In our playgroup, no real friendships have been formed. Many people never showed up in the first place, and many people dropped out during the school year. Perhaps if it had been more local, there would have been more opportunities for genuine friendships to develop naturally.
The “Social Assistance State”
This playgroup is part of a study which is focused on “social inclusion”. It seeks to help parents who aren’t able to afford to put their 0-4-year-olds in daycare. The organizers think that is the best place for children to socialize and develop cognitively, so if families are unable to provide that for their kids, they are there to help us. This is a little offensive to me as a stay-at-home-mom by option, especially since I dislike the idea of daycare at all. However, I accept that the program will have good benefits for us, even though their basic premise is wrong.
I have a need, which is for my child to play with other children. I need help to find other children who aren’t in daycare all day as is mostly the case here in Portugal. However, who is most competent to help me with my need? Do I really need the government or the European Union? The problem when the principle of subsidiarity is not applied is that help doesn’t work as effectively when organized from further away. The government acts paternalistic but it is failing to carry out its own mission statement.
Finally, this playgroup operates on the fallacy that children are better cared for by the “school” than by their families. They plan activities to unite the parents so that they can network and help each other because if they don’t have their children in daycare they are obviously disadvantaged. They teach the parents how to play with their children because obviously their children are not “stimulated” enough at home. This reminds me of a concept I’ve heard is in Plato’s Republic, in which the State takes children from their parents so they can educate them and both men and women can have “equality” and be free to work.
2 thoughts on “Why My Government Run Playgroup Doesn’t Work”
Elsewhere I have said something like this summed up in the saying: It Takes Families To Raise A Village. And a spinoff of this is: it takes holy families to raise a holy village. Subsidiarity in practice means that some entity other than The State has some power over people – and this is why a power-seeking secular state not only ignores subsidiarity, but tries to insure that it is in no way implemented – if subsidiarity were implemented, that would mean there is some power that The State does not have [or does not yet have]. Julie-this is a very insightful piece, keep it up. Thank you. Guy McClung, San Antonio, Texas
Wow, that’s a great point. Thank you!