children who waited by the window with long, sad faces for their parents to pick them up at 6:30 pm and beyond. This becomes even more tragic when you consider the fact that most of these parents were doctors, lawyers and other professionals.
As I watched the day-care workers in Quebec picket and chant slogans in front of their workplaces, I couldn’t help but think just how lucky some of the kids were that day. Alternative arrangements would certainly be made for some, but for others the day would mean something else — a chance to spend it in the company of mom, dad or even both parents.
How did it come to this? How did our country come to de-value parenthood? I would argue that this has been the goal of the state for a number of years. Communist dictatorships have always known that they must destroy the family and all of its traditions in order to secure allegiance to the state. In the academy award winning film, The Killing Fields, there is a scene where the North Vietnamese are indoctrinating the Cambodians in one of their concentration camps. Children are shown attending a school. There is a “stick drawing” on the blackboard of a family holding hands. The teacher asks a question and one of the children raises his hand. The child then gets up, goes to the blackboard and proceeds to draw a big X through the mother and father. The communists understood that the younger the Cambodian, the greater the chance of indoctrination.
In the formative years, children have no baggage and they have not yet developed a value-system or a properly formed conscience. It is the parents who are primarily responsible for this formation process. Christian parents must begin to instill a sense of the sacred and divine at this age or else risk losing their children to the dominant post-Christian culture. Even parents who are able to do this still must compete with the dominant culture that is at war with traditional Christian morality. Although the deck seems to be stacked against Christian parents, there is at least hope within the family.
Obviously Canada is not a communist dictatorship, but it would seem that we are heading in this direction. Those in our government who would seek to undermine the family would never be upfront about it because Canadians would never tolerate it. Incrementalism is the modus operandi of those who seek to re-define the family unit. Like the frog that is being cooked to death slowly on low heat, we Canadians have been willing to accept minor encroachments on our freedom during these past forty years. As the readers know, there are many groups that are actively trying to dismantle the very definition of family.
Make no mistake about it, the Canadian government realizes that he who controls education controls the future of any society. Why do you think that the current provincial government seems so hostile to home-schools and private education? They know that the faith and values that so many of these families hold dear are passed on within the family. Secular humanism and moral relativism, which are the pillars of most public education, are undermined within the alternative systems. I would argue that the Catholic secondary system lost something when it decided to accept government funding. They inadvertently opened the door enough for the State to water down the Faith.
After being deprogrammed and then reprogrammed, the children in the concentration camps developed a resentment and hostility towards their parents as a result of being isolated and alienated from them. Many of the children were then given the authority to ‘rule’ over their parents. Faced with the trauma of daily separation and the competition for the attention of the day-care workers, children will most certainly rebel against those who should be raising them — mom and dad. Recent studies have found heightened levels of aggression in children who have attended day-care compared to those who have been raised at home. What the North Vietnamese did by force, too many Canadian parents are doing by choice, the consequences of which will resonate for generations.
[This article courtesy of the SoCon or Bust blog.]
December 5th, 2008 at 5:50 am
Excellent points! Pope John Paul II is quoted in his biography that communist states have as their goal the destruction of the family so it can be reprogrammed by the state. My husband and I recognized the parallels in our own society that this article also elucidates.
Satan is a very sneaky devil! He even infiltrated preschool programs. When I was raising my first subset of children, preschool was a simple nursery school. Around around 1994 nursery school began to disappear. Rigorous academic standards were being imposed on 3 year olds. I could no longer send my 3 year old two days a week (so that I could attend Bible study one day and run errands the other). No! It was a 4-5 day school week. The funniest scene I remember, is a teacher (basically) pounding the table saying, “You must learn your ABCs!!” as 14 three year old boys and one lone girl stared at her with solemn faces.
Then the fees increased. “What’s going on!” I wondered. “Ah! The inflow of federal dollars.” Yep! Working parents could get a CREDIT for preschool since for THEM it was daycare, whereas, I just needed 6 childfree hours a week to regroup. Now, I had to absorb the opportunity cost of NOT working and the increased fees, plus funnel my tax dollars to
Working Wanda in the form of a money transfer/credit.
I was run out of the system. I couldn’t afford the fees. I didn’t want “Princeton Preschool”. I eschewed daycare.
GOD WORKS IN MYSTERIOUS WAYS! Raising my children has been MY salvation. What parents don’t realize is that parenting is a gift to moms and dads to help US grow up. My children have enriched me more than they will ever know. Every spiritual gift I have received has been wrapped in pink, downy baby flesh.
