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Can You Resist the Parent Volunteer Vortex?
This school year, will you be sucked into the (cue scary music) “The School Volunteer Vortex”?
On her blog Late Blooming Mom, 45-year-old working mother Holly Sklar describes her initiation into public school volunteering and the onslaught of all these Uber Volunteer Moms who are clamoring to suck her into her ranks. Two weeks into her kids’ kindergarten year, and she’s already fed up.
In a blog post highlighted on the New York Times’ Motherlode blog, she writes:
I have filled out dozens of forms from the [parent booster] club, not to mention the kids’ teachers, all to do with what activities I can volunteer to be a part of, in the classroom and outside of it, ranging from re-shelving library books to driving kids to and from field trips to helping to organize and run any of the myriad of fund-raising events and activities that occur throughout the year. I’ve been told of mandatory commitments per child at the school, e.g., every family has to work one traffic safety shift, at pickup or drop-off, per child, during the year. I have been invited to no less than four volunteer events, and I’ve already missed two of those. I’ve been asked to contribute the “suggested” amount per child – and nothing that you can pay in ten installments is cheap – because, though a public education is free, a great one is not — especially nowadays. Every day brings more mail in the kids’ backpacks, offering additional ways to get involved.
If I get another piece of paper from the parent association, it’s quite possible my head is going to explode.
Federal guidelines recommend that families spend no more than 10% of their income on child care expenses. But in the real world, many spend two and three times that amount because they simply have no choice. And while quality child care is expensive no matter where you live, in some states it now costs more to send your kid to day care than it does to send your kid to college. Continue reading »
It was funny when it happened to Macaulay Culkin, but being left home alone is often no laughing matter for a child. And with many families struggling in this tight economy, more and more kids are being left to fend for themselves while their parents are out earning a living. Continue reading »
With the economic crunch pinching families everywhere, a lot of stay at home parents have taken the plunge back into paying work. The road from baby meet-ups to board meetings is especially challenging for stay-at-home dads, the Wall Street Journal reports.
Let the daycare battle begin…again.
The latest report from the long-running U.S. National Institutes of Health study about the affect of daycare on kids is sure to add fuel to the so-called Mommy Wars.
Depending on how you spin it, the study, which was published in the journal Child Development, is either good news or bad news for working parents with kids in daycare.
Reuters emphasizes the upside of daycare: children in high-quality childcare scored slightly higher on measures of academic and cognitive achievement years later as teenagers.
But the Los Angeles Times highlights the fact that at age 15, the kids who spent long hours in day care as preschoolers are more impulsive and more prone to take risks than teens whose toddler years were spent largely at home. Continue reading »
Here’s some relief for working parents, from the same paper that vilified us last week. Today USA today has a quick quiz to help parents and teachers figure out when a sick child needs to be sent home from daycare, based on guidelines from Pediatrics.
The answers are not what you think. And if your kids childcare is anything like the majority of centers and home daycares, you’ve been called to pick up a sick kid who could really have stayed put at school.
USA Today offers a heaping helping of guilt to working parents today with a story about how work at home hours conflict with family time.
Recent studies have shown that in spite of the rise of dual-income families, parents today spend more time with their kids than they did in the 1950s.
Now USA Today has rounded up a slew of experts to say that parents, especially moms, are hurting our kids by working when they’re around. Don’t worry, though, moms. You can still do housework.
Lori Garcia 
Joslyn Gray 
Amber Doty 
Julianna Miner 
Monica Bielanko 
Sierra Black 
Meredith Carroll 
Carolyn Castiglia 
Sunny Chanel 
Madeline Holler 
Rebecca Odes 
Danielle Smith 
Danielle Sullivan 
Katherine Stone 
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