Bring back the stay-at-home mom

Could be - certainly that was true when I worked for the government, and at management levels at other employers.

Staggered work schedules with one partner only part-time is the best solution.

Thats how we finally cracked the problem, although we still see little of each other. A kind of twisted version of "tag".
I don't believe that anyone worked harder at trying to make the "day-care" thing work more than we did. We have a book with well over 200 names in it of "sitters" we either interviewed and found lacking (sometimes to a criminal degree), and those we agreed to try, only to leave a month or two later.

There seemed to be a common theme amongst persons providing day-care in their homes. It was, "I'm going to stay home with my family. I'm going to have the time to clean my house, cook nice suppers for my husband, and give my children quality time. Oh and by the way, your kids can hang around, (if they stay out of the way). AND THEN YOUR GOING TO PAY ME FOR IT! Oh and by the way, your also going to pay the taxes that I owe on the $400-$600 a week I make doing this, because I will not surrender my SSN so you can claim the child care dredit on your taxes.

We gave up.
After 7 years of trying, we simply found that to do it right, is not possible.
Remember that couple on the east coast that hired a girl from England to live in their home and care for their child? They were both Doctors with thriving practices. They had the money, the resources, and the time to do it right and make child-care work. All they got was a dead baby. Thats when my wife and me stopped trying.

You know what? We ended up making more money out of it! Although the wife went to part time, we no longer were paying the $100 a week to a baby sitter. We were no longer being forced to take a day or two off from work once a month because our kids were sick, or the baby-sitter's kid was sick. We wer'nt paying for Doctor visits nearly as much.

I guess our income was at exactly the right level to make the change work. But my advice to prospective parents is don't have children until you can live on one pay-check. Forget what you see on T.V. or read in the Mags. You must and will settle for your children having less quality care, period.

"Thanks" to the racist public school system, many don't have the academic skills for even entry-level office work.

Its the white peoples fault.

Doesn't matter whether the people at the top are white, black, or purple. They have a system that disproportionately fails to educated black students, but they refuse to provide schools that work (funny how private schools have no trouble teaching inner city minority students ...) or to allow students to escape from the system through vouchers.

I suppose the term "racist" here is debatable, but it works for me.