Why should I have to take care of my own children?

HotIgneous Intruder: All my kids socialization has been learned from DVDs of The Wire set to play over and over.
It's all there: Office politics, product sales and marketing, greed, honesty, the role of police in society, etc.

...how to shoot Omar to impress your other 10 year old friends...

attention span of a retarded fruit fly: So according to this before the time of Box school education, EVERYONE was maladjusted. I don't think so.

Before preschool, rich kids stayed with their nannies and maybe saw their parents once a day when they were trotted out to impress guests. Poor kids hung around the family workshop or farm while the parents worked, or got sent to whatever gin-sodden neighbour or relative would watch them on the cheap. It was the number of poor babies dying in the latter conditions that prompted the French to institute national daycare.

Monkeylint: HotIgneous Intruder: sid244: - How "clicks" work

As in safe cracking?
I think you mean, "cliques."

The safecracking program at my kid's preschool is terrific. He can't speak in full sentences yet, but he can open an AMSEC 5019 in 24 seconds.

Is this your kid?

Life was simpler back in my day.

There were Indoor Children and Outdoor Children. Outdoor children roamed the woods and fields, semi-feral, or roamed the village street side-by-side, sometimes as many as seven at a time, which I still regard as low class behaviour, as it blocks the road and is therefore inconsiderate, although traffic-calming. Respectable people walk two-by-two or in single file, leaving enough room for people and vehicles coming the other way. They don't bogart the street (or streets, as may be the case in larger villages).

Indoor Children played the piano or some other musical instrument, or had parents who were Devout Christians, and thus were hideous pale monsters who could not be trusted out of sight. Also, they were prone to outbreaks of piano-playing at inopportune moments, such as any time that your parents visited their parents.

There are still two basic types of children: those who misbehave when their parents are not around, and those who misbehave when their parents are around. The latter are worse--some of the children who misbehave when their parents are not around are teachable, with the aid of discrete threats or violence, but the children who misbehave under the blythely blind gaze of their parents are as incorrigible as their parents. If you are going to discipline children of the Second Variety, you might as well beat up their parents as well, if you are up to it. They are often bullies, however, and self-righteous bullies at that. Best to give them a miss.

Still, Indoor Children were to be pitied, because despite their psychosis, they were missing out on life and probably several different kinds of immunity.

The fable of the monkey who smothered her favourite child to death, while the unloved child prospered is still valid today. The more you protect people, the less they are able to fend for themselves. Humans are lazy as well as stupid, and don't learn what they don't need. This is why the best way to learn a language to is to get a job in, say, a lumber camp where, if you don't learn to ask in French for food to be passed at the camp table, you don't eat. After real life immersion, a girlfriend or boyfriend with unilingual family is best. You have to learn the language to stop his parents and siblings from saying awful things to your face.

By the standards of my day, we were probably Good Children, which is to say Sissies and a Terrible Example to all children, but by today's standards we were Nielson Muntz--able to thrive despite total parental neglect and even malice.

Now you must excuse me, as I have to go play in the traffic. Children playing in the streets make the best speed bumps a leafy suburb can have.

robodog: Basily Gourt: Kindergarten IS preschool, for christ's sake.

Not any more, at least around here kids are expected to know their ABC's before kindergarten and they start doing math part way through the year.

I sent my sons to preschool not because I was unable to teach them their ABC's, but because they both needed speech therapy and pre-k kids are a LOT less judgemental than older kids about that sort of thing.

If they don't know their ABCs by the time they are in K then jesus what were you doing with the kids for 5 years. My kids are in Pre-K and it's great they learn a lot and they get the structure of the teacher/student role down. Oldest starts K soon and he's exicited to go which probably isn't the case with kids that don't get any kind of school before it.

To each their own and those studies are messing up Pre-K (which is has guidelines from the State on what needs to be taught) and just daycare. I will say when we had our one in daycare he did pick up on some bad habits and some interesting words.

Starfly: As a first time dad in a few months, I look forward to hearing all stories of other farkers on raising their kids and why or why not they placed them in daycare/pre-school.

yes i am not expecting good, valid advice :)

I'm a stay-at-home dad of a 3 year old, and I feel very strongly that kids need preschool. It's about learning things like sitting still for 10 minutes while the teacher reads a story, or lining up, or how to interact with other kids. Perhaps most importantly, it's about the kid's self confidence.

Bborchar already said it, but daycare and preschool are two different things. Daycare is for watching kids while parents are at work, and the kid is often there for 8 or 9 hours a day. Preschool is for learning skills that a kid will need as a kindergartener, and meet just a few hours a week. My kid's preschool is 6 hours a week.

In America it's simply way too expensive to have a kid.

Either one parent has to put their career on hold for 5 years or you have to pay through the nose to babysitters/daycare.

You have to buy into a good school district or pay for private school.

Not to mention paying for things like sports teams, etc so they'll be well-rounded individuals and get into colleges.

This makes me sad