To have or not to have. Is that even a question?

My grandmothers did not work outside the home; they worked like hell inside.  At home, among other work, they took care of the children they gave birth to.  But, they didn't do it all by themselves.

Consider my Sengottai grandmother. Her life was in a joint family-- a multi-generational household in which the matriarch lived with her daughter and son-in-law, and their sons and daughters-in-law.  My grandmother was one of the daughters-in-law.

When my grandmother had kids--four of them, and all daughters--she was not the only one taking care of the girls.  Depending on the time of the day, there were other family members who attended to the infant or the toddler.

After getting married, my mother was practically in a nuclear family setting--with the occasional long stays by her mother-in-law (my paternal grandmother) or her mother (my maternal grandmother.)  During their visits, grandmas helped out in the kitchen and with the kids.  And, yes, my mother too did not work outside the home.

When we were three or four years old, we started "lower kindergarten."  LKG, as it was referred to.  And then a year of UKG, before first grade began. (Yes, it means that we were all potty-trained well before LKG.)

Neither my mother nor my grandmother worried about child care for their kids.

But then those were the old days when a woman's role was highly circumscribed. 

At first gradually, and then suddenly, conditions for women changed in India too.  My father's younger female cousins went to college.  A couple of them started working as professionals--one was a teacher, and two are physicians.  My sister earned a graduate degree in chemistry.  Now, there is no young woman in the extended family who does not have a college degree.

Such changes in the old country made possible the wonderful image of women rocket scientists celebrating their achievement in India's space program.

Did those women scientists have to worry about child care for their kids?  My speculation is that they did not.

I don't know their back stories.  But, chances are good that if those scientists are also mothers, then child care was never a big worry for them--grandparents, almost always grandmothers, took care of the young ones while the parents were off at work.  Nuclear families in which the parents, especially mothers, exclusively take care of their kids is more the exception than the rule in the old country.

Of course, that is not the case here in the United States.

So, if people willingly live as nuclear families, many in a single-parent situation, and far away from grandparents, then is child care a personal responsibility or a social issue that has to be collectively addressed?

When there is no going back to living as joint families, and when there is no going back to restricting what women can do, it does not take a female rocket scientist in India to figure out that we have a huge problem in this country.

The two main political parties here are divided on this, as one can easily imagine. 

[Progressives] are seeking a paradigm shift. They see child care much like public education: a service on which society depends and therefore should ensure. 

“It’s a public good and should be treated that way” said Julie Kashen, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation. “The shared stake in seeing children thrive doesn’t suddenly begin when they turn five.” 

But conservatives fear government intrusion into the family realm. Rachel Greszler, an analyst with the Heritage Foundation, recently warned Congress that the measure would increase costs and drive small centers out of business, especially those based in homes and churches. She also said the policy would penalize parents who stay at home, taxing them to expand center-based care and ignoring the “tremendous personal and societal value” of full-time child-rearing.

I was/am never a fan of government-subsidies for adults to have children.  As an atheist, I don't have any sympathy for an argument that god wants us to have children.  In the secular framework, having a child is a conscious (or, sometimes, an accidental) choice.  Decisions on what we choose to do have consequences.

But, I have also always believed that subsidies for human issues are far more important than subsidies for corporations.

However, as long as we have a party that is committed to protecting the life of abstract "persons" that corporations are, and with their party faithful committed to defending the "life" of a fetus in a petri dish while not caring about investing in life that is already here alive and suffering, we are doomed.

So, what can you do?  The answer is simple.