Nobody Can Love Your Kids "for you", in Your Stead or in Your Place.
Here is a recent writing from Melinda French Gates who is an important HDGIC* with Gates Foundation:
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"In June, I visited the Institut Pasteur de Dakar in Senegal, where I met Dr.
Billo Tall, the Institut’s director of clinical research and data science. She told
me that she wouldn’t be where she is today if not for the university where she
studied making special accommodations to help her care for her infant son.
Dr. Tall’s story illustrates a fundamental truth: Women will never have full
economic power without real caregiving infrastructure in place. In virtually
every society, women are expected to care for children, family members,
and homes without getting paid to do it. It’s an essential yet undervalued
responsibility that has stopped countless women from entering and thriving
in the workforce. In low-and-middle-income countries, unpaid caregiving
makes up more than half of women’s total working hours, meaning they have less time available to earn an income."
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There is a very important socioeconomic "nubbin/fundamental" in Ms Gates's observation. Lovingly and carefully taking care of the children and making the homes where we all live and grow is crucial. This critical work dates back in pre-history to before any payment-based socio-economic structures existed at all-- when homo sapiens were all in bands of wandering hunter-gatherers, lucky to find caves for shelter-- Even then, a woman's work of nurturing the children and making home for the family was (as ever), never done.
As we modernized and made slow, slow progress toward more productive, wealth-engendering technologies and ways of living, marriage and family became idealized as the "compensation" that was supposed to provide a way for caregivers (that is, mostly women) to thrive while performing the absolutely foundational work of raising children with the love and the socialization that turns them (oh so gradually) into fully human productive citizens. This probably never worked quite as well as our idealization of it pretended.
Now, our economy world-wide is based upon specialized jobs, compensated with fiat money as a universal medium of exchange. This is great for production of hugely variegated wealth in all its forms, but still and all it provides no mechanism for properly compensating caregivers (women) for the most fundamental, important, and crucial jobs of all. In fact, the position of women is made all the harder as family structure erodes, and by the fact that in general, very few families can get by on the average wages of one earner, only.
What happens now is the sad (and perhaps in hindsight inevitable) result that unpaid caregiving takes up most of a woman's workday time, while women are now more than ever required also to work for wages to create enough income for a family to get by. No one that I know of is working toward designing and inventing that "real caregiving infrastructure" that Ms Gates rightly refers to as not being in place.
I certainly have no ready answers or solutions to suggest for this missing "real caregiving infrastructure". What I do know from my heart is that you cannot hire someone to love your kids for you, at least not in the value systems of Western Civilization as we currently know them to be. Orphanages were abandoned for foster care systems because orphanages devolved into little more than death camps for unwanted children. And foster care is not enough of a step upward-- all too often foster care is only a way for society to more slowly fail its un-parented kids. Foster care children become (heartrendingly all too often) broken adults who are severely unhappy and/or neurotic, or worse. Too often such life stories end in the cages of state and federal prison systems.
I don't know. Could we reason by analogy to military conscription, where young people are required to take training and to become the bulwark (for a short time only) of the also crucial systems of national defense? Recall that in military context, conscription is aided and ameliorated by volunteers. If we had in place some "real caregiving infrastructure", could we conscript or somehow induce folks with a proven track record of successful caregiving to participate, giving their valuable time and TLC to raise up just one more person, not for all their lives, but for some crucial period, say 5 years, with a formal pass-off to the next 5-year stage, and then just three more 3-year periods again taken by folks with a proven record of successful care-giving, would see it through... For the time of their service, these caregivers could have no other "job"; just as our conscript soldiers are not allowed to "moonlight" at some other job.
AND OF COURSE, what you could argue (at least partly correctly) , is that I have just re-invented the foster care system, a known way of "slow failing". This is indeed a "wicked problem"-- look up "Wicked Problem" using Google to see more specifically what I mean by by that term.
* HDGIC is "Head Do-Gooder In Charge" by analogy to the military term HMFIC.