Sharings

While I did not have a long waiting time, the main issue was coverage. It was covid time and the nurseries were offering at most 3 days a week (while I was looking a service for 5 days a week). I gradually manage to increment to 4 days and…

One of our biggest challenges was the rigidity of my work schedule. My son was born during a semester in which I was teaching three course sections, with the final section ending at 6:20 p.m. Although my employer formally offered six weeks…

Long waiting times at quality day care centers was the primary challenge for me. I have had to reduce my work hours or work late in the night to provide child care in combination with a part time nanny. Also, when the child is sick (which h…

No such issues in Konstanz.

Location. The daycare is a bit far from my home; it took 1.5 hours per day on the road to drop off and pick up my child. Expenses. It's not cheap.

In the US, the biggest childcare challenge was long waitlists, which left us stressed until the last moment -the semester was about to start and we still had no solution in place. There is also enormous variation between daycares in terms o…

We decided to be a single income family.

I was very fortunate that affordability was never an issue – rather, we had the opposite problem, we would rather have spent less time jockeying for position on waitlists. The biggest challenge is assessing whether a program is good (and go…

While there are many options for day cares, such as day-care centers, it is still very challenging for the working parents to find coverage outside the 8~9 hrs of day-care coverage. Consider a tenure-track AP job which usually requires more…

Quality. It's hard to navigate work stresses and teaching responsibilities when kids have a tough time at the childcare place and then have tough emotions to process at home. The hours are also not suitable for evening teaching or Saturday,…

Probably waiting times. This essentially forced us away from a nearby affordable center toward a more distant (and more "high-end") option. This cost is OK, but the pick-up/drop-off time becomes a little cumbersome, which makes me work from…

Waitlist uncertainty, parenting at home while teaching during COVID

Combination of nanny, preschool, and family. I have three sons, all under 7 years old. Nanny is from 7am-5pm, M-F. She gets sick at times, which causes considerable disruption to our lives. Similar disruptions occur when our kids are sick (…

We did put ourselves on a waitlist but when ended up getting we had already adopted other solutions so we also concluded that its not reliable.