Childcare Provider Quotes

A reporter once asked me why I think progressive men who earn significantly less than their breadwinning wives still won't quit their jobs to take care of their children. Why do they still hold on to their careers, even if taking care of the children would make more financial sense because the cost of childcare is higher than their net salary? I think I know the answer to that now, and it sucks. Women are not expected to live a life for themselves. When women dedicate their lives to children, it is deemed a worthy and respectable choice. When women dedicate themselves to a passion outside of the family that doesn't involve worshiping their husbands or taking care of their kids, they're seen as selfish, cold, or unfit mothers. But when a man spends hours grueling over a craft, profession, or project, he's admired and seen as a genius. And when a man finds a woman who worships him, who dedicates her life to serving him, he's lucky. But when a man dedicates himself to taking care of his children it's seen as a last resort. That it must be because he ran out of other options. That it's plan Z. That it's an indicator of his inability to provide for his family. Basically, that he's a fucking loser. I think it's one of the most important falsehoods we need to shatter when talking about women's rights.

There's no such thing as a single parent. They've become dependent on other people in commercial transactions, such as their employers and child-care providers. A single mother may look like she's doing so much 'on her own,' but she has merely commercialized the things the father would (and should) have done.

Having to remind your partner to do something doesn’t take that something off your list. It adds to it. And what’s more, reminding is often unfairly characterized as nagging. (Almost every man interviewed in connection with this project said nagging is what they hate most about being married, but they also admit that they wait for their wives to tell them what to do at home.) It’s not a partnership if only one of you is running the show, which means making the important distinction between delegating tasks and handing off ownership of a task. Ownership belongs to the person who first off remembers to plan, then plans, and then follows through on every aspect of executing the plan and completing the task without reminders. A survey conducted by Bright Horizons—an on-site corporate childcare provider—found that 86 percent of working mothers say they handle the majority of family and household responsibilities, “not just making appointments, but also driving to them and mentally calendaring who needs to be where, and when.” In order to save us from big-time burnout, we need our partners to be more than helpers who carry out instructions that we’ve taken time and energy to think through (and then who blame us when things fall through the cracks). We need our partners to take the lead by consistently picking up a task, or “card”—week after week—and completely taking it off our mental to-do list by doing every aspect of what the card requires. Otherwise we still worry about whether the task is being done as we would do it, or done fully, or done at all—which leaves us still shouldering the mental and emotional load for the “help” or the “favor” we had to ask for. But how do we get our partners to take that initiative and own every aspect of a household or childcare responsibility without being (nudge, nudge) told what to do? Or, to simply figure it out?

I started to question what was being taught—I didn’t get much guidance in medical school or residency on what to do when your patient can’t pay for health insurance or when she has lost childcare for the third time in two months and is being fired from her job. Instead, I was taught to prescribe medications or provide psychotherapy for issues that were clearly systemic. While there is certainly a great need for both of these medical interventions, the lack of attention to the inhumanity of our social policies left me feeling powerless—just like my patients.

Let us admit that some government programs and personnel are efficient and effective, and others are not. Let us acknowledge that when it comes to the treatment of children, some individuals are evil, neglectful, or incompetent, but others are trying to do the best they can against daunting odds and deserve not our contempt but the help only we—through our government—can provide. Let us stop stereotyping government and individuals as absolute villains or absolute saviors, and recognize that each must be part of the solution. Let us use government, as we have in the past, to further the common good.

Make school affordable. For example, provide family stipends for keeping girls in school. Help girls overcome health barriers. For example, offer deworming treatments. Reduce the time and distance to get to school. For example, provide girls with bikes. Make schools more girl-friendly. For example, offer child-care programs for young mothers. Improve school quality. For example, invest in more and better teachers. Increase community engagement. For example, train community education activists. Sustain girls’ education during emergencies. For example, establish schools in refugee camps. Today,

