New Situation

Our daughter recently switched from an in-home day care, where she'd been for two years, to a center that's run by a local Catholic social service organization. My wife was mildly wigged out by our decision to place her in this new situation, primarily because she worried that we -- as parents with relatively decent teachers' incomes -- were taking a slot that would be best reserved for a child from a less affluent family. I did not share her concerns, for the simple reason that day care is at a premium in our city, and there were absolutely no other decent options that would not have required at least an hour's worth of extra driving each day. Moreover, the day care's administrator assured us our daughter's enrollment would not be depriving a poor child of a vital service.

But the process of deliberation raised all kinds of questions that we haven't had to confront yet as parents -- specifically, questions about social class and race. Our daughter's new day care does, in fact, primarily (though not exclusively) serve a less affluent clientele, and most of the children are non-white (mainly Filipino, Latino, and Alaska Native). I'm certain that my wife's misgivings about the place derived almost entirely from her (baseless, in my view) anxiety about taking advantage of a system to which we were not entitled; I did, however, feel more than a slight twinge of concern about the possibility that she simply didn't want our child hanging out with the poor kids. As a middle-school teacher, she sees the effects of poverty and expressed several times her worries that A. might be exposed, as she put it, to some "f*cked up" family dramas. We argued about this on a number of occasions before at last deciding to enroll her.

For my part, though, I'm willing to admit the possibility that my admittedly white, middle-class, liberal biases were leading me to prefer the center for similarly irrelevant reasons. I wonder if I wasn't being guided in my choice by an eagerness to expose my daughter to economic and racial diversity as early as possible, and to prove in some meaningful way that I don't harbor any unseemly social attitudes. Of course, the fact that I can reflect on these questions at all -- the fact that we had, in all sorts of important ways, options that could be shaped by considerations like this -- is a reminder once more of how fortunate we are to be where we are in life. It's also a reminder that it's easy to confuse, and at the same time difficult to sort out, the line separating what's good for our daughter from what's good for our own adult hangups.

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