Moms Talk Q&A: How to Find Safe, Reliable Childcare

Moms Talk Q&A is a new feature on Maplewood-Brentwood Patch that is part of a new initiative to reach out to moms and families. We invite you and your circle of friends to help build a community of support for mothers and their families right here in Maplewood-Brentwood.

Our takes your questions, gives advice and shares solutions. Moms, dads, grandparents and the diverse families who make up our community will have a new resource for questions about issues ranging from snow days to teen pregnancies. And if you have a question for the Moms Council, please leave it in the comments or reach out to them individually. But the conversation doesn't stop there—please share your own stories too.

So, grab a cup of coffee and settle in as we start the conversation today with the question: How do you find safe, reliable childcare? The Moms Council offers responses below.

Finding safe and reliable childcare has been my number one worry as a working mom. Our older children really struggled in the large daycare at Washington University. They loved the friendships and activities, but both of them were so sick with recurrent ear infections (which seemed to last from September to March every year) that it was physically and emotionally exhausting. I used to dread sundown because I knew that someone would be up all night with pain, fever or severe coughing. We don't have any family nearby to watch the kids or help when they're sick. For us, the chronic ear infection/antibiotics/ear tube surgery cycle mandated that we pursue other options.

At one point I was faced with the decision of unfamiliar infant care for our final baby versus curtailing my career, and I hadn't yet created a close-knit circle of trusted friends or neighbors who might care for very small children regularly. I ended up reducing my work to part-time because I couldn't find the type of full-time care I wanted at an affordable rate. You could say I "found" myself.

The way I have found other good part-time caregivers is through word-of-mouth from colleagues and friends. A caregiver with several years of experience, and who watches four or less children at a time, is who I look for. The one caveat is that it has to be a person that will engage the child mentally, not just watch TV all day or let them go wild, as in William Golding's Lord of the Flies. I know there are good daycares nearby, like the Clayton Child Center at Oak Knoll Park, and many kids weather daycare just fine.

One more note: It really does "take a village to raise a child." Foster your female friendships. They will save your sanity.

I have been fortunate to have several after-school childcare options available to me. When my son first entered elementary school, he participated in an after-care program run by our local YMCA at our school. This program provided a structured, safe environment for my child and is still offered at our local schools.

As my child got older, I was looking for something a little different. Through word of mouth and recommendations by others, we found a wonderful neighbor who has been providing childcare in her home for 20 years now. This setting allows for more of a laid-back environment that has been great for my child. With his friends, who also attend, he can choose to play inside or outdoors, do homework, read or just chill out in a relaxed home setting.

I would gladly relive labor and delivery than have to go through the painful process of finding trustworthy, reliable and affordable childcare from scratch again.

When we had our first son, we had no friends with kids in the area, no references and no idea of what we were doing. Did we want in-home care? A larger facility? Could Troy work nights opposite my days so we could leave the strangers out of it? It was terrifying, and there were no drugs to make the pain (or the guilt) go away.

Luckily the company I worked for back then had recently added an Employee Assistance Program to our benefits package and one of the services was a report of licensed childcare providers in the area. That is how I learned that the going rate for these kinds of places was $250 a week—and this was 15 years ago!

After many interviews and countless calls to the names on this list, I found a place warm and homey enough to consider, and close enough to my office that I could slip out at lunch and still nurse. The small staff was very sweet and warm and when Evan came he fit right in. This worked until Ethan was born.

Due to some staffing changes we fell out of love with this center and left. One of the staff members left at the same time and watched the boys in our home and hers for a year or so until she found a better paying job. By that time, Evan was ready for preschool and Ethan was ready for a change.

I was at my wits end until I spoke with our Maplewood Richmond Heights Parents as Teachers educator, Ms. Juanita. She convinced me that if I just tried the I would love it, and she also knew a mom just five doors down my street who provided in-home care. So Evan attended one year of preschool and Ethan spent a couple years with Miss Becky before enrolling in preschool.

For Ellen (our third and final child), preschool was not an option. As much as we loved the early childhood center, financially it just didn’t work out for us at the time. 

We found a local lady through Parents as Teachers (again) who provided childcare in her home. She kept Ellen since she was an infant. Ellen was so happy and we were so comfortable that I’m not sure we would have moved her even if we could have afforded it. Ellen’s life before kindergarten was spent baking cookies and reading books and being totally spoiled by someone who thought, and still thinks, she can do little wrong. She happily and easily transitioned into kindergarten and has done well.

What this has taught me is that there is no one right answer. All three of my kids had different experiences, different amounts of preschool—and infant care—in different types of environments. Nobody seems to have suffered any permanent damage from their experiences. They all perform well in school. Even without two years of preschool, Ellen is reading and writing at the same level Ethan was at this point (even with his two years of preschool). And Evan did just as well with his one year.

I sometimes wonder if all my worry and fretting over the choices I made were necessary. In a way, it was all necessary because I made sure I explored every option I could find and my children’s lives were enriched by some wonderful ladies who are still a part of our lives. So even if it looks like I was performing some kind of child development science experiment, we all survived it because every decision was made with love and the desire to do the right thing, which are the two most important tools any parent can take on their journey through parenthood.

It’s been a while since I needed to find childcare for my kids—my children are now teenagers—but the memory of hunting down childcare is still fresh.

As a new mom I turned to the Child Daycare Association to find a good daycare provider. I think we interviewed at least a dozen providers before finding someone great for our daughter. When my daughter turned two, we had to find a preschool for her because the daycare provider was only licensed to care for children younger than two. But by then we had developed quite a network of friends who were also young parents.

Young parents are by nature generous. Sharing tips and information among friends is nothing compared to the loss of sleep endured for teething infants. Our friends steered us to Childgarden preschool for our daughter, and later Children’s Enrichment Center for our son.

The real litmus test of generosity was sharing limited childcare resources for emergencies like a sick child or the rare date night. Our friends truly rose to the occasion and pointed us to a childcare agency that specialized in sick child babysitters: TLC for Kids. And for date nights? Luckily our work with our church’s youth group gave us a ready pool of babysitters.

As time went by, we sought out babysitter leads from school principals. Getting names of babysitters was a continuous process because there’s a lot of movement in the group. A teen who babysits today is too busy to sit tomorrow and is off to college the day after. 

Now we’re the parents of teens who babysit. Well, one of them is too busy to babysit now. After all these years I can summarize my experience in two sentences:

• Always share childcare information with friends.
• Trust your gut.

If you missed our Moms Talk Q&A last week, we talked about how parents handle snow days. .