Amongst all the things that needed discussing between my
boyfriend and I during pregnancy, one of the biggest was deciding childcare
options for our daughter once I was off maternity leave and back to work. We
knew we did not want to hire a babysitter or put her in daycare, which is what a
lot, if not most, parents end up doing. I try to always keep an open mind, but after
thinking it through, there are just so many reasons why I did not want to put
my child in daycare, which is what I felt like sharing online today considering
I have had so many people, especially pregnant women and new moms, asking me my
viewpoint on this topic. Be sure to also check out my video version on YouTube
here.
My biggest problem with having a non-family member watching
my child is that most likely they are not going to treat your child with the
best intentions. Any random person is not going to care too much about having a
relationship or strong bond with your child and is probably just doing it for
the money. As far as daycare goes, most daycare centers only have maybe two
caretakers handling a large group of kids of all different ages. Which means
while my baby is crying wanting to be fed and paid attention to, one of those
caretakers is feeding another baby and the other one is breaking up a fight
between two five year olds, leaving my child and a few others left alone. While
some kids are taken care of, others aren’t, and there is little to zero
one-on-one with your child, and I want someone very hands-on with my child.
With a babysitter, they are in charge of watching your child only, but even
then, how well are they really watching them? Years ago, a family friend of
mine had a babysitter (who was a close friend of theirs) watch their three-year
old daughter who was disabled and in a wheelchair. I will never forget that devastating
phone call phone call saying the babysitter wasn’t watching her and their three
year old baby died. The babysitter had taken her out in the backyard and rolled
away from her in her wheelchair and drowned. The wheelchair weighed her down
and she was found at the bottom of the pool. To this day I am scarred from
that. How did the babysitter not know that she was rolling away from her? How
did she not hear the splash to go save her? I know that may not be the case for
everyone, but I feel like when money is involved, anyone is going to want to watch
your child and they're going to only half-ass it.
Another issue I have, with daycare specifically, is the
amount of germs spread. It’s almost impossible for your child to not get sick
in daycare. I feel like daycare is a germ house. Children may be sent to
daycare sick, and you don’t know how many kids are putting their hands in their
mouths and touching other things and sneezing and coughing and picking their
noses and not washing their hands. Then your child takes these germs home, gets
sick, and then everyone else in the house gets sick. Some of the worst
illnesses my brother and I got were from being in daycare. It’s hard to even
remember a time when we weren’t sick. My brother was always catching weird colds
and getting temperatures as high as 108°F. My brother caught a cold from
daycare once, gave it to me when I was about six weeks old, I got RSV from it and almost
died in the hospital. I would rather not put my child in a germful environment
and keep her and the family as sick-free and healthy as possible.
With my family being vegan, and no one else around us is, we
also worry if a daycare caretaker would feed our daughter anything we did not
send with her with or anything we would have told them not to. When my brother
was eight months old, the caretaker in daycare fed him a hamburger and another
time a different caretaker had given him someone else’s breast milk. So it just
leaves me thinking something like that would happen with my child. After all, we’re
not there, so how would we know what goes on unless they tell us or we catch
them when we come to pick our daughter up?
Besides all the horror stories and things I feel like can go
wrong at daycare, there’s the financial aspect. It is so expensive to hire a
babysitter or put a child in daycare. The going rate for caretakers these days
is about $10 per hour, which is more than what I make an hour. So it makes no
sense for me to give away all the money I’m making, plus having to take some money
from my boyfriend’s paycheck, for someone in daycare to watch my child when I
can just stay at home and take care of my own child. Either way, I’m making no
money, and if we were to put our daughter in daycare we’d be losing money since
we’d have to use both incomes to pay for it.
So that may be leaving you guys wondering: "who watches your
child while you’re at work?" My boyfriend and I made our schedule to where we
wouldn’t have the same days off from work. So that leaves us with four days out
of the week (my two days off plus his two days off) for one of us to be home
with her. The other three days of the week is when we might need someone to
watch her. Some weeks we only need someone for one day of the week and we’ve
had weeks before where we didn’t need anyone at all. Sometimes it works out
that way because my boyfriend gets off from work usually at 12:30pm and
sometimes I don’t have to go in until 2 or 3 pm, so he’s usually off before I
even have to go in. When we do have someone watch our daughter though, it’s a
close family member, usually my mom but sometimes my boyfriend’s sister. We
also do not pay for them to watch her. I feel like you should not have to pay
family to take care of family, and also, as I stated before, when money’s
involved anyone is going to watch your child. It may sound selfish to some,
especially since the babysitter/caretaker is doing you a favor, but by not
including payment, it ensures that the person watching our daughter actually
wants to, that they have the time for her, and that they want to spend time
with her, creating a more loving, fun, and safer environment for our daughter.
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