Mother's Day Out is a brilliant marketing strategy to get stay-at-home moms to put their children in daycare. You can choose from placing your child at a center from 9 a.m - 2:30 pm just one day a week, two days a week, or every day! In fact, as a mother you DESERVE time (the entire week, if you want!) to not be a mother.
Mother's Day Out is very popular out here. I actually don't have a problem with it. If someone really needs a break or if they just want a break, then I think it is a great thing. I get annoyed because a lot of moms are being pressured to do it here. It is being couched in this rhetoric that it is best for your child and that you SHOULD do it.
For example, my good friend Lisa is facing a lot of pressure from her husband and family to enroll in her son in a program. Lisa doesn't want to send her son there. She wants to stay home with him and doesn't feel like she is overwhelmed by staying at home. Why is there this pressure from society to send away our very young children?
I have a friend of a friend who enrolled her son in a program even though she didn't want to. She cried all the way there, then in the parking lot for 15 minutes after she dropped him off. Then, two hours later they called her to come pick him up because he had been screaming the entire time. She doesn't feel like she needs a break (this baby is under a year and well-behaved), but she has been taught that a good mom sends her child to Mother's Day Out. So, she is continuing with the program for at least two days a week even though both she and her child hate it!
This has all come to a boiling point because the doctor mentioned Mother's Day Out at our appointment last week. Willa is not an aggressive baby. She usually stands there while other kids might take her toys. She'll complain and sometimes she'll get the toy back, but she will mostly wait until the child is done and then begin playing with it again, or she'll redirect herself to another toy. She rarely is the type to steal a toy from another child. I feel badly sometimes that she is the more timid child, but I would rather have her be timid than be aggressive and mean. I don't think it means that she needs to socialize more or that she needs Mother's Day Out to learn socialization. She plays with little friends several times a week. They parallel play, they actually play together, and they learn how to share! I don't think the key to helping your child overcome shyness or timidity is leaving them at a daycare center in a pack of other children. The skill they learn there is that aggression produces results. The soft get hard and the hard get harder. Shyness is a personality trait, not a weakness. You can surely introduce your child to gentler situations that will help them learn socialization and overcome their fears. That's all, I just had to vent.
Wow, that sounds like a hard cultural trend to resist, if you want to! I love having my kids at home with me, too. They grow up so fast as it is. True independence comes on their terms and in their time, not by parents shoving a child out the door. People often ask how I (a homeschooler) and my kids ("homeschool" preschoolers) are socialized. Um, by being around each other and plenty of other people? How often in real grown-up life are we only surrounded by our only the peers within a year of our age? Hardly ever. I think it's most important that children be around their parents and their siblings and friends of various ages. Okay, enough of my soap box. I just think you can feel confident in choosing what is best for you and your daughter. There are lots of good ways to do the same right thing.
ReplyDeleteExactly! Yeah, I think there are plenty of ways for kids to learn social skills that doesn't have to involve sending them out (especially for one year olds!).
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