Coping with Responsibility: How reliable is daycare?

            The general public might suggest that parents should be responsible for their children. In fact, that may be a challenge of common sense. However, the painful reality in many cases is both parents work. Furthermore, there are some cases where parents choose not to take responsibility for their children. At any rate, it has become standard procedure for parents to drop the younger children off at daycare, take the older children to school, and head to their own job for the next eight to ten hours. When people began to wonder if working parents or daycare attendance may have lasting effects on children, studies began. Currently, studies show that the age of the children involved may effect whether or not the idea of daycare is bad for certain children.
             For many individuals, life is constantly moving. Think for example about the following example of the Bell family: Gwen is running late one morning and still has to drop Cassie off at daycare. When Gwen finally makes it to work, her co-worker has already poured her a cup of coffee assuming the morning had been rough. Now, Gwen will put in eight and a half--sometimes nine hours a day before racing back to Spotted Dear Child-Care Center to pick up Cassie. At home, Gwen's husband John will entertain Cassie while she prepares dinner and begins answering faxes and e-mails for work. From 8:00-8:30 PM, the family enjoys the only quality time of the day. Around 9:30 PM, Cassie heads toward bed, leaving Gwen to check the fax machine and e-mail once more before tucking herself into bed as well. Although she and John both complain about the lack of quality family time and the fact that Cassie spends almost four times the amount of time with her parents in the daycare around strangers, they continue with the cycle.
             every morning, beginning around 7:00AM (636).
             Yet this example is a reality for more families than one might imagine. In fact, according to Arlie Russell Hochschild's article "There's No Place Like Work," a 1993 study concluded that 56 percent of women with children ages six to seventeen and 43 percent of women with children younger than five work full-time.