Patriarchy creates coercive background conditions for women, and thus patriarchy, not capitalism, is to blame for women’s exploitation under capitalism. Women are exploited under capitalism because they are forced by gendered expectations of women’s place into segregated spaces. In the home, gendered expectations about what women ought to do causes them to devote more time and energy to caring activities. Not only are women expected to be the main source of childcare and domestic labor in the home, they are also the psychic caregivers, coordinating social, spiritual, and emotional efforts for families. Their doing this explains the exploitation of women qua women in capitalism. The best evidence for this claim is that women in other economic systems are also exploited. For example, in the Soviet Union women were exploited for their domestic and sexual labor despite living under a noncapitalist economic system.121 I do not mean to say that there is no economic or material component to women’s condition. Women are stuck in these roles in part for material and economic reasons; they do not have enough bargaining power within heterosexual relationships generally to escape these roles. If women are able to gain an economic foothold, as is possible in an enlightened capitalism that eschews discrimination and gender segregation, then they can begin to work their way into better bargaining positions in their homes. And with better bargaining outcomes in their domestic lives, women can do better in the capitalist economy. Thus, capitalism does not provide an easy escape route, but it does point in the direction of escape from patriarchy.

Interactions with the world program our physiological and psychological development. Emotional contact is as important as physical contact. The two are quite analogous, as we recognize when we speak of the emotional experience of feeling touched. Our sensory organs and brains provide the interface through which relationships shape our evolution from infancy to adulthood. Social-emotional interactions decisively influence the development of the human brain. From the moment of birth, they regulate the tone, activity and development of the psychoneuroimmunoendocrine (PNI) super-system. Our characteristic modes of handling psychic and physical stress are set in our earliest years. Neuroscientists at Harvard University studied the cortisol levels of orphans who were raised in the dreadfully neglected child-care institutions established in Romania during the Ceausescu regime. In these facilities the caregiver/child ratio was one to twenty. Except for the rudiments of care, the children were seldom physically picked up or touched. They displayed the self-hugging motions and depressed demeanour typical of abandoned young, human or primate. On saliva tests, their cortisol levels were abnormal, indicating that their hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axes were already impaired. As we have seen, disruptions of the HPA axis have been noted in autoimmune disease, cancer and other conditions. It is intuitively easy to understand why abuse, trauma or extreme neglect in childhood would have negative consequences. But why do many people develop stress-related illness without having been abused or traumatized? These persons suffer not because something negative was inflicted on them but because something positive was withheld.

Women are expected to be nurturing, to be emotionally available at any time, and to provide the appropriate level of discipline for each child’s developmental needs, all while doing much of the shopping, cooking, cleaning and childcare.

I feel this intense pressure to step in and be this amazing “bonus mom.” Everyone expects me to just naturally be maternal and love my step-kids and take care of everything for them. I feel like I do all the hard work of parenting, but I don’t get any of the benefits that bio-parents get. I don’t get love, loyalty, or affection from the kids, no matter how kind I am to them. They never hug me or say thank you. I certainly don’t get acknowledged on Mother’s Day. I really try to be a good stepmom, but I feel like all my efforts are looked at with suspicion or resentment from my step-kids, because they think I’m “trying too hard.” It also feels like my husband wants it both ways. He expects me to love his kids “just like they’re my own,” and he expects me to take care of them and be involved and support them and help raise them. But then he gets defensive and territorial, and he resists my input if I try to be involved in any actual parenting, because they’re “his” kids, not mine. And his ex-wife gets threatened, and she basically tells me to “butt out and stay in my place.” So, my husband and his ex both expect me to help them do the hard work of parenting and provide childcare for them, but only on their terms. Apparently, I don’t get a place at the decision-making table. I feel like an unpaid babysitter, not a partner. And it seems like the harder I work and the nicer I am, the less anyone appreciates me. I can’t win.

parenting matters. Much more consistent than any of the associations in these studies is the association between parenting and child outcomes. Having books in your house and reading them to your kid is going to matter much more than what books they have at day care. This seems to be true even though your child probably spends as many waking hours with their care providers as with you. I don’t think we know precisely why this is the case, although it may be that you as the parent are the most consistent influence your child has. Second, childcare quality matters much more than which type of childcare you have. A high-quality day care is likely to be better than a low-quality nanny, and vice versa.

