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2. Is homeschooling or home-child-watching really better than school/daycare?
One might raise the analogy of nursing homes. Are nursing homes better than having children personally take care of parents, apart from the extremely ill elderly who need intensive medical care? I would suggest no, because humans dealing with humans, however well trained, cannot scale as easily as assembly line robots dealing with cars. My personal experience of public school was not awful, but I and many commentators from both the left and the right have noted the ways in which schools are necessarily limited by their mandate to warehouse and hopefully teach lots of kids at the same time for cheap. Use humans to take care of humans, is my general take, and no, a nurse/teacher following a three-ring binder is not the same thing.
I acknowledge that there are some parents whose kids would be better off under bureaucratic care because they’d be better off under *anyone* else’s care but their parents, but that’s a separate issue.
OK, there’s actually a really important meta-lesson to be learned here, separate from the object-level question of childcare.
It’s true: one might raise the analogy of nursing homes. And it turns out that – almost everywhere in the world that money and infrastructure allows – elderly people in need of care are fleeing from the prospect of being cared for at home by family, searching out alternatives where the care can be provided in some more-professionalized arm’s-length kind of way. And in the places where the elderly aren’t fleeing from the in-home family-based care model, their children are, even when those children have the resources to provide what’s needed.
(Basic information about this, presented in a pop-sociology kind of way, can be found in Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal. You can also get anec-data from, well, almost anyone who’s had to engage personally with the world of elder care.)
Which does seem weird on some level. I mean…it’s not wrong to suggest that family members are likely to care more, and to be more personally engaged, than professional caregivers.
But the very fact of the family connection means that the caregiving relationship is bound up in all sorts of other complicated relationships, about which people have independent feelings. When your caregiver is your child, then every single decision – every single action – becomes a referendum on love, and respect, and independence, and values. On both sides. You can’t just decide that a given thing doesn’t matter, even if it’s a tiny little stupid sort of thing, because this is your parent / child we’re talking about and everything matters.
It’s like…well, it’s a lot like a parent living with a subadult child. Surprise! There’s a values gap and a generation gap and an eternally-clashing set of priorities, and every engagement can easily give rise to friction, and it’s really hard to let any of it slide off your back because it’s all part of your very most important identity-critical relationships.
This is soul-crushing, on a day-to-day basis, with subadult children. When the dynamic takes place between two adults, each of whom feels rightly that he should be in control of the details of his own life, it can easily become a living nightmare. Even with all the goodwill in the world.
And someone is going to be in charge of the fraught little emotional vipers’ nest, which means that the other party is going to be subordinated and infantilized. In the classic Chinese-style multigenerational model, the elderly parent gets to make the decisions, which means that even adults don’t really get to have self-controlled adult lives until they have no more parents who might need their care. In more modern-Western-style settings, the elderly parent is reduced to being a sort of burdensome guest in his child’s home, perpetually at the sufferance of those on whom he is imposing.
Christ. Given those options, can you be surprised that people would prefer to turn to the professionals and the bureaucrats? Even at the cost of more mistakes and more apathy? You and your paid-for caregiver will probably annoy each other a dozen times a day, but so what? It’s just the fucking caregiver. You can still basically live your life with self-respect. You don’t have to live with one of your most cherished loving relationships becoming a tangle of dependency.
There are a lot of confounding factors here. Dementia is a big one; as your mind deteriorates, priorities like “independence” and “self-respect” are likely to shift around somewhat. And it’s true that even semi-decent professional caregiving is ridiculously expensive, in our current economy, while lowest-level nursing-home care is the stuff of horror movies.
But. Nonetheless. When circumstances allow it, parents and children alike are generally really happy to let professionalism and bureaucracy step in and take some of the burden off the family tie. It makes things easier, and less painful, for everyone involved.
This is the sort of thing that it’s really easy for traditionalists and primitivists to miss. The personalized, home-crafted, lovingly-made version of a thing is not always superior. (Even once you get outside the realm of “material consumer goods” and start looking at key social institutions.) Sometimes, the benefits of anonymity or standardization or arm’s-length engagement are pretty overwhelming.