On Mar 27, 2012 10:21 AM, "Deepa Mohan" <[email protected]> wrote: > > > Saritha Rai's new fortnightly column in the New York Times online- > http://india.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/27/when-daycare-slips-into-night-care
Not that long ago a major controversy broke out in Switzerland when one of the affected children, now in his retirement years wrote a book detailing his life. Until the 1950s the conservative Swiss politicians and by extension society backed a secret policy that allowed the state to separate infants from incapable mothers. Incapable mothers so defined would be teenage mothers, pre-marital mothers, single mothers, mothers who worked when the father also worked , mothers of loose moral character and so on. These snatched infants would then be raised in proper foster homes, families with the proper structure of both parents, a large home, siblings, relatives and such. Of course they'd over stepped the line and the practice stopped, but even today normal Swiss society frowns intensely upon working mothers. Such day and night care services as the article talks about would be almost definitely illegal. In fact, the schools don't act as proxy care takers during the day either - they begin at 7:30 in the morning, break at 10:00, kids come home, they resume at 2:00; to let out at 5:00. Kids who are seen loitering the streets are reported to the parents first, and then the local church and at some point the city council steps in if they think the parents aren't doing a good job. I have no doubt that by Swiss standards the featured Indian parents would be considered grossly negligent to say the least. I can't directly evaluate the outcomes of this policy, still, most Swiss teens I know are among the best behaved. The loud drunk Swiss teen on a Friday evening is known to apologize for his behaviour rather shame-facedly when the passing old ladies turn on their disapproving gaze. Crime and truancy is impossibly low, kids generally seem to end up growing into proper citizens. Now there could be many other hidden and obvious aspects to this picture, but popular wisdom generally attributes all this to stay at home mothers and wholesome families.
