A Thank-You To Daycare
Robbie went to daycare with R; her younger brother, C, goes to daycare with Claire.
Robbie and R have been at the same camp for the last two weeks,
so all four kids have gotten to hang out at the playground at the end of the day.
Jon and their dad are now poker buddies, so this isn’t the end of the friendship!
Tomorrow is Claire’s last day at daycare. We’ve been with this daycare for almost six years; Robbie started when he was nine months old, in September 2018, and he and Claire overlapped for a few months before he moved on to preK-3.
I’m not going to delve into the bowels of Reddit or conservative parenting blogs to find exact quotes from people who think that sending a child to daycare is tantamount to abuse, but one I remember seeing repeatedly over the years is “Well, I could never let someone else raise my child.”
Putting aide the fact that this straw man argument is bullshit, let me just say this:
I am so, so grateful to the professionals at our daycare who have, in fact, helped us raise our children. I owe everything to the women who have loved and nurtured and encouraged Robbie and Claire alongside me and Jon. And they truly have loved the kids; you can see it in the way they greet us in the morning and in the way they tell us about the day’s small accomplishments at pick-up. Robbie and Claire have loved them back, and I am hugely flattered when Claire accidentally calls me by the name of her favorite teacher.
We all know it takes a village to raise children and I am honored to have been a part of this one. The fact that we paid to participate in it doesn’t make the help any less meaningful. The expanded community of other families has been a beautiful bonus, and I’m going to miss the parents’ WhatsApp chat when we kick ourselves off at the end of the summer.
So thank you, daycare. Thank you for helping us shape curious and creative children. For working through nap transitions and those phases when our child has subsisted on only air and string cheese for days at a time. For your empathy when one of our children was being bit regularly by a peer and when the other was doing the biting. (I’ll let you guess which was which, dear readers.) For teaching our children how to speak Spanish and how to share. For loving them and welcoming their love.
Thank you for helping to raise our children.
