KPL Debate: Children First!

[pnijjar]

I attended Wednesday's debate at the Kitchener Public Library somewhat reluctantly. I had been under the impression that the debate was for Kitchener Centre only, and I had already gone to one debate outside my riding. Somebody had to stuff the literature table with Fair Vote advertising, however, so I skipped gardening and made the trip. To my

Comments

[pnijjar]

It's socially and fiscally conservative in the sense that in advocating for publicly-funded daycare we are using the government as a crutch for work we should be doing ourselves. Also it is conservative in the sense that parents have traditionally stayed at home with their kids to raise them (mind you, families used to work together as a unit without a parent working outside of the home at all, but I guess that is too traditionalist to count).

All I know is that managing a group of 15 (or even 5) children is a lot more work than managing a group of 1 to 3 kids. 1-3 kids can get a lot more individual attention than a group of 15, which is one thing that children need to thrive. So I am not overly in favour of taking kids out of the home.

Do parents need training? Sure. As traditional social and family ties have eroded, we have lost much of the knowledge that is involved in raising kids well. (For example, not that many grandparents live with the family to help take care of small children.) So why not develop training for parents rather than specialists, and why not work to rebuild the social and community ties that we have lost so that poor moms don't have to shoulder all of the stress of parenting on their own?