Mick Hartley

More adventures in the struggle against anti-socialist practices in North Korea. And you know what's really anti-socialist? Hiring nannies:

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.

Too individualistic, you see, nannies. The children might go off-message and pick up bad habits. They're better off absorbing he basics of Kim-worship in state-run childcare centres.

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.”

As the offence of watching South Korean TV carries the penalty of five to 15 years of correctional labor, that's more than a slap on the wrist.