As I’ve written many times, the childcare-industrial complex is the outcome of one of the most grotesque exercises in civilisational gaslighting in modern history. How Western women were convinced that trading the irreplaceable experience of raising their own children for a soulless corporate treadmill will be a mystery for future anthropologists to puzzle over.
The victims of communism at least had the excuse that they were forced to relinquish their babies to the collective crèche at gunpoint. What’s our excuse?
Yet, here we are: parents have been persuaded that handing over their precious offspring to complete strangers (and paying for the privilege) is somehow a great idea. Just ignore the obvious downsides of tearing a child from its mother after just a few months, if not weeks. Ignore the endless stream of revelations of physical and sexual abuse.
Just shut up and be an obedient productive economic unit.
It’s not just we Westerners, though, who’ve been so brutally gaslighted.
Indonesian police named 14 more people as suspects in an alleged child abuse and neglect case at a daycare center in Yogyakarta city, an official said on Monday, bringing the number of suspects to 27 people in a case which has sparked outrage in the country.
Police raided the daycare center in late April, and said they found dozens of children aged between two and six years old with their hands and feet tied. Some children were tied to doors.
The centre, operating without a licence, had its owner, principal and caregivers arrested initially. The new suspects include 10 more caregivers, a security officer and administrative staff accused of participating in or allowing the abuse.
This wasn’t a rogue employee: it was systemic failure in an unlicensed facility supposedly caring for the most vulnerable.
The pattern is depressingly familiar, whether in the West or the developing world. Parents are sold the lie that professional childcare is essential for ‘empowerment’ and economic productivity. The reality is warehouses for children where abuse festers because strangers simply don’t care like a parent does.
In Australia we’ve seen the same horror stories: babies left strapped in high chairs for hours, toddlers injured and predators slipping through inadequate checks. The child-care industry rakes in billions while parents outsource the most important job they’ll ever have.
Indonesia’s scandal is grim but unsurprising. The solution isn’t more regulations or more taxpayer subsidies to prop up the industry. It’s parents rediscovering that raising your own children isn’t a burden to be outsourced but the highest calling most will ever know. Civilisation was built on strong families, not state-approved crèches.
The childcare complex doesn’t love your kids. Only you do.
