Why is a raven like a writing desk?

Compared with feeding the toddler, feeding the preschooler is easy. Your preschooler wants to please you and wants to get better at all that he does - including eating. But in some ways, that makes feeding harder. You can get your preschooler to eat more, less, or different foods than he wants. But if you do, it will make him feel bad about eating. He will lose his pleasure in learning to eat the foods you eat. He will lose his ability to eat as much as he is hungry for and stop when he is full. He will, that is, provided he is a compliant child. If he is not so compliant, he will fight back and feeding will become a battle ground. Stow youragendas, make meals with food you enjoy, eat with him, and follow the division of responsibility in feeding. Then trust your preschooler manage his own eating

• Have 3 meals a day at set times and sit-down snacks at more-or-less set times. Say no to between-times food and beverage grazing - except for water.
• Sit down and eat with him, don’t just feed him. Be good company.
• Be family-friendly in your meal-planning, not by catering to your child, but by putting together meals that allow everyone to be successful.
• Let him serve himself and eat his way - fast or slow, much or little, 1 or 2 foods. Let him have more of any food (except dessert), even if he hasn’t cleaned his plate.
• Be realistic about table manners - he will use his fingers along with his silverware, and he will make less of a mess than he did earlier. Excuse him when he is done.

For more about feeding your preschooler (and for research backing up this advice), see Ellyn Satter’s Child of Mine; Feeding with Love and Good Sense, Bull Publishing, 2000. Also see www.EllynSatter.com to purchase books and to review comprehensive educational materials that teach stage-related feeding and solve feeding problems.

Many families are struggling to afford child care costs in this economy, and I have started to see parents get creative to pay for it. Parents will alternate their work schedules, have a relative provide part time care, or care in between child care hours. I have also started to see more and more part time enrollment than I have seen in the past. My program serves a wide variety of families, head start, best beginnings, foster care, and private pay families, and they have all started to get resourceful in how they pay for child care.

The ultimate conundrum is that parents need child care so that they can work, but they need to work so they can pay for their child care. The issue isn’t just that child care is “expensive”, it’s that nobody is making enough money, and the cost of everything is going up. While the first article seemed a little out there with some of the suggestions, something my program has done and loves to do are trades. We recently remodeled our classroom, and were lucky enough to have one parent who was an electrician and another parent who was a contractor. The job was easily finished in a weekend, and we traded a months tuition in leiu of paying for the labor.

Child care has a high overhead cost. A family friend of mine watched some seven kids in her home for some $30 a day. She wasn’t licensed, and was simply babysitting these kids for her friends and family members. Her initial costs of supplies were low as she already had her own children’s toys, and she made enough money to live as a single parent household.

In my program, we charge $33/day for a 10 hour day. This comes out to about $3.30 an hour. We are a nationally accredited facility (the only one in town), and with two providers, one has her Bachelors degree in Early Childhood Education, and I am working towards mine. We participate in the STARS to Quality field test, which requires a lot of monthly training and program changes. All of the money we spend on this is directly related to improving the quality of our program and is worth ever cent, however, it is costing a lot of out of pocket money from the business.

However, when you add that to the cost of nutritious meals (even with CACFP, grocery costs are rising high above the reimbursement rate) utility bills, and all the upkeep and supplies (art supplies alone!), $33 a day is far less than what is actually being put into each child per day.

As a staff member, I feel that tuition is not high enough! I am trained and certified, and am working towards my bachelor’s degree in early childhood education, but am barely being paid above minimum wage. I work a 50 hour work week on top of attending full time school, and my benefits consist of lots of hugs and kisses and using the company costco card when i grocery shop. A lot of parents see the “high” tuition, but in reality i’m struggling to buy new shoes and pay my rent every month.

Sending a child to a high quality preschool program truly is investing in their future. When you look at a child’s development and realize that the brain will develop more between the ages of 0-8 than it ever will in their entire life, is it not worth investing in their future? The way I see it is you could buy your child a video game system and a few $40 games a month, or send them to a high quality program where their development will be nurtured and stimulated. To me it’s worth the investment!

We recently had a mother pull her child because of a $1 tuition increase ($32 to $33 a day). but over the course of a year I watched this mother buy two new vehicles, take out a loan for breast implants, and dress her five year old in designer clothes. I’m not usually one to judge, but I had to wonder what was important to the modern family!

“that’s what I do in my room. Pretend I have a ghost husband.”

Okay who’s letting their five year old watch ghost?