or4ngecrush

Hi Everyone,

I work in a Daycare/Nursery in Edinburgh and I was thinking about what daycare is like in Canada.

I want people to share their experiences good/bad with daycare in Canada?

All aspects; working in daycare, your own children in daycare, comparisons from the UK to Canada....or anything as you please

Anything you want to say please post here, it would be greatly appreciated

dbd33

I lived with a daycare teacher for years. She worked at the onsite daycare for the electricity utility here. Many of her friends also worked in the daycare. Some observations (based on Toronto):

- in Toronto daycare people drink a lot. They also smoke a lot of weed, something they say they need due to the parents with whom they have to deal. The daycare has "piss tests" but the same methods are used to circumvent them as we use for office work in the US.

- ten or so years ago the rules for daycare were changed and now one needs an ECE in order to work in one, maybe 20% of employees predate the requirement and aren't qualified; they're paid less.

- the daycare staff take their job very seriously which, in many cases is just as well as the parents don't seem to take being a parent very seriously. The daycare commonly had children a week old and had them for twelve hours a day.

-daycare is staggeringly expensive and, as a business, it seems to offer a tremendous profit margin. There is no way the parents (in two parent families) were financially better off by working and paying for daycare compared with staying home. Ten years ago the cost was $600-$800 month which was about what an employee was paid, that employee would be responsible for five children (actually ten children between two staff); granted the premises for a downtown facility are expensive but there's an unreasonable gap between pay and fees.

- languages are important. Perhaps a third of the parents did not have sufficient English to be able to discuss their child's needs; accordingly multilingualism was sought in the staff.

- you don't want to be on the late shift in a daycare, many parents are late and they're all angry because the fine for being late is quite stiff ($50/hour iirc). They take their anger out on the staff.

- cultural norms for child rearing vary widely. It is difficult to manage a group of children where the standards of behavior differ greatly. <he typed, nearly dying of political correction>

- the waiting list for daycares is such that one should register before getting an erection.

JulJul

Please, please, please tell us now you were joking. What you have said sounds horrible...Worse than in Ireland!

Judy in Calgary

When my kids were in before and after school care at a daycare centre in Calgary, 12 - 16 years ago, I was not aware of substance abuse amongst the staff. But who knows for sure?

I don't know what the deal is with that in Calgary. My impression, when my kids were in daycare, was that child care workers were required to be able to speak English, and that was about it. Several of the workers were from non-English speaking countries, and their English was a bit dodgy. But they were fluent enough to communicate with the kids about the basics of life.

I don't think I witnessed any cases of babies under six weeks of age being put in daycare, but eleven hours a day was pretty much the minimum daycare shift if a parent commuted into downtown for a fulltime job.

I stayed home till my younger son entered grade one. When I returned to the paid workforce, we only needed childcare before and after school. There was no way that my earnings as a secretary could have made up for fulltime daycare (and transportation to and from work and the smarter clothes that would have been required for work and so on).

Although fulltime daycare was too expensive for me to afford, daycare workers were notoriously poorly paid, and I understand they still are.

That was/is not the case in the quadrant of Calgary in which we lived/still live.

When my kids were in daycare, the late fee was a dollar a minute, so it worked out to $60/hour. That was 12 - 16 years ago. I don't know what it is now.

My husband and I tried to be good parents, honestly we did. Our efforts notwithstanding, our younger son was expelled from his daycare centre, and we had to find another one for him. There was a series of incidents leading up to his expulsion. The straw that broke the camel's back was that he instigated a strike against drinking the daycare centre's milk by telling his fellow charges that it was radio-active. Although I grant you our son was a hell raiser, I think his ability to wind up the staff members was at least partly attributable to the fact that they were foreigners with a limited grasp of English. When he switched to another daycare centre, the woman in charge was a New Zealander with a dynamite personality and a German woman with an excellent command of English. He got on very well with those two women, and behaved himself well in their daycare centre.

That is true in Calgary. I recently attended a baby shower (what do you call it in the UK? a stork party?). The expectant mother was ecstatic because she had secured a spot for this, her second child, in the same daycare centre as her first child.

To secure that spot, she had submitted her application form as soon as she received confirmation that she had conceived. The daycare centre would not accept an application until there was confirmation of conception. The woman had a positive pregnancy test on a Saturday, and submitted her application on the Monday morning. She did that even before her parents or parents-in-law knew she was pregnant.

A friend of hers had not been so lucky and had her second baby at a different daycare centre from her first child.

In Calgary there also are day homes, run by mothers who take in a few extra kids over and above their own kids. I understand they are more affordable than daycare centres. However, they vary in quality. I gather some of them are good, and some of them are bad. The thing is, how do you know how good or bad they are? There really isn't another pair of adult eyes checking.

Some couples choose the nanny route. It is an expensive way to go but, perhaps when you have two children, and all the more so when you have three children, it may be more feasible, overall, than a daycare centre. I have known nanny situations that have worked out well, both from the employers' points of view and from the nannies' points of view. I also have known nanny situations that have worked out badly, either for the employers or for the nannies. Some people make bad nannies, but by the same token some employers are exploitative, even abusive.

dbd33

No, I'm not joking. When I met Ms. Daycare I thought use of daycare was a bad thing, excusable only by poverty, but over the years I came to the view that, at least, the daycare staff were interested in the children so maybe it wasn't so bad.

dbd33

I didn't meet any daycare workers who had trouble with English, they were mostly from Ireland or Newfoundland, it was the parents and the children who often didn't speak English.

Long days are inevitable, I think. The place I knew was a workplace facility and so probably less bad in that regard.

A huge bone of contention among the staff was that "problem" children were subject to penalty fees; none of the extra fees went to the staff who had to deal with the children.

or4ngecrush

In Scotland all workers must be trained or going through training, new regulations and all the old managers now have to retrain too. Wages aren't great here either and the cost of living is very high in Edinburgh.

The Children here do long hours too and we can take babies only a few weeks old too. Some of the children do longer hours than me and I do more than I'm supposed too.


Same here, but people who don't earn as much they can get help from government.

Same too but that happens more in council nurseries

It happens here too but they dont get really angry most of them can afford the extra fees.

Ditto

Interesting, Thanks for the reply

Emma

or4ngecrush

Found this,

http://www.hfxnews.com/index.cfm?sid=20912&sc=89

apart from the recent drive by shooting in Dartmouth my new life looks great doesnt it.