On Saturday afternoon, I was reminded why we cannot outsource parenting. That day, I was notified by one of the administrators at the Academy that my son would need to meet with the police on Monday morning.
This notification caught me completely off guard. I thought all the arrangements that needed to be made had been made and that all the requirements were satisfied. More than just being caught off guard, I can’t begin to tell you just how alarmed I was. The words “meet” and “police” used in the same sentence are simply terrifying. (I’m actually shaking as I write those words.)
Neither my son nor I had done anything wrong. Yet, for some reason or another I started to feel extremely nervous and began to sweat more than I was already sweating under the tropic Brazilian sun. “Meet with the police”, what an uncomfortable foreboding thought. The notion of meeting with police in my neighborhood in the U.S. is scary enough but meeting with the Brazilian Policia Federale evoked an entirely different fear.
Up, Up and Away…Not So Fast
Knowing that my flight was scheduled to depart on Sunday morning, the administrator said the following words to me “no problem, I will take care of your son, he’s my responsibility”. The words the administrator shared are the kinds of promises that parents hear just about every day. On the surface a seemingly harmless expression. Below the surface something entirely different.
For me the words that the administrator spoke were more than a mere expression of concern for my son. To me, those words meant an ultimate sense of duty, a great obligation and the most supreme commitment one person can ever make to me – to care for my child the exact way that I do. Fairly certainly that the administrator was not making the absolute promise to care for my child as I would care for him, I elected to change my flight and pay the ridiculous flight change fee so that I could be present when my son met with the police.
I Wonder
This incident left me pondering when we outsource parenting – as the administrator effortlessly advocated that I do – do we actually have any idea what we’re in fact negotiating. I wonder if parents even know what the word outsource really means or what it truly means to be parents anymore.
It’s fairly clear that when American corporations outsource, they do so with a clear objective in mind. You might hear a lot of bogus reasons given for outsourcing but the real reason is to enhance profitability: reduce local, state and federal taxes; avoid local, state and federal laws and regulations; reduce operating costs such as utilities; and ease the requirements and restrictions placed on corporations with regard to employees, union involvement and governmentally mandated employee benefits.
But when American parents outsource parenting, what are we hoping to truly accomplish by passing off the care of our child to someone else? Are we looking to enhance financial returns? The answer to this question just might astound you.
Just Like Me
Most of the time when we outsource parenting, we do so acting as if we believe that the contractor will treat and raise our children just as we would. We want to act as if we believe the person who offers to take care for our child for minimum wage will love and care for a child in the same manner as the person who paid a most severe cost – painstakingly suffering through nine months of pregnancy and hours of labor just to bring the child into the world.
We want to act as if we believe that an organization that is socio-economically exclusive, reluctantly diverse, that only admits the “best” families and charges exorbitant fees would love and care for a child the way parents should do – unconditionally and absent any regard to cost, race, religion, national origin, gender, ability or social standing.
Do You Believe in Magic
I suppose given our predilection for wanting our children to believe in Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy it should come as no surprise that we enjoy a little make-believe in our own lives. You might have noticed the repeated use of the phrase “act as if”. I use this expression to signify our belief in parenting fairy tales.
We try to convince ourselves that outsourcing our parenting responsibilities is a good thing. We participate in our own mental hocus pocus because we are willing to do just about anything to justify that we outsource parenting and pass our children off to someone else whenever we see fit.
Nine to Five
It’s not enough that we outsource parenting during the work day but we willingly do it before and after work hours. Like the big corporations that leave the shores of the United States to conduct business in a location that will allow greater financial rewards, many of us outsource our parenting obligations and responsibilities solely for greater financial rewards as well.
We ship our preschool aged children off to the nursery at wee hours of the morning so that we can get to work early, climb the corporate ladder and make more money. We enroll our elementary age children in aftercare so that we can stay at work longer, advance our career and buy more stuff.
We give our middle school age children a key to oversized house to let themselves in and out before and school so that we can focus on working uninterrupted, getting acclimated to our new job (after the last job turned out to be less than it had promised) and again concentrating all our energies on climbing the corporate ladder. We are late or miss most if not all of the activities that are important to our high school student because of our responsibilities at work, our sense of obligation for colleagues and the necessity to pay for all the stuff we now realize that we didn’t need in the first place.
The Danger Outsource Parenting
Unlike the corporation, who can examine the Income Statement, Balance Sheet and the company’s stock value to know that outsourcing was advantageous, parents do not have this luxury nor similar results. When parents outsource for income, the lives of our children are thrown out of balance and far too often our children’s opinion of life itself is devalued.
It also should come as no surprise that not only do our children not have time for us when they grow up but our children often times grow to be people whom we don’t know, people whom we don’t want to know and people whom we are not particularly proud of. Such is the risk all parents face when we begin to treat our children as a factory good to be outsourced for the purpose of greater profitability rather than another life to be loved and nurtured.
Before your child grows to be someone you either don’t know, don’t want to know or who you are not particularly proud of, ask yourself the following question before you even consider outsourcing the care of your child to another for any reason:
- What do I really know about this person – contract laborer?
- Does this person have any personal, mental, emotional, legal or finanical issues that I would find alarming?
- Does this person share my philosophy about what it means to be a parent?
- Does this person have a good, admirable relationship with their own children?
- Does this person realize how very very very very important my child is to me? (did I say very enough)
- Does this person have any idea what I would do to them if one small strand of my child’s hair was harmed?
- Is this person prepared to suffer my wrath if even one small strand of my child’s hair is harmed?
- Have I made it clear what my expectations are when I leave my child in their care – to love my child identical to the way I love them?
- Repeat #6 – Does this person have any idea what I would do to them if one small strand of my child’s hair was harmed?
- Repeat # 7 – Is this person prepared to suffer my wrath if even one small strand of my child’s hair is harmed?
If you can answer yes to all the questions, by all means go ahead and outsource the care of your child to another. However, if you can’t answer yes to all the questions, maybe with the exception to question 4, you better do as I did, stick around and be responsible for your own child. I asked myself the same questions. Now I am still in Brazil but I can assure you that I’m here for my son and not because I’m trying to find out how I can outsource the delicious fruit, great weather, gorgeous beaches or the beautiful women.
What do you really know about the people you entrust with the care of your children? Are you outsourcing the parenting of your child?