Reply to Are you suspicious of people who chose to work with kids?

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[quote=Anonymous]I love it when people with infants have such strong opinions about elementary and teenage kids. It’s almost as great as when childless people have opinions about childbirth or infant care or what they will “allow” hypothetical children to do.

OP - If you want your child to participate in any sort of activity outside of school, they will interact with adults who chose to or are paid to be there. Camp, sports, dance, music, lessons of any sort, Brownies, Cub Scouts, etc.

By the time your child is old enough to participate in these activities, I hope you have managed to form a community. This will help you have connections to these adults and you can understand their motivations. I assure you as a coach for an after school club who is married to a Cub Scout leader, we really do care about your kid and enjoy spending time with them and watching them master new skills.  Most of us have a passion for the activity or organization and want to share our love of baseball, swimming, debate, robotics, etc. with kids who want to learn. Sometimes it’s our kid that has a passion for the activity and we step up and volunteer to make it possible for them. I promise you, adults who want to abuse kids aren’t giving up multiple evenings a week and every Saturday morning for months for the chance at 5 min with your kid. When you are still in diapers and formula, it’s hard to imagine that in 7 years you might give up 4 hours of your weekend to learn how to time a swim meet and then spend the next 6 Monday evenings standing by a pool with a stop watch from 5-9pm, all so your child can swim for 30 seconds. But you will likely do something equivalent. Because you love your kid. And because you’ve gotten to know your kid’s friends and you care about them. You do the swim meets for all those kids because you know your neighbor Steve will coach soccer in the fall, your other neighbor Jan give up her living room for 8 weeks to be the “cookie mom”, and Beth and Joe don’t have time to do community theatre anymore, but they will patiently coax your child and her classmates through their lines for hours every Thursday for the 5th grade play. It takes a village.

Bedsides the parents, who are these people? 
1. HS students who need jobs - swim coaches, camp counselors, etc. 
2. Parents and semi-retired people who want part time jobs or need jobs with hours that allow them to also care for children or family members. 
3. People who need flexible jobs to increase or decrease hours as needed due to other obligations in their lives. 
4. Teachers, Nannies, and other professionals who make extra money babysitting, tutoring, or teaching lessons. 
5. Parents who need summers off to care for their own kids.

Why the heck would anyone do these jobs instead of working at Target? Because lots of people genuinely like kids, in a non-creepy way. Lots of people had a coach/teacher/community member in their life that made a huge positive difference to them as a kid and they want to be that person for someone else. [/quote]

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