Who will take care of our children?
The following is the continuation of a two-part series on child-care options for Jamaican parents living abroad.
It would seem that a mature woman in a home environment is a popular solution that people are willing to pay for. What choices are Jamaicans overseas making? Dollar for dollar, how does that compare with the preferred solutions on the island.
Jamaican Mother, Sussex, England, UK “From the birth of my children I have had au pairs/nannies. I paid them sixty pounds a week (US$2.25/hr), plus I provide room and board. I also pay for their tuition to evening school which is two hundred pounds yearly (US$300), and one return journey back to their home country, on average two hundred pounds”.
In the city of Birmingham, home to 44,000 ethnic Caribbean people, the city helps the community by listing the childcare options on its website. These choices range from private nanny care to the more economical Community Nursery Network, which is partly sponsored by the city council. If she can afford it however, a Jamaican mother would still prefer to pay a nanny sixty pounds a week per child for individual attention, rather than send her children to a nursery.
Going north to Sweden, today almost 75 per cent of children between one and five years are registered in state sponsored childcare centres. It is easy for parents to find day care, as each residential area, including villages have these facilities.
However, Prudence, a Jamaican who raised her family of three children near Guthenberg, home of Volvo, disagrees with the system. She says that if she could do it again, she would prefer to lose the benefits of a second income and state subsidised child care, and stay at home with her children until they were of primary school age. In Sweden, income tax is 65 per cent and families do not get tax breaks if only one parent works out of the home.
Therefore, both parents usually work. Chief among Prudence’s concerns is that between the 1970s and 1990s the quality of childcare has decreased.
Quite the opposite of Sweden, the United States of America does not have a government sponsored early child care system. This is left open to private providers who should be state licensed. The Administration on Children Youth and Families (ACYF), Administration for Children and Families (ACF), and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHF), are just three USA federal agencies concerned with child care standards. There are also many federal and state sponsored projects that help the poorest in society.
For a Jamaican couple living there, the most acceptable option is to have a Jamaican woman live in and care their twins saying, “we do not subscribe to the American system of institutional care.” When that arrangement came to an end, the parents arranged to work on separate shifts so that one would always be home.
Taking care of the very young is a constant balancing act for Jamaicans, whether at home or abroad. The choices that we seem to prefer is to have our young children spend as much time as possible in a home, under the care of a woman, even a household helper, rather than all day institutional care.