In the past, rich women had frequently delegated childcare to a wet nurse. As doctors and companies began to promote and provide artificial milks, this practice began to be abandoned. A bottle would be less of a rival for the child’s affections:

Traditional roles were all well and good when everyone agreed and could actually stick to them, but unfortunately, late-stage capitalism and the cost-of-living crisis made it impossible. Women stepped up because men weren’t making enough money to take care of their families anymore. One income wasn’t enough; the wife had to go out to work, too. Trouble came when women stepped up… but their husbands didn’t. That was the root of the problem, now. It was why so many women were tired and defeated and were giving up on having meaningful relationships with men. And it was the reason why so many men were so angry. They considered unpaid domestic labor as exclusively women’s work, and they refused to do it. They didn’t pick up the slack at home. Women found they were doing everything—working, taking care of the household and the childcare and all the mental labor that came with it—and eventually, they started looking at their husbands, and they realized he was just another child they had to take care of. A lot of men still didn’t accept the fact that if they wanted to have traditional wives, they actually had to be traditional husbands. If you didn’t provide or protect, then you were just some jerk who wanted a slave to do his unpaid labor and relieve his blue balls.

Welcome to Learning Tree Academy. We provide full-service child care for preschool kindergarten as well as a before/after school care provider in Albuquerque. We cater our services to children as young as 6 weeks old to children up to 12 years of age. Operated by experts in childcare with decades of experience, we make sure to employ only the best people that can provide the best for your children. Our employees are all knowledgeable of performing basic first-aid and CPR and are all certified.

The average daycare provider lives on the edge of poverty, with hourly wages below those of truck drivers, bartenders, animal care technicians, and even some middle-class teenage babysitters. Certified preschool teachers make a bit more money, but retirement plans are almost unheard of for preschool teachers not affiliated with a public school, and preschools have rarely provided health benefits or other nonsalary remuneration.12 In Mississippi, catfish skinners apparently make more money than daycare providers. In some parts of the country, childcare providers don’t even need a high school diploma, and the care of dead people in funeral homes is more tightly regulated than the oversight of living children in early education and care settings.13

Gather six to 12 months of checking, savings, and credit card statements, and break your income and expenses down into categories and then line items. I have suggested some here, but add your own as needed. Check to see if your bank or credit card company provides reporting that categorizes charges or lets you assign categories—your work may already be almost done for you: •Income—paychecks, interest, dividends, rents, royalties, business income, pension, social security, child support, spousal support •Housing—mortgage/rent, property taxes, HOA dues, insurance •Utilities—gas, electric, propane, phone, TV/Internet, trash, water/sewer •Food—groceries, dining out •Auto—car payments, gasoline, repairs, insurance •Medical—health insurance, doctor/dentist visits, prescriptions, physical therapy •Entertainment—travel, concerts/shows, sports •Clothing—personal purchases, dry cleaning, uniforms •Personal care—hair/nails, gym/yoga, vitamins/supplements •Miscellaneous—gifts, pets, donations •Children—education, activities, school lunches, childcare You can use a spreadsheet or pen and paper to take note of income and expenses as you go through statements, then calculate a monthly average for each item.

Oh, she went to get us some bagels and fruit because we have two-a-days,” the answer came. “Our nutritionist says we should eat an hour after our first training and an hour before our next one.” Langel was again stunned. The players had double training days, and in between sessions, a player had to run out and get food because U.S. Soccer didn’t provide catering like they did at the men’s training sessions. That went on the list, too. Other small things added up. Players weren’t allowed to keep their jerseys after they played—they had to give them back to the federation, which was unusual in the world of soccer. There were no provisions that covered childcare for mothers on the team. Joy Fawcett and Carla Overbeck had children that they often took to national team camps.

