Below you will find pages that utilize the taxonomy term “Daycare”
The Sad State of Daycare in America
Today I heard a story on NPR’s Fresh Air about the state of child daycare in America. Let’s just say it’s not very good. It was an interview with Jonathan Cohn who recently wrote a “The Hell of American Day Care” for The New Republic. It was a story that had some details that rang too true for Danielle and I. One of the key points that Cohn makes is that daycare is very expensive - so expensive as to be a burden to those who need it the most, single parents. That is a very, very true statement. Danielle and I flip-flopped during the pregnancy about whether Scarlett would be going to daycare. Around three months before she was due to be born, we decided to go with daycare so I set out to find all the daycare centers near our house that seemed reputable.I was quite surprised that it was hard to find one that was clean, provided stimulation for the kids, and wasn’t impossibly expensive . Eventually we found one that seemed good based on the tour. About a month before Scarlett was supposed to start, we went for a visit to meet the teachers. While talking with them, we realized that most of the kids were left alone and the workers weren’t washing their hands after changing the kids’ diapers. Disgusted, we decided to just take care of her at home. The sad thing is that daycare at that place cost so much that we weren’t really losing any money with the loss of one income. That was what had made us so unsure of whether to go with daycare in the first place - the amount of money we’d still get to take home if she was in daycare was so small the only thing that kept us actually considering it was a fear of how expensive diapers and other baby products are.