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I don't think child care is ever going to be much of a federal effort. Just like education. Six or 7 percent - that's all I want from the government. Pay that piece of it for poor or developmentally disabled children.
Sep 10, 2025
We have to stop harming children in child care. I'm trying to make us stop. I wouldn't know what to do otherwise.
The problem in child care, which really all of us are going to have to think hard on, is that there is no really great solution that we can come up with for ages zero to three.
If we trust parents to choose child care for their children, and we trust them to help their children choose a college to attend – and both those systems have been so successful – why do we not also trust them to choose the best elementary or high school for their children?
Biologically and temperamentally... women were made to be concerned firt and foremost with child care, husband care and home care.
But the majority of mothers work - and are responsible for taking care of the kids and home. And more fathers are spending more time doing child care and housework, and still working long hours. That work-life conflict is weighing on everybody.
In response to our fast-food culture, a 'slow food' movement appeared. Out of hurried parenthood, a move toward slow parenting could be growing. With vital government supports for state-of-the-art public child care and paid parental leave, maybe we would be ready to try slow love and marriage.
In a sense, in the area of child care, children's relationships with parents' working has come full circle. We have gone from the mom-and-pop store (or mom-and-pop farm), with its integration of child care and work, to children-at-home and dad-at-work; to the mom-plus-daddy working at home, with its integration of childcare and work again. From mom-and-pop back to mom-and-pop.
I took my kids everywhere. I didn't have money for child care, so I took them to college with me and they sat in the hallway.
You think people can work all day and then pick up their kids at child care or wherever, and get home, and then still manage to sandwich in an eight-hour vote? Well, Republicans, I guess, can do that, because a lot of them have never made an honest living in their lives.
I think [women] should be armed but should not vote ... women have no capacity to understand how money is earned. They have a lot of ideas on how to spend it ... it's always more money on education, more money on child care, more money on day care.
The question is still asked of women: 'How do you propose to answer the need for child care?' That is an obvious attempt to structure conflict in the old terms. The questions are rather: 'If we as a human community want children, how does the total society propose to provide for them?'.
Where America has got to move is not growth for the sake of growth, but it`s got to move to a society that provides a high quality of life for all of our people. In other words, if people have health care as a right, as do the people of every other major country, then there's less worry about growth. If people have educational opportunity and their kids can go to college and they have child care, then there's less worry about growth for the sake of growth.
Three factors--the belief that child care is female work, the failure of ex-husbands to support their children, and higher male wages at work--have taken the economic rug from under that half of married women who divorce.
We have to change men's expectations, as they grow up, regarding their share of domestic work, of child care, but also of elder care, which is less pleasant and which men don't want to do.
The choice made by families not to immunize their children is not supported by public policy or medical research nor should such action be supported by taxpayers in the form of child care payments.
You can read the best experts on child care. You can listen to those who have been there. You can take a whole childbirth and child-care course without missing a lesson. But you won't really know a thing about yourselves and each other as parents, or your baby as a child, until you have her in your arms. That's the moment when the lifelong process of bringing up a child into the fold of the family begins.
Defining child care primarily as women's sphere reinforces the devaluing of women and prevents their equal access to power.
The reason child care is such a loaded issue is that when we talk about it, we are always tacitly talking about motherhood. And when we're talking about motherhood we're always tacitly assuming that child care must be a very dim second to full-time mother care.
Most mothers and fathers will shop more for a TV set than they will for a child care center for their child.
Reading is important. Books are important. Librarians are important. (Also, libraries are not child-care facilities, but sometimes feral children raise themselves among the stacks.)
Good guilt is a product of love and responsibility. It is a natural, positive instinct that parents and good child care providers have. If bad guilt is a monster, good guilt is a friendly fairy godmother, yakking away in your head to keep you alert to the needs of your baby.
The legacy I want to leave is a child-care system that says that no kid is going to be left alone or left unsafe.
Child care is an invisible part of the economy.
It's not a nice-to-have - it's a must-have. It's time we stop treating child care as a side issue, or a women's issue, and treat it like the national economic priority that it is for all of us.
Parents deserve the peace of mind of knowing their children are in good hands. By investing in early childhood educators, we are supporting nurturing child care environments where children can thrive.
