Child Care
May 4, 2026
I am grateful for the gift of a new day.
My heart is filled with gratitude for the many blessings I have.
I will appreciate the small joys and express my thanks in all circumstances.
Let my attitude of gratitude bring joy to others.
I am grateful for good child care.
Good child care is really hard to find but, it is a godsend. The early years in a child’s life are so critical to his or her lifelong well being. Parents have to work to earn money or care for their families and rely on others to help them. Throughout history other people, family members, neighbors, and others have stepped up to raise other people’s children. There have been orphanges, child care centers, nurseries family members…devoted to raising children. So many books, fairy tales and stories like Heidi, Jane Eyre, David Copperfield, The Wizard of Oz, and the Secret Garden are about children who are cared for by others after parents died. Wealthy people hire nannies to care for their children. Mary Poppins is famous in literature, but Alison Cunningham was the real thing for Robert Louis Stevenson.
Robert Louis Stevenson
To Alison Cunningham
For the long nights you lay awake
And watched for my unworthy sake:
For your most comfortable hand
That led me through the uneven land:
For all the story-books you read:
For all the pains you comforted:
For all you pitied, all you bore,
In sad and happy days of yore:--
My second Mother, my first Wife,
The angel of my infant life--
From the sick child, now well and old,
Take, nurse, the little book you hold!
And grant it, Heaven, that all who read
May find as dear a nurse at need,
And every child who lists my rhyme,
In the bright, fireside, nursery clime,
May hear it in as kind a voice
As made my childish days rejoice!
R. L. S.
In previous generations, even in farm families, if a parent died, children were “adopted” by other families and became part of the working farm. My neighbor’s father and father-in-law were both raised by other farm families in the early 1900s after their mothers died. I can think about and times in my childhood when I felt neglected or unfairly treated, but that is nothing in comparison with being raised by people who may have no affection for you, a wicked stepmother or cruel patriarch. There are a whole lot of stories about that: Cinderella, Hansel and Gretel, Oliver Twist…
My mother born in 1929 grew up on a farm owned by her grandmother, Ida May Metzger, who lived until 1948. She had wonderful memories of her grandmother’s parenting style. Evidently she was famous for saying “Take Care!” when children were misbehaving. My mother’s parents weathered the Depression working on the farm. Her playmates were her cousins and all her aunts and uncles who lived in the community were integrally involved in raising her.
One of my older relatives was raised by her aunt. Her mother had died when she was born in the 1930s, and her father could not manage working and caring for his infant daughter and her older brother. Sometimes grandparents wind up raising their children’s children.
During my childhood in the 50s and 60s, I knew of several families, who had stay-at-home mothers. Those women kept house, made meals, and cared for the children. But many families did not have the luxury of being able to have a stay-at-home parent. Across the street, in our suburban community, the father had died of a debilitating disease when his children were young and for many years, before she remarried, they grew up in a single parent household.
When I was a preschooler, and my sisters were in kindergarten and first grade, my parents hired an older Italian woman, Mrs. Arata, who lived a few houses down from us in Columbus, Ohio. I don’t remember her husband ever being around. My mother was a high school math teacher. Mrs. Arata watched me during the days when my father and sisters were in school. My older sisters went to her house after school.
When we moved to Virginia, both my parents worked. The next door neighbor, Mrs. Fling, who had a daugher, Janet, one year younger than I was, watched me during the day before I went to first grade. My sisters came there after school. When my little sister was born, in 1962, she cared for her and we went to Mrs. Fling’s after school. Then her husband, got lung cancer and she has to get a job. He watched us after school for a couple years until he got too sick.
There were only a few times that my parents hired a babysitter. They just didn’t go out on dates. But I did a lot of babysitting when I became a teenager. I’d get booked for New Years Eve months in advance.
