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…

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…

long waiting times

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…

burden on family members who take care of the child.

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…

I paid a deposit for a spot at the daycare when I was about 4 months pregnant, as there could have been a significant wait had I not. Fortunately for those living in my area, the current daycare that we use is expanding to a second location…

The childcare quality was fine. It was a bit pricey but not overly so.

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…

Hours, location and quality. I had to compress my work days to accommodate drop-off and pick-up.

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…

Quality, luck of flexibility.

While I was a Ph.D. student, my stipend was not enough to cover the childcare expenses, so I had to rely on the money I had saved while I was working.

The biggest hurdles we faced were the high cost of childcare and inconsistent service quality. Due to these issues, and also out of a desire to build a closer parent-child bond, we had to devote a huge amount of time to childcare ourselves.…

Having a child in May 21 implied that a lot of daycares had shut down with the onset of COVID. Finding a daycare in time for starting with work was a pure gamble, there was no choice. I took the first non-private daycare I could find (and l…

Affordability and quality are the main challenges. We moved around the world. :)

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,…

Even with the support of a strong childcare system, I still face significant challenges. Childcare does not depend solely on institutional support; it also requires a considerable amount of parents’ time, energy, and emotional attention. Ma…

Long waiting times ( in Canada), some teachers are not caring and difficult to switch class/daycare

Finding the right mix of quality, availability, and affordability has been a leading challenge. Moreover, because of the competitive market, the first dimension on which we have compromised is affordability.

Quality is important. In Hong Kong, kindergarten is linked with elementary schools, which are linked with middle and high schools,

All of those, plus (limited) hours and (unlimited amount of) viruses of childcare centers.

The town we live in has only one childcare center. Luckily they had a spot when we needed it! We had to pay for the first half of the year while I was on leave (when we didn’t need childcare) to ensure our spot, though. Which was expensive!

In the Netherlands, availability and quality was good but it was expensive. In our experience in the US, both availability and affordability could be better, but the quality is still good.

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

Having two children has certainly impacted my work output and my mental well-being quite substantially, but childcare wasn't the issue. But then, my setup is very fortunate.

The biggest challenges were the quality of care (due to babies not getting enough one on one attention), falling sick often, and the constant work adjustments we had to make to accommodate that.

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.

Affordability and sick days

Price and trust. Answered above.

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…

Even with childcare, it was difficult to keep both of our careers. My wife made sacrifices, and this still bothers both of us. As immigrants, we have no other family around to help.

all of the above challenges apply in the USA. We took a detour on the way to work to drop off children at a good daycare, then pick them up on the way back (another detour). Quality was good, but the price was like a college education.