Paediatric First Aid is a training provider that specialises in offering first aid courses focused on infants and children. These courses are designed for individuals who work in settings such as schools, childcare facilities, nurseries, or for those who are responsible for children in any capacity, including parents and guardians.

the size and functions of the state matter profoundly to the performance of capitalist economies. In orthodox economic commentary it is frequently asserted that the role of the public sector should be minimised in order to free private enterprise from the ‘dead hand’ of regulation and the perverse impact of ‘crowding out’. In fact, successful economies have almost ​all had states actively committed to their development.54 This is not just about the role of the state in providing or co-investing in infrastructure (as is sometimes conceded even by those otherwise sceptical of public investment), though this is indeed important. Its role in innovation is also key, as we have seen. At the same time, the development of a skilled and adaptive labour force requires deep investment in education, training, health, childcare and social care. These functions cannot simply be outsourced or privatised—as Crouch shows, when this is done the goal of greater competition almost always degenerates into private oligopoly, where public purpose is lost, and corporate political influence increases. We need to acknowledge, rather, the interdependence of private enterprise and the public sector; of market and non-market activities.

Liberal feminists generally believe society already provides almost all the opportunities required for women to succeed in life. They simply want the same access to those opportunities as men and advocate measures that allow and protect that success—educational opportunities, affordable childcare, flexible working hours, and so on.

but this of course becomes irrelevant in a jobless future where nobody works. Governments can help their citizens not only by giving them money, but also by providing them with free or subsidized services such as roads, bridges, parks, public transportation, childcare, education, healthcare, retirement homes and internet access;

Somewhere a scholar is preparing a manuscript on the poetry of Lucille Clifton while his child happily plays under the watch of a childcare provider, the cost of whose labor is paid without worry but the cost of whose living is a source of ongoing anxiety. Somewhere a Frantz Fanon scholar is spending grant money on addressing the built-in obsolescence of their laptop, the rare earth in the guts of which have been plundered from the ground in the new scramble for Africa; the toxic skeletal remains of which will be shipped away out of sight, out of mind, to be dismantled by dispossessed, non-white hands in sacrifice zones for digital capitalism. Somewhere a theorist of settler colonial economic formations is falling asleep on the train en route to a precarious adjunct gig an hour and a half from home, the text of the conference proposal in their lap blurring like the landscape outside, their eyelids heavy from last night's shift at the cafe at which the hourly pay is more or less equivalent to that which they receive for teaching. Somewhere a mid-career scholar is arriving on campus for office hours more relaxed than they have been in years, buoyed by a mixture of validation and excitement after having read an article on white supremacy in classrooms led by non-white faculty, text on page relaxing muscles, jaw, and gut, thinning the dense cloud of alienation in a department in which indicate phrases like "playing the race card" and "all lives matter" are replaced with more professional ones--like "you may be overreacting" and "try to adopt a student-centered approach." Scholarship, no matter how abstract its subject matter, is always already a material practice, a lived experience with complex, far-reaching physical entanglements.

My sister-in-law worked full-time for Head Start, providing free childcare for poor women while earning so little that she almost couldn't pay for her own. She resented this, especially the fact that some kids' moms did not work. One arrived late one day to pick up her child, carrying shopping bags from the local mall. My sister-in-law was livid.

Liberal feminists generally believe society already provides almost all the opportunities required for women to succeed in life. They simply want the same access to those opportunities as men and advocate measures that allow and protect that access—educational opportunities, affordable childcare, flexible working hours, and so on. Liberal feminism does not automatically assume that differences in outcomes imply discrimination, however, and thus it eschews the equity-based approaches of intersectional feminism. The liberal focus on removing the social significance of identity categories—that is, the legal and social requirements to comply with gender, class, or race expectations—seeks to refine the legacies of the Enlightenment project and the civil rights movements, rather than overthrow them for socialist or postmodern ends. Consequently, many liberal feminists believed their work would be largely done once women gained legal equality with men and had control over their own reproductive choices and when societal expectations had changed so much that it was no longer surprising to see women in all fields of work.

