By Cailin Acosta
LA JOLLA, California – Four Hours a Day shown Tuesday morning, Feb. 4, at the San Diego International Film Festival is a documentary film directed by Ayelet Dekel in which she interviews mothers and daughters who lived on different kibbutzim in Israel. The subjects commented on the kibbutz ideology of having their children raised communally in a “children’s home.” The documentary is based on Orian Chaplin’s bestselling book.
Babies would be sent to the children’s home and nannies cared for them. Mothers only got four hours a day with their children and then went back to work in the fields and slept away from their children at night.
A common emotion of these many mothers was extreme guilt. Many of them have five or six children that they did not raise. The ideology was that parents needed to focus on work or social time involving dancing and parties. Some of these mothers would find ways to sneak into the children’s home at night to breastfeed, soothe or sleep on the floor next to their child’s crib.
Some of the children would be considered “bothersome” if they cried too much. In such a case, mothers would be called to come and take care of their child since nannies had all the others to watch. Many of these mothers wished every night that their child would cry so they could be with them.
Orian interviewed her own mother, asking, “why did you think this was good parenting?” Her mother tearfully replied that she did not know any other way than the rules of the kibbutz. Mother and daughter tearfully hugged and the pain that was felt between them and the years of emotional disconnect.
In the 1970’s many parents on the kibbutzim wanted children to live at home and not in the children’s house, so communal sleeping arrangements were brought to an end.
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Cailin Acosta is the assistant editor of the San Diego Jewish World.