THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, July 31, 1994 TAG: 9407310048
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: ELIZABETH SIMPSON
LENGTH: Medium: 65 lines
The story that came out of Mount Clemens, Mich., last week was enough to make a working parent bristle.
A judge there ordered a mother to give up custody of her 3-year-old daughter because she put her in day care.
And for what horrible reason did this wicked mother do such a thing? She wanted to further her education by taking classes at a university.
Any working parent - father or mother - should find the judge's decision morally outrageous. This isn't about who's the best parent, but about a judge so behind in his thinking he believes sending a child to day care is inherently bad.
What is the judge trying to tell us here?
That parents who put their children in day care are slighting them. That families who can afford to stay home with a child are better parents. And that single mothers trying to improve their lot in life, and in turn, their children's lives, are instead neglecting them.
The judge's '50s-style thinking doesn't make room for families in which both parents have to work to pay even the most basic bills. Or where single parents need more than minimum-wage jobs to survive. Or, for that matter, where day care exists that actually helps children to thrive.
Unfortunately far too many people out there still think parents put their children in day care, as one reader so eloquently told me I did, because they're too concerned ``about which expensive car looks best in the driveway of that $200,000 home.''
Yeah, right. You wonder whether these people ever get out of their own neighborhoods, or whether they ever talk with people outside their income bracket. They're certainly not living on my block.
Since when is it wrong for parents to want to raise their children in a financially sound household? Consider that the median cost of a U.S. home in 1990 was $95,500. That's 53 percent more than a decade earlier. And that in 18 years, it will cost nearly $70,000 in tuition to send a child to college. Assuming we're able to keep up with our insurance and health bills in the meantime.
Most families can't use '50s lifestyles to make '90s budgets work.
The judge's decision also seems to imply that day care is bad. He sides with the father, who plans to have his mother care for the girl, because 3-year-old Maranda would be ``in essence raised and supervised a great part of the time by strangers'' if she were in day care.
The judge not only insults working parents, but dedicated child-care workers who rock babies to sleep and raise children like their own. Does he think all day-care providers are heartless robots who never bother to learn the names of children?
It seems as though this woman and other single parents like her can't win. Either stay at home and be accused of living off the system - welfare or child support - or go back to school and be accused of handing your child off to strangers.
As long as attitudes like this judge's abound, single parents can't aim for better lives, and children in day care will be branded as second-rate.
Granted, the judge in this case may have taken into account many other factors that the rest of us don't know about, and the media may have grossly oversimplified the situation, but the immediate message to this young mother and other single parents was this:
Put your aspirations on hold or lose your child. by CNB