It all sounds perfect but it wouldn’t if there was no reliable babysitter, someone I can trust completely and who I know will be good to my son. Again, we’re lucky it worked out great but it got me thinking about how the other young parents do it in Mongolia. It seems, from speaking to many people with children (I think people with young children naturally get drawn to one another!) that their parents (grandparents) perform a huge chunk of the childcare when the parents decide to get back to work or in a lot of cases in recent years, to study. In Arvis’ case though both of his grandparents are unable to do that both two very different reasons-one grandma’s very elderly and needs a lot of care herself and the other set is in their prime and working away.
Paid hourly babysitting is an alien thought in Mongolia because of the abundance of relatives and grandparents, and also because of a lack of trust in people and a even more so a lack of integrity in the carers. I know of several agencies training babysitter but they’re mostly for permanent and full time carers rather than services which you call in an emergency and still be at peace.
Once the kid gets old enough they’ll inevitable be sent to nurseries and kindergartens, some even to nurseries that care from Monday to Friday-a social conditioning and infrastructure that is no doubt a residual Soviet system-and they are not at all great. There’s the problem of unreliable care (food, environment, discipline tactics from medieval times) and then the issue of logistics. I honestly have no idea how some people deal with it. A very good friend of mine leaves her daughter with her mother-in-law and her own mother when she’s able to take time off her work. I think it requires a lot of energy to keep lugging a child around as well as leaving them behind, then going home to take care of house business, never mind personal business.
There are good nurseries out there, ones with great facilities, good food and abundant supervision, and the children who attend them tend not to get ill very easily-is it that it’s more clean or that their home environment is healthy? And is that in any way related to socio-economic background? Inevitably, it all comes down to affordability. Not everyone can afford to send their children to these great places, and they are a dime a dozen. Why aren’t more nurseries being built and run this way? The biggest reason it seems is that there is no physical space left in UB for the infrastructure. Thousands of people move to the city every year in search of a better life-employment, housing, education, opportunities. Buildings containing banks, shops, mining projects and health spas are being erected in every nook and cranny, and they are being filled by jobs for the thousands of newly graduated young Mongolians, with dreams to leave their country for an even better life. But why is child care being left behind? Why is the concept of raising your children in a good environment, nearby and without risks such an separate issue for our development leaders today? Surely it’s all tied up together?
Nurseries in the office building, or within the office if they’re accommodating enough, or one nearby a concentrated amount of offices in the city…it’s all possible with enough planning and a genuine concern for this growing trend of leaving your children behind or resorting to less than happy situation. I only hope that it’s not too late for development to keep striding forward with social issues holding its hands.
This was of course a non-issue for me a year ago because how we raise our children in Mongolia was not our main cause for concern, or what we’re offered as choice for child care. I never want to burden my parents or aunts and uncles and distant relatives with child care but if I had no choice, no money, no Baljka (our lovely nanny) our situation becomes the normative situation. Here’s our lovely twosome:
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