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Strollerderby
If your child's daycare used GPS tracking would you feel comforted or concerned?
Is it the way of the future? Some daycare centers in Sweden are using electronic devices like GPS to track children while on outings like supervised walks in the forest. The kids apparently wear vests with transmitters in them as the staff tracks them on a screen.
Some parents are worried daycare centers will use the technology to replace staff. Others wonder whether getting children used to being under surveillance could affect their idea of privacy when they grow older.
As Malin Rising reports, Monica Blank-Hedqvist, the principal of a daycare in Borlange tells the Associated Press that electronically tracking the children has been a good thing. “It is excellent, it has been only positive for us.” She says the devices are used as an added precaution by three preschool teachers watching around 20 children. Continue reading »
When take your daughter's to work is dangerous -- and the only option.
Any working parent knows that childcare can be a scramble — a job-threatening, tears-inducing, wallet-emptying scramble. But rarely is the search childcare life-threatening, or even dangerous, for the kid.
Not so for Col. Latifa Nabizada’s daughter, Malalai. The 5-year-old frequently rides along with her mom, a helicopter pilot who is sent on sometimes dangerous missions for Afghanistan’s Air Force. Nabizada is the only female pilot in Afghan aviation history and it’s a job she fought hard to train for, to get and to keep. Continue reading »
How much freedom should day care centers have to create and enforce their own rules?
I live in Colorado and can attest to the fact that it’s a fairly vanilla state.
To the Colorado Department of Human Services, that appears to be part of the problem.
They’ve issued a new list of proposed regulations for all childcare providers in the state, which has some of the centers crying that they don’t like being treated as children themselves.
The set of rules is long — 98 pages long — and, well, diverse, like requiring that the dolls children play with are diversified with at least three races, and that teachers are prohibited from eating fast food in front of the children as well as from wearing clothes that don’t cover their laps and shoulders.
What do you do with the kids before summer camp starts?
MP Dunleavey at DailyWorth, a financial site for women, has (as far as I can tell) coined the phrase “Camp Gap.” The “Camp Gap” encompasses the days between the end of the school year and the beginning of summer camp, when women are faced with the harsh reality of “insufficient, overpriced, erratic child care choices for working families.” The emphasis is Dunleavey’s, but it might as well be mine. My daughter’s last day of school is June 28, and her summer camp – which is only half-day – begins the second week of July.
Dunleavey writes, “When someone bemoans the lack of women in corporate leadership—currently less than 20% occupy C-suite positions—I feel like screaming: ARE YOU KIDDING ME?” Ha! No kidding. How are we supposed to get to work if there’s no one to watch the kids? Continue reading »
Child care helps depressed moms' kids.
The old saying “If mom isn’t happy, nobody’s happy” is true. Mom sets the tone for the household. So what if mom is sad all the time? According to a new study, about a quarter of the moms with 18 month-olds and one in five mothers of 3-year-olds show signs of depression.
Experts say children often show the signs of their parents’ distress. Some act out by being hyperactive and overly aggressive, others internalize the feeling, take on their mother’s depression and sadness by becoming withdrawn. In fact, children of moms who experience ongoing or recurring depression are twice as likely to act out and four times as likely to be sad or depressed themselves. Click here to learn how to know if your child is depressed.
Often, these are moms who are at home with young ones full-time. They don’t take their children to day care because they believe it’s their job to watch them. Why waste money on child care when I’m home full-time, seems to be the consensus in many homes. But a new study says spending just a few hours a week in day care, especially if mom’s prone to depression, will help protects kids from developing behavioral and psychological problems. Continue reading »
10 more minutes per day? What to do . . . what to do . . .
New research commissioned by Microsoft found that 90 percent of moms would be happier if they had 10 more minutes in their day. Clearly I wasn’t asked to participate in the study, because if asked, I would have answered that I’d be happy with 10 fewer minutes in my day. Make it an hour or two less and I’d be downright ecstatic.
The Microsoft study also said moms would give up sex, alcohol, TV or chocolate to get that extra time. What I wonder is if they’re giving up everything pleasurable, then what, exactly, do they want the extra time for? Folding more onesies? Picking up Legos?
Give me 10 more minutes and that just means I have 10 more minutes of stuff to do. (And by “stuff” I definitely don’t mean eat chocolate, have sex, watch TV or drink alcohol.)
Do we show our domestic workers enough respect?
It’s been a big moment for Nanny Power. When Amy Poehler accepted her Time 100 award, she thanked her children’s nannies. In the recent article deconstructing the motives behind Obama’s mother’s trip to Indonesia—widely thought to be a formative experience for the future president—the author implied that access to affordable childcare and domestic help abroad may have been a factor. Royal Wedding buzz noted the prominent presence of William’s former nanny, Tiggy Legge-Bourke. (Some even suggested that William was attracted to Kate because of her resemblance to Tiggy—and that Prince Charles was drawn to Camilla because she looked like his own nanny.) And this week’s T magazine featured a piece about a young woman who’s dedicated herself to the rights of nannies and domestic workers.
To me, the question isn’t so much why nannies are getting so much attention at the moment, but: What took us so long?
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