I'm particularly fortunate to be in a position where I can bring my child to work and be able to get good child care. Not a lot of women have that.
Quality child care, health insurance coverage, and training make it possible for former welfare recipients to get, and keep, jobs.
We will live to see the day that St. Patrick's Cathedral is a child-care center and the pope is no longer a disgrace to the skirt that he has on.
No government can love a child, and no policy can substitute for a family's care. But at the same time, government can either support or undermine families as they cope with moral, social and economic stresses of caring for children.
Raising or caring for children requires sacrifice and service, which, I believe, heals us from the destructive forces of self-centeredness.
It's more pressure on women to - if they marry or partner with someone, to partner with the right person. Because you cannot have a full career and a full life at home with your children if you are also doing all of the housework and child care.
If a mother or a caregiver does not have a job that pays a living wage and they cannot afford child care, that is unacceptable.
[Donald Trump] would give wealthy families 30 cents or 40 cents on the dollar for their nannies, and little or nothing for millions of hardworking families trying to afford child care.
In our society competitive capitalism has put family life and working life on a collision course.In Canada statistics show that over 70 percent of the burden of caring for children, the aged, the disabled and the sick falls on women most of whom receive no pay for these very essential tasks.Normally speaking, it may be said that the forces of capitalism, if left unchecked, tend to make the rich richer and the poor poorer and thus increase the gap between them.
[Among the Arapeh... both father and mother are held responsible for child care by the entire community...] If one comments upon a middle-aged man as good-looking, the people answer: 'Good-looking? Ye-e-e-s? But you should have seen him before he bore all those children'.
I think there are many people in the working class who say, you know what? Yes, maybe we are better off than we were eight years ago, but I am still working two or three jobs, my kid can't afford to go to college, I can't afford child care, my real wages have been going down for 40 years. The middle class is shrinking. Who's standing up for me?
The child supplies the power but the parents have to do the steering.
Trust yourself, you know more than you think you do.
I say Democrats should not be afraid to talk about the morality of life, of caring for children who are born. It seems the Republican obsession with being pro-life lasts about nine months. After that, it’s each baby for herself.
The child's personality is a product of slow gradual growth. His nervous system matures by stages and natural sequences. He sits before he stands; he babbles before he talks; he fabricates before he tells the truth; he draws a circle before he draws a square; he is selfish before he is altruistic; he is dependent on others before he achieves dependence on self. All of his abilities, including his morals, are subject to laws of growth. The task of child care is not to force him into a predetermined pattern but to guide his growth.
Caring for children is a dance between setting appropriate limits as caretakers and avoiding unnecessary power struggles that result in unhappiness.
We need to invest in job training programs, especially those that include child care, transit stipends and paid apprenticeships and internships.
The most unacknowledged spending expectation among women is the amount of time spent by single mothers caring for children, not only physically, but psychologically. It is my feeling that only a small percentage of a mother's time is normally compensated for by child support, given what a woman could make adding these hours to workforce hours. It is why women who have never been married and never had children earn so much more in the workplace than women who have had children.
I'm always amazed to hear my more conservative colleagues talking about how they care about life. They're pro-life, but when it comes down to safe work environments that allow for unions, being able to pay for child care, having family leave - they don't care about any of that. That's where I argue that they're not pro-life, they're pro-birth.
There are some die-hard male chauvinist pigs and there are some Neanderthal women who are threatened by equality - but the great majority, polls say 65% to 75% of women of America, of all ages, absolutely identify with the complete agenda of the women's movement: equal opportunity for jobs, education, professional training, the right to control your own body - your own reproductive process, freedom of choice, child care-the whole agenda.
The lack of affordable, quality child care is a ticking time bomb.
Growth can also involve producing services instead of goods. In particular, a major expansion of public and caring services (like child care, education, elder care, and other life-affirming programs) would generate huge increases in GDP and incomes, with virtually no impact on the environment.
Whether it's making sure that families have access to quality health care and child care, or making sure that our children receive the best educational opportunities we can give them, we must remain committed to these needs because our children are our future.
Each day of our lives we make deposits in the memory banks of our children.