Transferring childcare from a mainly unpaid feminised and invisible form of labour to the formal paid workplace is a virtuous circle: an increase of 300,000 more women with children under five working full-time would raise an estimated additional £1.5 billion in tax.84 The WBG estimates that the increased tax revenue (together with the reduced spending on social security benefits) would recoup between 95% and 89% of the annual childcare investment.85 This is likely to be a conservative estimate, because it’s based on current wages – and like properly paid paternity leave, publicly funded childcare has also been shown to lower the gender pay gap. In Denmark where all children are entitled to a full-time childcare place from the age of twenty-six weeks to six years, the gender wage gap in 2012 was around 7%, and had been falling for years. In the US, where childcare is not publicly provided until age five in most places, the pay gap in 2012 was almost double this and has stalled.

One overlooked aspect of the matriarchal image is the relationship with other matriarchs or mothers who are the heads of households. Mother-to-mother dependence is another element of African American motherhood. Whereas these women work hard for the money outside of the home, they also lean on each other to share childcare responsibilities. The concept of “other mothering” is a component in the African American maternal tradition. Women taking care of each other’s children helped to establish a form of extended family. If formal childcare is not available or too costly, one mother substitutes for another. Other mothering means that the level of respect and honor a child gives to her or his biological mother is due the neighbor, cousin, aunt, or family friend taking care of the child. In the same vein, this secondary mother has the right to discipline the “son” or “daughter” as she would her own. Such reciprocity promotes a sense of communal responsibility that cross-connects mothers and children. If a child misbehaves, it is not unusual to suffer the wrath of both a community and a biological mother. Although this level of motherly accountability may not be as prevalent today, in some communities African American women still depend on each other to pick up children before and after school, carpool to a practice or game, provide a meal here and there, and just serve as an additional family member and supporter.

Sharing Each week, we will take time to share what is happening in our lives. At first this sharing will include some planned “sharing questions.” After the first few weeks, it will become more informal and personal as our group feels safer and more comfortable. Study Each week we’ll study a portion of God’s Word that relates to the previous weekend’s sermon. Our goal is to learn how to apply and live out our Christianity in our day-to-day experiences and relationships. Support Each week, we’ll learn how to take care of one another as Christ commanded (see John 15:9–13). This care will take many forms, such as praying, listening, meeting needs, and encouraging and even challenging one another as needed. Five Marks of a Healthy Group For our group to be healthy, we need to 1. focus on spiritual growth as a top priority (Romans 8:29); 2. accept one another in love just as Christ has accepted us (Romans 15:7); 3. take care of one another in love without crossing over the line into parenting or taking inappropriate responsibility for solving the problems of others (John 13:34); 4. treat one another with respect in both speech and action (Ephesians 4:25–5:2); 5. keep our commitments to the group—including attending regularly, doing the homework, and keeping confidences whenever requested (Psalm 15:1–2, 4b). Guidelines and Covenant 1. Dates We’ll meet on ____________ nights for ____________ weeks. Our final meeting of the quarter will be on. 2. Time We’ll arrive between ____________ and ____________ and begin the meeting at ____________. We’ll spend approximately ____________ minutes in singing (optional),____________ minutes in study/ discussion, and ____________ minutes in prayer/sharing. 3. Children Group members are responsible to arrange childcare for their children. Nursing newborns are welcome, provided they are not a distraction to the group. 4. Study Each week, we’ll study the same topic(s) covered in the previous weekend’s sermon. 5. Prayer Our group will be praying each week for one another and specific missions requests. 6. Homework and Attendance Joining a growth group requires a commitment to attend each week and to do the homework ahead of time. Obviously, allowances are made for sickness, vacation, work conflicts, and other special events—but not much more! This commitment is the key to a healthy group. Most weeks, the homework will require from twenty to thirty minutes to adequately prepare for the group study and discussion. If we cannot come to a meeting, we will ________________________________ 7. Refreshments 8. Social(s) 9.

In the current economy, for most students, colleges couldn’t possibly deliver on providing hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of anything. Wages aren’t budging, even though corporate profits have soared. The average CEO now makes 271 times the salary of the average American worker, whereas in 1965, the ratio was twenty-to-one. Healthcare costs are staggering—per capita health spending has increased twenty-nine times over the past four decades—and childcare costs are rising like college tuition, even as the frontline workers in both healthcare and childcare often receive poverty wages. A college degree is no guarantee of financial stability.