Your Childcare Conundrum is an Anti-Communist Plot
When my friends and I bemoan our own child care conundrums, anti-communism is not the first thing we blame. But on the right, writers and pundits still invoke it to condemn the very concept of government-funded day care. Michele Bachmann, speaking on the floor of Congress in 2009, characterized “President Obama’s vision for child rearing” as “send that little baby off to a government day care center from the day that baby is born.” A cheerily designed website called Daycares Don’t Care features a history of day care that sports a clip-art hammer and sickle. It quotes a woman “who spent most of her childhood in Communist Poland’s daycares”: “The assembly line time table, with everyone having to perform together on cue…The grubby, institutional food. The absence of real contact with adults, which meant that fights and squabbles were usually settled on the survival of the fittest principle.”
Slate.com, June 14, 2017