Sharings

The biggest challenge was the initial year of daycare - as a new parent, you think you have obtained reliable childcare, but then your child (and the rest of the family) gets sick every few weeks and it throws a wrench into all of your plan…

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…

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…

I singed my kids up for daycare before they were born as I heard about the long wait lists that happen! Luckily my husband and I both do well so cost was never an issue with childcare. The largest challenge was finding reliable care that my…

Quality of care, lack of back up, hard to find reliable babysitters. Luckily both of us are academics and we had to rely on flexible schedules to cover gaps, but that also meant working strange hours

Affordability. To stay close to work, we have to send our child to expensive private schools. We can also move to neighborhoods with good public schools, but that would be far from work.

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.

All of these factors were relevant in making finding childcare difficult. From an everyday perspective, location was a primary criteria which quickly narrowed down to few affordable and quality options. Intermittent childcare has been extre…