North Korean authorities have ordered an end to the largely urban practice of hiring nannies to look after children. The order comes amid North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s recent emphasis on the issue of child rearing.

Kim has stressed the “party-focused system of management and responsibility” since the Eighth Party Congress in January. The order to eliminate personal nannies can be understood within this context as a signal that the authorities plan to expand people’s use of state-run childcare centers. 

According to a Daily NK source in Pyongyang on Monday, the city’s party committee issued a directive on June 22 for all party committees in government organizations, workplaces, and localities (administrative divisions and administrative dong) to implement decisions made during the Third Plenary Meeting of the Eighth Central Committee.

Specifically, the municipal party committee ordered that the managers of all party organizations ascertain the precise state of childcare centers and kindergartens and report what they have done to improve conditions in these facilities. The committee also ordered party officials to turn such facilities into “places where women will have no problem leaving their children.” 

Daily NK confirmed that the same order was issued in South Pyongan Province as well. A source in the province said Sunday that party organizations “at the provincial, city, county, village, district and even inminban [people’s unit] level” are discussing and handing out tasks regarding the “repair, improvement, and supply of childcare centers, kindergartens and secondary academies.” 

The source said that the country’s leaders believe that mothers refuse to leave their children at daycare facilities because of “bad conditions,” namely that such places are “unhygienic, [too] cold, or [too] humid.” According to him, party officials harshly criticized this state of affairs as reflecting the “views held by local party managers toward [North Korea’s] future generations and the [North Korean] people.”

North Korean children / Image: Seokwang

Stressing the need for party officials to take charge, North Korea’s leadership appears to be pressuring party organizations to improve conditions at childcare centers “self-reliantly.” 

North Korea’s leadership is blaming women with children as well, slamming the hiring of nannies as “individualism in the selfish pursuit of one’s own comfort.” This is apparently a call for restoring North Korea’s own brand of collectivism.

Moreover, the leadership is spreading propaganda calling on women to follow the example of the Kim Il Sung era’s “Chollima spirit.” The propaganda claims that parents during that era “did not soothe children with blind love, but trusted the state and the collective by leaving them at childcare centers and kindergartens.” As a result, the propaganda says, those children “became the creators of miracles and exploits in factories and agricultural villages.”

North Korea’s leadership has further claimed that hiring nannies is “non-socialist and anti-socialist.” They view the hiring of nannies and home tutors as “poison left over from the old ideology of rotten capitalism.”

Accordingly, the leadership has hinted that families that hire nannies will face “legal punishment” akin to those meted out to people who watch South Korean TV programs or listen to foreign radio broadcasts. Daily NK understands from sources in the country that the authorities are saying that the society must wage a “sharp struggle to eradicate [keeping] nannies” and that offenders will face punishment “without question.”

In reality, however, North Korean women are giving these government claims a lukewarm response. Generally, their position is that if they are hiring nannies on their own dime, that is their own choice. This demonstrates that the worldview of North Korean women, who have actively latched onto the country’s slide towards a market economy, is more “individualistic” than the leadership believes. 

Many women are criticizing the government’s priorities. They say the leadership should first improve conditions at childcare centers and kindergartens before moving to eradicating nannies.

Some women have reacted to the government’s directives indignantly, asking why in the world the leadership – which has promoted concern about the spread of COVID-19 – would “stubbornly” ask them to send their children to “dilapidated facilities where [their children] could catch the infectious disease.”

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