Balancing job, childcare can be hard | Nov 27th 2006
The National Institutes of Health released a compendium of findings last month which claim a child’s development is primarily affected by his or her family life regardless of whether he or she is in child care.
For example, the study reports children did better (socially and educationally) in homes where parents were more educated, there was less maternal depression, consistent routines were in place and the child had access to a lot of stimulation from books, toys and activities. This was the case regardless of the day-care situation.
What I think it really boils down to is that happy parents equal happy kids. I’ve seen that regardless of the amount of time my girls spend away from home during the day, they are both happiest when my husband and I aren’t miserable. This makes perfect sense, of course, but it’s easy to overlook this simple fact of parenthood when you’re up to your neck with work, kid stuff, house stuff and overall stress.
My work situation has changed frequently over the course of both my kids’ lives and my childcare arrangements have changed accordingly. My first attempt at solving the child-care dilemma was to avoid outside day care altogether. My husband stayed home four days a week with our infant daughter and I worked from home on the fifth day — or tried to work while I cared for her. All of us were stressed out with this arrangement, including my daughter.
When I got laid off in September 2002, my husband started working full time once again while I nursed my wounds, collected unemployment and spent an amazing amount of time with my toddler.
Soon afterwards, I began freelancing for 10-15 hours per week and my husband cut his work day back a bit so he could watch our daughter while I worked. Although this enabled us to avoid putting our growing toddler into day care, the arrangement was very taxing on me because I never had enough time to focus on work. It was hard on my husband too because he had an exhausting job and wasn’t really up for watching our 2-year-old immediately after work every evening. This is when day care finally entered the picture.
We started out small — one morning a week at the BOCES Childcare Center in Port Ewen. It broke my heart when my daughter cried for me as I left the room, but I’ll never forget how nice it was to sit down and do a few hours of work in the morning then have the entire afternoon to devote to her.
As my business grew from part time to full time, our child-care situation shifted along with it. My husband gradually reduced the hours at his job and then quit altogether once our second child was born.
We kept our oldest at BOCES 2 1/2 days a week until she was 3 and eventually increased her schedule to three days a week until she started kindergarten this year. Now our youngest is in BOCES (it’s really an exceptional program) two days a week and the house is actually quiet enough for both of us to get some work done. This makes for happy parents which makes for very happy kids — most of the time.
Even so, I’m still trying to figure out the perfect formula for ultimate bliss and balance. Child care is a very important ingredient in that formula and it is an ever-present topic of conversation in my house.
–
This article was published in the Poughkeepsie Journal on Saturday, November 4th, 2006