The assumption was simple.
A child in preschool, eight hours a day, five days a week. A child in primary school and after-school care, eight hours a day, five days a week.
Then came the discussion of costs and the differences between municipalities.
What caught my attention, though, was what was not discussed.
We were effectively assuming a 40-hour week in institutional care and education for children.
Perhaps that assumption has become so taken for granted that we no longer see it.
We have built a society in which a child’s day has to fit around the adults’ working day.
Parents have to go to work. The working day is eight hours. Travel takes time. So the child has to be somewhere in the meantime.
This is understandable.
But understandable is not necessarily the same as desirable.
What is the underlying assumption?
We often talk about preschool staffing, municipal costs, opening hours and after-school provision.
These are all important questions.
But perhaps a larger question comes before all of them:
How long a day do we want our children to have?
Not how long a day the system needs to offer.
Not how long a day employers require parents to be able to buy.
But what kind of day is good for a child?
If we were designing society from scratch, with children’s well-being and their future among our central priorities, would we design their day this way?
I do not know.
But I think the question is worth asking.
The system shapes what becomes “normal”
The remarkable thing about systems is that after enough time, we stop seeing them as choices.
They simply become reality.
An eight-hour working day becomes normal.
Two parents working outside the home become the normal assumption.
A long day in preschool or after-school care then becomes a necessary consequence.
And gradually we begin discussing how to run the system better, without asking whether its underlying assumption is the one we actually want.
I am not claiming this is simple to change.
Families need income. Businesses need staff. Municipalities need to provide services. Life is more complicated than one beautiful idea.
But that is precisely why I think it matters to ask the question before accepting the outcome.
Whom is the day designed for?
I have become increasingly interested in this kind of question.
Not just: How can we make the system more efficient?
But:
Whom was the system designed for?
Whose needs came first?
Which consequences then became so ordinary that we stopped noticing them?
And if we were starting again today, would we do it the same way?
Perhaps the answer is yes.
Perhaps not.
But our children only get one childhood.
That is why I think it makes sense to turn the question around sometimes.
Not:
How do we make a child’s day fit the society we have built?
But:
How would we build society if a child’s day were one of its starting points?
Where do the children play?