Reply to Daycare wait list fee insane NE DC- how many are worth paying for?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I think, unfortunately, if you are geographically limited and absolutely need care starting at a particular date, you need to either 1) have a daycare that's basically given you a "yeah, with this much notice, you'll almost certainly get a spot" (we were able to find one like that, it was just super pricey) or 2) way more waitlists. Sadly, probably closer to 10.

Daycare is going to cost you, what, $2k a month? That means shelling out for 10 waitlist fees is equivalent to only two weeks of care. Sucks, but if you need care, you need care.[/quote]

So I don't know what daycare is like in NE at this point, but I went through this about 6 years ago and what I found was that #2 gets you nowhere. I spent around a thousand in waitlist fees and I didn't get off one of those waitlists until my baby was 8 months old.

One winning strategy is to just accept that childcare is going to cost you more for the first year and line up a nanny share, and then get on waitlists for when your child ages out of the infant category. It is easier to find a spot for a 12 month old than a 3 mo old, because the the ratios are more favorable. Infant ratios are really hard for daycares, and they limit infants as much as they reasonably can do reduce staffing pinches.

Another option is to work the in-home daycare angle hard. This is really labor intensive BUT they don't tend to have those steep waitlist fees and if you find a good one, they will often be much more communicative with you about openings and when you might be able to get a spot (at least in my experience). But some of them are bad -- do your research and check their citation records and, whenever possible, see if you can talk to current or former families to learn about their experiences.

But yeah, people told me "eh, just get on waitlists for as many daycares as you actually like and surely you'll get in somewhere." It did not work out that way, and I spent a lot of time trying to get updates from places that were just never going to have spots for me. I also wasted time on a couple daycares that gave preference to certain employers and I was never going to get a spot there, but I was naive when I was first looking and didn't realize this until later. Like most of the daycares close to Union Station (which are convenient for a lot of families for obvious reasons) never open up spots because they give preference to DOJ or FTC employees and there are never other spaces available. Also some places never have places because they go to siblings. It's such a crapshoot. You could easily spend a couple grand on waitlist fees and never get a spot.[/quote]

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