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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]A lot of kids at my kids school don’t go to aftercare either. It’s so mysterious to me as someone with an 8-4.30 job. How is it possible??[/quote]

I'm the poster whose kid was one of 3 out of 16 kids in aftercare.

In our situation, the majority of the kids in the class were fairly recent Latino immigrants who primarily lived in multigenerational housing. So, yes, maybe mom and dad are working 9-5, but maybe they're instead working split-shifts, and also there's aunts and uncles and grandparents and older cousins around, and so there was a really village approach to childcare. Very noticeable at pickup time the few times we got the kids right after school - yes, there were a few moms and dads, but there were also lots of other family members doing pickup. And the parents who were there were also picking up the kids' cousins.

I think the thing that I had to realize is that while the UMC parents all had had some kind of regular, full time, professional childcare for the previous 3 years (daycare, nanny, etc), poor and working class families were never doing that. They don't have $2200 a month to shell out to a daycare center. They've been making it work for three years with relatives, informal arrangements, split shifts, etc, etc. So to all of a sudden have care from 8:45-3:15 was a bonanza.

But yeah, that's all hindsight. When my oldest was starting I just assumed pretty much everyone would go to aftercare, and I was dead wrong. [/quote]

Yeah, between low-income and immigrant families who don't like to put their kids in aftercare, and upper income families with one parent who has a flexible job/no job and/or is independently wealth either from working in their 20s/30s and living off investments or family money, there are MANY kids who don't use aftercare.

Aftercare kids are all dual full-time working parents.

[/quote]

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