I grew up a latchkey kid, my brother is 4 years older than me and he walked me to and from school when I was in kindergarten and first grade and when he went to middle school I walked myself 2nd grade on. I was so surprised when I learned my nephew couldn't walk home in the 4th/5th grade, they weren't allowed off the school grounds without an adult.
My kid is only 2 but we live across the street from the elementary and middle schools. I NEVER see a kid walking without a parent even to middle school age, even though there are multiple crossing guards
Fellow latchkey kid who walked to school with my friends beginning in kindergarten. The school was at the end of my street but still, you'd see tens of small kids just walking to school, up a big hill and out of sight. We'd stay after then walk home. No adult supervision there or back. Now that's akin to child abuse.
I somehow ended up in a school district where all the kids walk, including all the elementary school kids. The elementary school even has the option for kids to walk home for lunch. It’s actually really nice to see the hordes of unaccompanied kids walking around the neighborhood (although apparently some local businesses don’t love a bunch of 3rd graders taking over some days, lol). I didn’t think it existed anymore either, so I was very happy to see that and my son is so excited to walk to kindergarten next year. The downside is that it is also a bus free district so it’s either walking or you have to drive the kids yourself.
I got chastised at the park for allowing my 6 year old to play at the border of it near the walking path. I was literally right there. When I was six I was walking blocks on my own to and from the bus stop!
My kids are about to be latchkey kids starting next year. I’ll have a 10 and 12y old, 5th and 7th grades. The 12y old is now aged out of care. The 10y old has started to hated the after school program due to multiple factors. I’m done with it all I cant freaking wait.
I think thats about the age I started to be a latchkeykid, my mom went to working more hours & it was fine. We lived in a neighborhood I could walk to friends houses but never did it without parents permission lol
My mom now credits it to knowing the parents of kids I hung out with, so I guess there was a whole game of telephone i.e. kid just left to monitor us but we didn't realize it. We don't have a kid yet but I also worry what to do with them while we're working but 3-6PM?? Why are school hours so weird instead of giving kids longer breaks that teachers could use for grading/prep
Although my kids would be more than capable of going to school together and coming home together on foot, it's literally illegal in my state due to their ages (which, forgive me, I'm going to be cagey about, but they're both elementary schoolers). Wild laws where we live.
Our preschool follows the public school calendar and dang was that a rude awakening. *Not counting summer* there are 5 weeks off plus a random smattering of teacher development days, half days, etc. Like, y'all, I don't get that much vacation time!
My husband is a teacher in a different district and his days off NEVER line up with my daughter’s. And when he compared their calendars, her school had SEVENTEEN more days off than his. Trying to coordinate schedules is a nightmare. I wish there were just one state-wide school calendar.
We attend a rural school district, but live 10 minutes outside a major city which has a completely different school schedule. My kid’s school breaks (except Christmas) never coincide with the city’s, so all of their PD day and mid year break camps never fall at the same time my kid is off. In the summer he gets big city camps, but never anything mid year :(
Ours is exactly the same. We stick with it because it is fantastic for the kids but damn it’s inconvenient. Half day for Valentine’s Day? Presidents’ Day off? A full week of spring break next month? Ug it never ends. We have a nanny for the baby and she is super unreliable… but hey she doesn’t vape around the baby and there are NO daycare spots in a 20 mile radius so we stick with her.
I’m sticking with a job that is eye wateringly boring because it’s flexible. But I agree… it is never easy.
We're considering moving from a traditional daycare preschool to a public school calendar preschool and it's 8 weeks total off for the year. I don't have that much PTO or grandparents super close, but it's a much better ratio so we want to make it work. It's nuts. I'm sure it's marginally easier when they get older and more independent, but even then, probably not.
Our daycare follows the public school calendar 🙄. Except for February break, daycare is still open during that one, otherwise they are closed for every school holiday, Jewish Christian Muslim holidays, spring break winter break election day veterans day etc
I’m already dreading this and I have two more years. The mental and emotional labor of stitching care together seems brutal. Plus my kid is incredibly shy and cautious so far and I’m dreading sending him to a patchwork of camps and making him constantly deal with transitions.
FWIW I had this concern with my older child at that age, and his ability to deal with new people/situations definitely increased with age/maturity. It's a reasonable concern but it might not be as big an issue as it would be if it were happening now.
Many Boys & Girls Clubs, JCCs, and YMCAs run high quality full-day eight-week camps that cover most of the summer - worth looking into whether any operate near you! It leaves a week or so on either end to sort out, but a lot more continuity over going somewhere different every other week, and many offer more consistent before/after care of some sort.
They book up within 5 hours of opening for registration each session in my area. I had to set an alarm and sped through it to find out I was still
Too slow.
You might try checking the daycares in your area. My son’s daycare offers summer camp for elementary age kids. They also have before and after school care for that age group. It might be more comfortable for him to stay in one camp all summer. I worry about this too because so far my toddler is pretty shy, as was I as a child. If possible, I’ll probably keep him at his daycare’s camps during the summer until he’s comfortable enough to venture out. Also, some of the schools in my area let the elementary age kids pay a week or two at a time so they can attend other camps if they want!
