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The smartest parenting decision my spouse and I ever made was to send our two girls to non-profit day care. They started early, they received care vastly superior to what we could have provided at home, and their early experience with classroom routines will give them a huge head start in school.
But the most important lessons they learned were about how to treat other people. Just imagine two dozen toddlers beavering away in a big, busy room. The only way to avoid utter chaos is by establishing and enforcing clear rules about sharing, non-violence, cooperation, and respect. As a result, a well-run day care is one of the most egalitarian, inspiring places on earth.
My only disappointment was the gradual realization that this nurturing and generally peaceful environment was completely different from the real world that my daughters were destined to inhabit. At day care they learn to be compassionate and cooperative human beings. But capitalism does not reward compassion and cooperation; it is driven by acquisitiveness and individualism. The rules of the game change once you leave day care-and so do the "teachers" who enforce them.
In short, it will be all downhill for my girls once they hit the world of supply and demand, competition and survival. Too bad we don't enforce some of the same rules, and teach some of the same lessons, as prevail inside a day care. Here are the ones I would choose.
You must share. In day care, sharing is not simply a nice or polite thing to do. It is an essential social skill. A child who refuses to share is demonstrating anti-social behaviour, and will be consistently coached to change. We used to do that in broader society, too. It was called paying your taxes. But the tax-cutters ruling Ottawa and most provinces are doing their best to make us forget this lesson.
Be gentle. The professional response when a child hurts another is to take their hand and stroke the cheek or shoulder of the person they were hurting, quietly whispering, "Be gentle." We should try the same technique on the next CEO who wants to lay off a few hundred employees to fatten up the bottom line. If he had to stroke the cheeks of the people whose lives he was about to devastate, he might make another decision.
If you're not using something, someone else gets it. Day care children learn this rule very quickly: put it down, and it's fair game for others. I could imagine an entire national housing policy based on this logical and efficient premise. There's more than enough unused space in the mansions of Bridle Path, Coach Hill, and the other luxury suburbs of the land to house every Canadian who lacks a home.
Abundance makes it easier. A good day care supplies multiple copies of the most popular playthings, making it infinitely easier to take turns. Even two-year-olds quickly learn they'll get a fair chance to join the fun. Want to see the opposite emotion? Go to any Canadian emergency department, where frightened people get more panicked with each hour that goes by without seeing a doctor. Building in a little redundancy brings out the better side of our personalities.
Everybody is safe. Day cares invest incredible attention and energy to ensuring a safe, secure, and inclusive environment where each child does well. Everyone gets a hot meal and three snacks, dry clothes as needed, a meticulously safe physical environment, and emotional support to get through the tough spots. Outside those walls, however, individual risk and failure is celebrated as a necessary dimension of the process of "creative destruction." You don't want to care too well for society's losers, lest we all lose the hunger to survive.
Displays of conspicuous consumption are strictly discouraged. Nothing is more disruptive than a shiny new toy that everyone wants to get their hands on, so personal toys are prohibited at day care. That kind of thinking would drive BMW out of business in a month.
A few readers will take the foregoing as evidence of long-standing suspicions that group day care is a breeding ground for rampant communism. But from observing hundreds of parents at neighbourhood playgrounds across the country, I think most children are raised to follow similar rules, even those from traditional stay-at-home families.
How ironic that we train our children first to be good, social human beings, only to later demand that they act like acquisitive, productivist, hardhearted machines. I prefer the approach that rewards cooperation and compassion, and that produces an environment in which everyone succeeds. If toddlers can learn to do it, why can't the rest of us?
Perhaps it's time we all went back to day care.
Jim Stanford is an economist with the Canadian Auto Workers. A version of this article was published in The Globe and Mail.
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