Do You Have Reliable Childcare?
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Anonymous
Adding that of course there are some gaps that we can't avoid- school breaks, 3 days between school ending and camp starting, 5 days between when camp ends and school starts back up in Aug, etc. We piece together grandparents, our date night sitter, and PTO. |
Anonymous
| I work at an ES that dismisses at 2:25 (Loudoun). The amount of students being picked up at that time by a parent (vs going to aftercare) has probably quadrupled since pre Covid. All those parents are then “working” with their young ES kids at home and no childcare for the remaining 3+ hours of their workday. Watch all the parents come here to defend it. |
Anonymous
For my 2nd and 4th graders, the issue would the parenting/screentime, not the work quality. They'd be only too happy to leave me alone for three hours to play video games. |
Anonymous
Weird that you know the work schedules and childcare arrangements of all of those families! |
Anonymous
If every kid needed aftercare, the demand increases and so do the prices. Most of the parents in my kid's cohort are SAHP, shift workers, or PT workers. I am the only parent I know in my kid's cohort that works from home FT. I work around pick up and drop off and walk my kid to/from school because transportation is not provided for kids living within 1.5 miles of the school in my county (ridiculous as that is). |
Anonymous
You don’t need transportation if you use aftercare. And there aren’t suddenly 3-4x as many SAHP as 4 years ago. It’s obvious what is going on. |
Anonymous
Question is WHY ARE YOU SO FIXATED ON IT? |
Anonymous
Aftercare is full AND IT COSTS MONEY. Its more per hour than daycare and honestly, it is shi% care. You dont care about the kids, you think its unfair and you are bitter because you think someone else is getting a better "deal" or "scheming" the system. And people 100% changed their shifts/jobs, decreased hours, or quit. Do you not remember COVID where there was NO support for working parents who had kids at home? |
Anonymous
That's a different matter. My school dismisses at 3:30. Some people get in 8 hours of work by starting at 7 AM. Some people work in schools (my kid's best friend's mom BOOKS it from her workplace to our school). Some people have flex schedules (my husband is a professor, and if he's not teaching at that specific time, the cliche is "you can choose to work any 80 hours you want). I know a lot of parents who pick up their kids, and almost none of them take their kids back home to keep working, they all either have a SAHP or some specific work arrangement. I didn't have school aged kids before covid, but I suspect the real change in aftercare demand has at least as much to do with the increase in flexible schedules and decrease in commuting time due to telework/remote work. If I were working my same schedule fully in office, I'd definitely need aftercare due to spending 2 hours on metro and the train, not because of my actual work hours. There you go. There's your defense. Totally different than the question in the OP. |
Anonymous
What a catty, nasty response. This is exhibit A for why 2:25 should not be an acceptable end time to a school day. It's early afternoon and way before most people's core hours end. I pick up my DD at 2:25 and I end my day at 3:30pm, not 3 hours later. I'm at a title 1 school. All the middle class kids get on activity buses because their parents are unable to pickup in the early afternoon. The poorer kids? They go home on buses to empty homes by themselves. |
Anonymous
How do you know the parents' work schedule? You don't. And you certainly don't know whether the parents are getting their work done. |
Anonymous
Have you seen CASA in Loudoun? It's basically lord of the flies over there. Kids just running screaming everywhere for hours with next to no supervision. There's bullying and 5th graders picking on 5 year olds. Who would let their kids go to that unless they were desperate? It's much preferable to have the kids come home and have parents working while the kids read or do crafts. |
Anonymous
My kids’ school doesn’t let out until 3:50 so I don’t have a dog in the fight about what parents are doing as of 2:25. But have you thought about the fact that many parents just got an extra 1-2 hours back in their day from no longer commuting and that many workplaces post-COVID offer greater flexibility in setting your hours. Maybe they’ve been working since early am and are going to finish up an hour or two later that night. Many fed jobs have this ability to flex hours. |
Anonymous
| this is the anti-WFH troll, again. |
Anonymous
I work at GAO and we’ve done a series of reports on the loss of daycare workers in the workforce / closure of childcare facilities post Covid. It is harder to find childcare now and it wasn’t ever easy. Personally, before Covid (when I already worked most days from home) my older daughter attended after-school care and my younger daughter was in a daycare near my husband’s office. She was unable to return to that daycare so we eventually found a preschool near our home but it was only open 9-5, so for the year she was there we had to juggle our schedules a bit to get full days of work or we had to use leave time. Now both go to the after-care program. If school is closed my older daughter is pretty self sufficient or goes to a friend and my younger one goes to camp for a day or I take leave. But emergencies happen - I had my younger one signed up for camp recently and the night before she sprained her ankle. I was able to work some hours and took sick leave for some of the day. |