The Regulated Life

So this past week I had to do the hardest thing I have ever done in my life: I sent my 14-month old daughter to day care for the first time. This is the first time in her life that she has not been with someone in my immediate family, and they very thought of it made me want to throw up. No matter how many awards they have or how many smiling parents that I see dropping off their children, I know without a doubt that they will never love my child as much as I do, and therefore can never possibly hope to care for her as I do. Day care is a bit like hospice care; even when it's really good, it's still really sad.

But that's not why I started writing. I often think that as Americans we are deluding ourselves when we say we live in a free country. I would agree that we have the highest level of personal freedom of any country in the world, but is that really saying much? It seems a bit like homeless people arguing about who among them is the least poor. When you look at our history, one has to admit that our personal freedoms have been trending downward for the past 70 or 80 years, and thinking about it causes me to lose sleep at night. "If Thomas Jefferson were here, he would break down and cry," to anyone who will listen, but my inner conservative knows that if Thomas Jefferson were here, there would be a revolution.

What could this possibly have to do with a place where you drop your kids off while you're at work, you ask? More than you think. I dropped my daughter off in the morning and went back at lunch to see how she was doing. When I walked into her room, the teacher told me that she was sleeping and walked me to a window looking in a room with all the lights on and my daughter, along with 3 other babies laying in cribs. None of them were sleeping. My first question, which I think anyone in my position would ask was, "Why are all the lights on?"

"We have to keep every light in the building on while we're open. It's a state law." She went on to explain that if they had to evacuate for any reason it would be easier to search the building, and that it prevents adults from getting into dark rooms alone with the children.

Now I can understand that the reasons she listed for the law are problems, and I understand where the "Lights On" law solves them, but aren't there other possible solutions? What if a day care had some kind of badging system for the children so that it could tell if rooms were occupied. I've seen it at hospitals. A nurse wears a special badge, and when she goes into a patient's room a light in the hall goes on. Couldn't this be employed in a day care? Or maybe a day care could have an alarm system that automatically turns on all lights in the building in case of an emergency. That wouldn't solve the "Stranger Danger" problem she mentioned, but really the electric locks on all the doors should do that.

Now, I'm not saying that there aren't problems with my two scenarios above. I'm not even saying that they are better than the "Lights On" law. All I'm saying is that shouldn't we get to choose what's best for our children and not some muttonhead in Albany? All these laws do is restrict our choices, retard growth and advancement in the day care field (don't laugh), and make all day care centers the same.

Now this wasn't the only thing. All the kids have to sleep with their shoes on (fire code), and we had to fill out a reem of forms to see if the state could give her any welfare benefits (whether we wanted it or not). And I was only in this building about 15 minutes. I can only imagine the level of my fury if I had taken time to explore the cockles and sub-cockles of the day care industry. I don't even want to think about it.

The sad thing is that it's not just day care. Name any aspect of our lives and you don't have to search too long to find the governments prying fingers. Thomas Jefferson would not be proud.