Utopian Child Care at a High School (A Second Hand Report), and Wider Implications

Someone once mentioned to me that a Catholic school in San Antonio that had high incidence of unwed mothers decided to try a radical method of correcting the situation. Instead of expelling the unfortunate mothers and ostracizing them, contributing to their disgrace and difficult financial situation (or providing implicit pressure for the girls to have abortions to avoid being expelled), this school set up a daycare on the campus that was staffed, in part, by the girls themselves, and that this did more than Home Ec and Sex Ed combined to make the girls understand the realities of life with a child and to consider the consequences of their actions more carefully. Now, this did attract negative attention as I understand it, but the results spoke for themselves. This seems to be an example of a positive move towards helping mothers and educating young people. It also represents a bringing of children into unaccustomed spaces where they might be accessed by their own mothers periodically. I'm sure there were those who doubted that the students would get anything accomplished with their babies and others' close by.

This may not actually be too different from the move by some employers (especially schools) to include child care for employees. If a high school teacher could pick up her child from an on-site child development center at 3, that would be infinitely better than 5, and a step in the right direction! If she were able to spend the lunch hour with her own baby, even if only twice a week or so, this would provide valuable bonding time. (The idea has good breastfeeding potential, too!) If the facility also provided credit or work-study for the students and supervised child care experience, so much the better!

Utopian? Maybe. But many times the point of a utopian vision is to illustrate an ideal with the hope that it might influence our vision of what is possible in our own world, and give us ideas of things to implement. Unless you take the definition of utopia that sees the utopia as necessarily ironic, since the utopia is a place that does not and can not possibly exist. I take most utopias as sincere attempts to influence change, though there are exceptions.

The question of whether the facility would be faculty-only, or if faculty children would be kept apart from students' children (if applicable) would be a bit stickier, but this might even be sticky if we were talking about university faculty's or grad students' or undergraduates' children, hierarchies being what they are. Which actually leads me to another point: At the university from which I have my B.A., there was a child care center that was available to faculty, staff and students alike. Rather than requiring the parents to keep their children in the center for fixed hours, parents could, at the beginning of each semester, register for the number of hours and specific hours needed for their particular teaching, work or class schedules. Thus, child care was available when necessary, and no one was forced into predetermined hours to maximize either the child's hours in the facility or the facility's profit. And no one had to pay for more hours than they needed or wanted, which often leads to the feeling that, "Well, if I'm paying for it, s/he might as well stay!" By contrast, the children's center on the university campus where I currently teach has fixed hours, was (at one time--perhaps still is) full-time only, and was at one time for faculty only (or at least preference given to faculty/staff), though I believe this has changed, as some grad students--like my office mate--have their children enrolled in the center.