Parenting numerous children over several decades works miracles in the souls of parents. Joy and Peace flourish year-round. Priceless, and bought with the price of Christian parenting, they are worth more than any tax credit.
December 5th, 2008 at 6:17 am
The mindset that governments are trying to instill in today’s parents is “Parenthood is for trained professionals only, do not try this at home!”
December 5th, 2008 at 6:58 am
At the same time, they are saying that the “trained professionals” should be the lowest paid and lowest status workers – talk about mixed messages.
December 5th, 2008 at 7:15 am
Right. Because like the author brings out parenthood is not valued. Parenthood is not valued because children are not valued. Children are not valued because life is not valued. Children/people are useful to the state only as cogs in a machine — not as what they are in truth, human beings whose highest allegience should be to their Creator. Canada is being strangled by Leviathan and we are right behind.
December 5th, 2008 at 8:27 am
Pro-lifers, myself included, have noted the correlation between the birth dearth and contraception/abortion. Interestingly though, there is something else, but it doesn’t get reported (Pres. Reagan did allude to it once some years ago): there is a direct correlation between public schooling and family size. This tidbit was reported in Rian Robertson’s book “There’s No Place Like Work.” I haven’t seen it anywhere else, and I think this one definately needs to good looking at by serious demographers.
Anyway, a junior high school aquaintance of mine sent my a fund raising letter to promote the Imagination Library in our own town. This program was designed to provide children under five with their own set of age appropriate books. It was started by a noted celebrity for her own hometown in Tenn, which may or may not be financial distressed–I simply down’t know. Sounds harmless enough, right? Heck, sounds like a good idea to me: Turn off Barney; read Hop on Pop instead!
Well, in our town, the local education services people have gotten ahold of the program, and want to give books to all kids under the age of 6 who live in our county. Some of the money spent is private; a lot of tax payer funded. Now, I assure you, while there are a great deal of children in the county who are in financially distressed families, huge numbers of city kids (and a lot of the county kids too) are quite well off. There is no need to enroll ALL 6 years old in the program. Mom and Dad could go down to the local book store and buy books themselves. And we have an excellent public library, open 7 days a week during the school year, M-Sat during the summer.
My point: bit by bit, we are relieving parents of their single most important job: raising their own kids. Everything from school lunches, to extended school days, after school programs, “free” in home wellness checks by social workers. And now books for the little guys.
And then of course, parents are slammed for doing a poor job of parenting. Pareting in a learned behavior and takes practice. And you can’t work on your parenting if your kids are never around, (and “professionals” are doing it all for you anyway.) It is little wonder more and more parents are doing a poor job, and more and more young adults are deciding not to do it at all.
(Incidentally, there still are traditional preschool schools out there: lots of play time and fun. My 5 year old attends one. But the pressures to “get with program” are tremendous, and I fear for our great preschool program’s future.)
December 5th, 2008 at 10:12 am
Catholic education did not have to water down the teachings to get federal funding, they did of their own accord.
Catholic education in Canada is a guaranteed treaty right granted to catholics by the very un-catholic friendly british to those inhabiting New France, after its conquest– to preserve public order (seeing how badly stamping out catholicism worked in Ireland). The only moneys added recently were to fully fund catholic education to the end of highschool– it used to stop at grade 9, a funding decision reflecting how few people used to continue past that level. As catholic missions spread throughout Canada, these rights were extended to all catholics in British North America.
Attitudes to homeschooling vary from province to province. Quebec feels the need to convert non-quebecois children into quebecois, and homeschooling interferes with that.
December 5th, 2008 at 2:48 pm
Maybe this explains my knee-jerk reaction to “universal preschool.”
HUH?
Do people really think that our education problem is due to the fact that our children are not learning enough at age 4?
I guess I’m lucky. We found a preschool that is excellent (in my opinion).
It isn’t “heady” but allows children to “learn” simply through play.
Gosh…who would have known that a clump of Play-doh helps with spacial development, fine motor muscles, creativity, and the like. Yes. we have it at home too. They are not hammered with ABCs, but everything there is designed to give them an embedded foundation for learning when they are ready. It might be why I was able to teach each of them to read the summer before entering Kindergarten (summer babies…just had turned 5). They weren’t already burned out!
I’m with elkabrikir. Mine go two mornings a week so that I can get my own spiritual formation and a Bible study. I don’t like how pricey it is. But I am pretty sure I would NOT be happy with the quality if it was state-run and $10 a day. Sometimes you get what you pay for.
December 5th, 2008 at 3:13 pm
Mary, awesome post!