Letter to the Editor - Assignment Example

Wichita Eagle Dear editor, Surely everyone must agree that one of the most important things for any healthy society is raising children properly, so they can grow and develop and take leading roles in the society in the future. Yet in our community, as in many others, child rearing has become incredibly difficult; though we all know the wisdom of the adage “it takes a village to raise a child” too many families are struggling to have the time to both raise children properly while earning enough money to feed, house and educate the child properly.

These parents find child care services over-enrolled and increasingly expensive, and sometimes are forced to leave children at home while the parents work. This has always been a problem for lower-income families and single parent families, where all available care-givers have always had to work, but as more and more middle class, dual parent families need two incomes to achieve the standard of living they want, this problem is starting to affect many people in our community. One excellent solution to this problem is community organizing.

Taking care of five children is not significantly harder than supervising one, yet walking around you see dozens of parents taking care of only their own child on their day off. With a little bit of communication, community organization and logistical support, it would be very easy for members of a community (be it a neighborhood, a work place, or even a club) to establish small of say 5-6 parents who would share child rearing duties for the entire group on one of their day off on a rotating schedule.

So each parent would take care of the whole group’s children one day a week. These parents would already be caring for their own child on their day off, and as mentioned above, supervising a small group of children or toddlers is not much more challenging than supervising one (in point of fact it can actually be simpler, as the children can play together and thus entertain themselves rather than needing entertainment from their caregiver). In this way every child in the group can get constant adult supervision during working hours, much like they would if they had a stay-at-home parent, but all the parents would e able to work full time jobs.

This only consideration in the formation of such a group is that it obviously would not function if everyone worked a “9-5” job, so it would be important to form these groups with people with flexible or complimenting schedules. This kind of community-organized day care has many advantages. The first is to the children involved in the day care – they would no longer need to be left alone for long periods of time, and could spend more time in loving and supporting situations, with a small group of friends they would form with other day care children.

Every study shows that this kind of care is essential for quality development in children, and will be so good for our community in the long term. Community-organized day care also keeps children off the streets, safe, and out of dangerous situations (of both the physical and social variety). Obviously the second benefit is the cost-saving and efficiency for the parents. This would give them an alternative other than the three options of leaving their child unsupervised, paying extremely high private daycare costs, or having a parent stay at home.

The only cost associated with this would be a parent needing to feed a meal and some snacks to the children they were taking care of on a particular day, but this cost would be offset by the fact that their own child would be provided these meals and snacks by other parents on the other days of the week. Furthermore, this would allow dual-parent families to work two jobs and get two incomes, significantly improving their quality of life. So many things are possible if we just break down the walls separating us and try to work together!

We may not live in villages anymore, but that does not mean we have to raise or children alone!