In the blog Finding Child Care for Your Small Child, Part One: Considering Quality, I wrote about balancing an expectation of finding the ideal care with the reality of what’s available, what to expect in quality programs, and barriers to finding quality care. After considering the quality of a program, other things to think about are how well your family and child fit in a program, the proximity of the program to your home or job, and the cost of care.
Goodness of Fit
Say you have found a nice accredited program for your child with highly trained staff and a good reputation. They tick off all of the boxes on the lists of what to look for at the NAEYC resource page for finding high quality care. Now you need to meet with them and see if the culture and community is a fit for you and your family. We swim in our cultural preferences all day mostly without realizing that we even have these preferences. Now would be a good time to tease out what is important to you in general regarding your child.
- Do you eat organically grown foods or no, that’s not a big deal to you?
- Is tv ok with you or no, that’s not ok?
- Are you ok with guns in the home, or no, that’s not ok?
- Are you hyper clean, or are you ok with pets and tracking dirt in the house?
- Is it important that your child be on a schedule, or are you ok with flexible scheduling?
- Is it important to you that your young child is socialized to sit while eating, or no?
- And more, of course.
Some of these questions relate to what happens in the school itself and some are questions to ask directors about the other families who go there—generally speaking, they can give you an idea of commonalities among the families. I’d say this is a layer that is good to get to know, because you will start being a part of that community which includes family get-togethers and playdates. For example, I had my daughter at a school where I’d say a large number of families were gun owners—it was a part of conversations, they were in their homes, hunting was a part of what they shared with their small children, and more. I don’t hold the same beliefs about guns in the home and felt uncomfortable all the time. And, my daughter was put in uncomfortable conversations when peers talked about daddy bringing home the deer he killed and all that entails. Can you imagine similar situations for you and how you might go about handling them?
Child care services in the U.S. can meet state and national accreditation standards and still be very different from one another. The local and regional environments will impact the programming in obvious and subtle ways. For example, if you are in an urban area, a program there may have limited outdoor space, therefore, limited time in nature. Conversely, if a program is situated next to a woodland area, the teachers may take the children to the woods daily which would give them a totally different experience from the urban program. Both settings could meet state and national standards, and yet create very different experiences for the children and provide very different opportunities for the staff.
Proximity
Ok, now you have found a nice quality program that seems to fit your family. Is it close enough to where you work or live? I doubt you need much advice from me about evaluating location, but it will affect your options and may end up being a significant determining factor. I sacrificed proximity for quality and goodness of fit for the high-quality program I found for my infant, and to be honest it was a struggle, and had I kept her there, it would not have worked in the long run. It is common for small children to get sick, have doctor’s appointments, and have to fit into the lives of the other people in their families. If you can afford a long time in the car (and your small child can handle it) given these realities then, this isn’t an issue for you. Otherwise, take this into consideration.
Cost
Be prepared to be shocked at the high cost of quality child care in the U.S. Even though early childhood educators are some of the lowest paid workers in our country, the cost of child care at a quality center can be comparable to sending your child to college for a year. This is a major breakdown in our country, and yet we carry on. The truth is, is that this is usually the deal-breaker for many families. When you sit down and calculate the cost of sending one or more children to full-time child care, oftentimes, it’s more cost effective for one parent to leave their job and care for their children. And, many families are in a bind and can’t leave their jobs or they will lose their health insurance. These families are left asking for financial help from grandparents or getting deeper in debt. It is a national crisis.
If your income is at or below the Federal poverty guidelines, there is help for covering the cost of child care from your state…maybe. It depends on available state funds, which depends on which political party has the power in your state during any given year. When funding is low, you can still apply for the aid but you will likely be put on a waiting list until the funds are available to help you. This is so challenging for families in need, because as you know, child care is necessary to work, and if you can’t afford child care then you can’t work, but wait, you have to work in order to afford child care! It’s very messy for those of us who do not have the privilege of family support or steady income. I, like many others, believe that child care and access to health care should be a right not a privilege, but alas, here in the U.S. this is what we must contend with.
Have Hope
In spite of the challenges to finding a good fit for you and your child, there are many wonderful loving individuals who have what can be thought of as having “the right attitude” toward children (which is a whole other blog topic!). They are respectful and knowledgeable of positive guidance practices. These folks can be found in any early care setting and are our beacons of hope in early childhood education.