When we had kids in 1986, it was a struggle to find child care. I felt a lot of guilt about being a working mother. Even though my mother had worked, a lot of women my age felt the right thing to do was to be a stay-at-home mom. Women were selfish if they tried to “have it all.” We looked around for day cares and private homes, women who had their own children and watched other children, too to earn a little extra money. We finally chose a woman with two young children, Judy, to take care of our baby Charlotte. We dropped her off every morning and picked her up after work. I was always running late. But Charlotte was safe and seemed to be cared for.
As she got older, and Judy’s own children, started school, we were really impressed that Charlotte was so familiar with famous artists, Leonardo, Michelangelo,
Donatello, and Rapheal! What a wonderful experience she was getting! Little did we know at first it was the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Judy also made pine cone wreaths to sell at Christmas time and Charlotte accompanied her on her outings to gather pine cones.
When she was 4, we finally decided to enroll her in summer day camp at the Jewish Community Center and then she started preschool later in the summer. At the time I was working in southeast Columbus and I would drop her off in the morning and pick her up at the end of the day. It was a busy life.
Madeline was born in December 1990 and Stewart took care of her for a while when I returned to work. Then we sent her to Judy Caplan’s but she cried all day. It broke my heart. Charlotte started kindergarten in late summer 1991 and we took her to a neighbor, Velma, who watched children before and after school. It was an active house. We took Madeline there, for a couple weeks, but she cried and cried there, too.
We had a respite when my sister Lynda and her two children lived with us for several months. Charlotte was in school, but Madeline was able to stay home and play with her cousins.
I finally asked a friend, Shelly, who had quit her job in publishing with me when she had children, to watch Madeline. And Madeline seemed really happy there being with Shelly’s boys. She became very familiar with all the characters in Thomas the Tank.
When she turned 3, we enrolled her in the Jewish Community Center Day Care program, which had a “north side” branch. It was a great experience. In the summer she and Charlotte took a bus to the day camp.
Money was always an issue. Even then day care was expensive. We were lucky that by the time Madeline was in day care full time, Charlotte was in kindergarten. Day care expenses were a significant expense. I remember paying the Jewish Community Center $565 a month for one child. On the one hand, it’s really hard for working parents to come up with the money, but on the other hand, I always wanted day care providers to be paid well.
Like my parents I think there was only one or two times we had a babysitter. Because our kids were in daycare, we didn’t feel right about leaving them. It was a relief when the girls were old enough to come home on the bus after school and take care of themselves until we got home from work. We still had summer day camp expenses until they were too old for that.
When my little granddaughter, Juliette, was born in September 2023, I decided I would step up to provide day care for the first year of her life. I drove down to Columbus every day and structured my days to take advantage of all I had learned about early childhood education. We observed weather clues, chose a color of the day, read books, sang songs, inspected the backyard for changes in the cycles of plant life, took a daily long walk around the neighborhood, observed the people and workers in the neighborhood, counted train cars, identified birds and flowers, explored sounds, forces and motion, whatever I could think of. When she started daycare after a year, she was ready and loves it.
My second granddaugher, Lulu, was born on December 29 and Charlotte has just started back to work. I’ll be providing day care for her as long as her parents want me to. My schedule with my shop is very flexible and my friend John helps me get packages out every day. I’ve been exercising, and am happy that I am physically able to provide the needed care. I can get up and down from the floor and maneuver the stroller up and down stairs and hills. It’s a win win!
Day care for a 2 and a half year old is about $1700 a month. Infant care is more expensive. I really don’t know how we could have afforded that cost for one child, let alone two.
Stewart worked on a project years ago studying birth rates in different countries. In agrarian cultures, the birth rates are much higher than in industrialized cultures. Part of that is that children live on the farm and become part of the life and work of the farm. Historically many children did not survive into adulthood, so having a lot of children was very desirable. In industrialized cultures in which parents have to work, the birth rates are typically much lower. Part of this is the cost of child care but also the amount of time and effort parents have to raise their children. It is a whole lot of work to take care of a child. It’s a full time job!
I’m so grateful for good child care. It’s so incredibly important.