Anonymous wrote:
3. Daycare is the only option for pool of people who really, truly cannot afford private care. But most of DCUM can afford a nanny, nanny share or other smaller childcare setting. It's just that we've all decided we would rather have vacations, enrichment classes, meals out, house cleaners and other supports. No problem with that, I was one of them. But now that you can't have any of those things, yes, you probably can afford to pay more for safer childcare for this limited period of time.

Anonymous wrote:I can tell you my Mom participated in child sharing/caring with other Moms and these arrangements were commonplace in the 1960's.

Five Moms. Each Mom takes a day. You tell your employer you can work 4 days a week. The kids get dropped off at the Mom of the day.

Daycare as a business was not such a thing in the 1960s. You had to be creative to get your childcare.

This arrangement was pretty common in Bowie in the 1960s and allowed Moms to work.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Not all college students have the luxury of not working that your daughter has. Many have to work for rent, car payments, groceries etc.

Yes, exactly. I cant pay more than minimum wage. Min wage in PG county is 11.50 x 40 hours =460 plus taxes? so 500x4=2000/mo. I pay 240/week for my 2 year old including meals for a licensed in-home daycare provider who does arts n crafts, music, yoga, has a obstacle course/playground in her backyard. Even the super ritzy centers in PG like Montessori, Celebree, Goddard cost less than 1500/mo for a 2 year old.

Given the choice between an 8-400 schedule with a crazy 2 year old and doing groc checkout in a 2-10 shift- its not a hard decision.

Umm grocery store workers get hazard pay, paid leave, and health + dental.

Plus you’re mostly standing in one place with occasional haunts.

Kids are exhausting. I’ll take the grocery pay for full benefits. Or an Amazon warehouse that issues PPE.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:
1. If daycare is open and you feel it is not safe, that's your decision. There is some data on infections in centers for essential workers and the vast majority of centers have been able to safely operate. When two centers in CO have to close temporarily due to cases, that is what we hear rather than the fact that hundreds or maybe thousands of facilities that reopen had no incidents.
2. Paying daycare while they are closed is up to the center. For better or worse, they are businesses that need to survive and government is not going to bail them out.
3. Deregulating day care temporarily is a terrible idea.

I have an infant and a toddler and think we need to prioritize getting daycares open with protocols recommended by CDC. Even more dire will be then they open at half capacity and many people can't get care.

Our society's reaction to COVID is mind boggling. On the one hand, we have shameful fools in the white house stoking controversy of mask wearing. On the other hand, we can't seem to put risk in perspective and figure out how to open an essential service like child care. In one weekend we shut down the country and I fear it will take years to unravel this mess. Yes, there is risk, but the risk to young children and parents is very low, and the benefits (indeed the necessity) of opening child care far outweighs the risk.

OP here.

The point I was trying to make is that the additional regulations added by COVID have created a very, very difficult situation for parents by closing daycares and creating complicated processes to reopen (they weren't even accepting new applications to reopen until this new order took place). I'd have less of a problem if they created an easier path for providers to reopen.

It's bad for providers, too. As you noted, many are going to struggle, and some will likely go out of business. That bad for the providers and its bad for the parents/kids who use their services. For a lot of reasons, which I think you were alluding to, you pretty much need parents to keep paying otherwise we'll probably end up with a big shortage of providers.

I very, very strongly suspect that the rules Maryland is putting in place for essential personnel providers are simply for show. You are crowding a bunch of kids together that are each at high-risk for contracting the disease because the jobs their parents have. You can put all the rules you want on cleaning surfaces, but that's not thought to be the primary way COVID spreads anyway. You're not going to keep younger kids separated, or have them wear masks. And some of the rules probably have a net-negative impact, such as by discouraging playground use because of proximity/contact concerns. But that probably results in more close contacts inside, which is much more likely to result in transmission. In any event, yes, childcare during a pandemic is risky, but it is a necessary evil for some unless you want society to devolve into a several-months-long version of "The Purge."

And I didn't mean to suggest that childcare should be *completely* deregulated. Just partially deregulated. It's a spectrum. Maryland has already (temporarily) deregulated providers caring for 5 or less *school-age* children. Why not expand that to any ages? Or, Maryland's regulations have never applied to providers who watch your kids for 20 hours or less a month. Why not expand to cover the full period when daycares are closed? Possibly with greater restrictions, such as limiting it to children from 1-3 families.