Comment by mothballed
5 months ago
The main reason I wouldn't enjoy watching my neighbor's kids is that we now have an absolutely paranoid, delusional society that has a mentally ill view of the dangers of children. By signing up to watch kids you incur absolutely massive liability, all it takes is one accusation and your whole life is destroyed and you lose everything, no matter that it was false. You would basically need cameras at every angle at all times before any rational person would want to watch someone else's kids.
Thus you end up with daycares nowadays where you pay a gazillion dollars tuition for your child to be taken care of by a minimum wage worker, with most of the money going to overhead and insurance.
The real advantage of government childcare is the state can just say "go fuck yourself" if you sue them or accuse them of misconduct and thus do it for cheap like in the old days. In fact the only other economical model is to just dump your kid at an illegal's house, they don't give a shit if they get sued, they can just dump everything and move to the next city.
That's a good point, but the model could still work.
I think it comes down to trust. If something bad happens to my kid when my neighbor or friend is taking care of her, am I gonna sue them? Furthermore, if they give me their kid, would they sue me if something bad happened? Is it worth burning the bridge of friendship over a mistake? There's a number of different factors at play of course, but if I trust my neighbor / friend / parent / sibling enough to take care of my kid, I hope they trust me enough to know that I would try to resolve any issues privately and not get courts involved. Maybe the worst thing that happens is that a certain neighbor doesn't get to watch my kid anymore.
Of course if there's actual abuse or something criminal, then yeah by all means get the courts involved. But if it was something minor that blows over quickly then no need to escalate.
As an example, my mother in law was helping out for the first two weeks after my daughter was born. One day, my daughter had hiccups. My MIL said "I'm gonna fill a bottle of water to give to her" and I'm like "you will do no such thing, babies cannot have water. It's formula or breast milk." Later, on a cold night, she put a blanket (not swaddle) on my daughter, and a stuffed animal in her crib, and I'm like "babies cannot have loose stuff in their cribs, it's a choking/suffocation hazard."
My point is that I'm not gonna sue my MIL for being a bad caretaker, I'm just not gonna trust her to be a caretaker unless she took some infant safety courses. But I would trust a neighbor who I know has taken infant safety courses because they recently had a newborn or something, and trust that they'd do their best with my kid as I would theirs.