Corporate daycare? Not my first choice!

The Fortune 100 Best Companies to Work for in America list just came out, and we know we're in for a few weeks of thumb-sucking stories that amount to dull lists of employee benefits.

The leading employee benefit--the one, that if you offer it, you're
practically guaranteed to get on the Fortune list--CORPORATE DAYCARE.

I suppose I'd send my daughter to corporate daycare if it was my only option. But I have to say: "Corporate childcare," like "corporate culture" and "corporate communication" and "corporate life," seems to me to be an oxymoron.

How rich an experience is my daughter going to have in a "corporate environment"--another oxymoron--with a "corporate childcare professional" (another!)?

My 14-month-old daughter Scout gets babysat all day in an old three-flat in the inner city of Chicago next door to the school where my wife teaches. The daycare professional is a woman who knows how to raise kids because she's raised a bunch of them.

We don't agree with the woman all the time, and she doesn't agree with us. (For instance, she is 100 percent puzzled and totally annoyed by our request that Scout not eat sugar; but she goes along, most of the time.)

I know this may not be the ideal environment. Sometimes I worry that by a childhood development perspective, we could do a little better for Scout. (Is the TV on too much? Are there dynamic learning opportunities?)

And as she gets older, I'm sure we'll find different places for her to spend the day while we're working--places that fit her developing social and developmental needs.

But if I had to choose between where she's going now and a corporate daycare center--at least the kind of antiseptic, politically correct, safety-first, sense-of-humor-last corporate daycenter I imagine--that's a no-brainer.

Give me corporations for money. Give me mothers for daycare.