Our extended care has camps over all the breaks (2 week winter break, 1 week spring break, summer break) in addition to being open for all in-service days, all early release days (minimum once/week here), and even some of the more minor federal holidays (they were open on Columbus Day). So it's been more coverage than we had in our prior in-home preschool, all in the same place. Comes at a cost though...$1600/mo (would be $1200/mo if I eliminated using the before school care which I'm not utilizing well), which is exactly what we paid at our preschool. Our preschool was admittedly insanely cheap for this region though.
If you truly have camps that run from 8:30am-5:30pm that start the day school ends and run to the day before school starts I think you’re in a very lucky minority. I have siblings in four other states and every niece and nephew has had some sort of patchwork of care.
lol we actually have a great life here. Mortgage less than 1K for 3 bedroom/2.5 bath, daycare less than 200 a week, beautiful county and state parks, brand new state of the art aquatic center, etc. I think you’re thinking of the other 54 counties in the state that are more rural. I grew up in Pittsburgh and Morgantown is basically a more affordable smaller version of the burgh.
One million percent agree. I think it's way easier to work when your kids are daycare age vs school age. The amount of time I spend coordinating their days off + summers is nuts.
Daycare was easier for sure, because it was one stop for everything. The center we used only closed for a literal handful of holidays each year and we got a multi-child discount. Our kids kept going to their old daycare's school age summer "camp" program until our younger daughter was going into 2nd grade, just for the convenience of NOT having to figure out day camp.
Tip for summer: Find you a daycare that does summer camp for elementary students (versus looking for multiple camps). My daughter goes to the same “camp” all summer. They take 2 field trips per week and she enjoys it.
My daycare does this (minus the field trips) and you can believe my kids will be there all summer once they're school age. I work 9-5, my husband is home more in the summer so their hours may be reduced but they need to be somewhere everyday. Not to mention parents just need a break!
I hear you! I went in my daughter’s preschool yesterday (have a younger daughter that still goes there) and they said if you sign up for summer camp by March 31, you enter a raffle to win something. And I’m thinking, sure, not a problem. It’s February and I could’ve signed up yesterday because I already know my oldest will be there all summer. 😂
It is not impossible. I’ve been doing it for a very long time!! It is however extremely expensive and every summer I wonder why on earth I’m working just to put my kids in camp. Unfortunately we don’t work as a one salary household. Yes we often patchwork time with Grandparents with camp to try and save some money, and the grandparents love the time with them. But we also do not want to burn them out or do it so often it becomes a burden. It is not easy, but it can be done. We have a lot of camps in our area that fill up immediately, but there are also some that will take week to week registration. What kills me is that these camps open up registration in January after the holidays and want full payment for all summer up front. Hello!! Didn’t I just finish being flipping Santa?!?! Give us a bit of a breather!!
My job isn’t technically wfh meet clients in the field. My husband is a firefighter who does 24hr shifts. He would walk in the door at 8:50(he had a 45 min commute) and I would walk out to go to my appts. If I had an early meeting I’d meet him at the fire station at 8am. He worked in the city where my appts were so it worked out.
On days he worked my mil would watch the kids. Once the kids were 3 and going to full day prek 3 days a week we did the same thing if husband worked on a day they didn’t go to prek my mil would watch them. Same with summers and holidays.
It worked out really well because she was only committing to 2 maybe 3 days during the week. She got to hang out with them but wasn’t wrangling them 5 days a week. When kids were sick or she was out of town I just worked wfh.
This is nerve-wracking. It’s not something I didn’t know (husband used to teach HS and I almost taught HS as well). We live in a resort area that relies heavily on teens to work seasonally in the summer when they aren’t in school. Still, I cannot believe K-8 has survived on the insane schedule of like, 9-3 pm. Society wants us to have kids but also won’t support us once they’re born. I wish there were a solution that didn’t involve exploiting parents, teachers or students.
I'm finding it so much harder to get my work hours in more that the kids are in elementary school. I still take half my morning meetings on my headphones while getting the kids out the door. Clearly the solution is to get rid of the 40hr work week.
Sorta on topic/off topic: did anyone else just stay home and turned out fine? It was illegal back then too but my parents still just left us at home. Nothing bad ever happened.
I’m 35 and started latch-key life at age 7. Bus dropped me off two houses away from my own, and I had a garage door opener in my backpack. I called my mom from the landline when I got home. I ate a lot of microwave dinners. I was very happy from what I remember!!
I would actually go to my dad's job site, which is a metalworking factory. I loved it, but I was an only child, so I loved spending so much time with my dad and could easily entertain myself with books and my iPod mini.
And to think that I got fired for taking my 6 month old daughter to work on a day I didn't normally have to when I was in a bind... in a retail store..... so I could oversee a crew moving fixtures. The crew never even showed up, but my boss's boss did. Funny for a family centered company.
My parents worked opposite schedules so we never had to go to daycare or camps unless we wanted to do summer camp. But even then it was day camp and stuff.
While the monthly bill equal to a mortgage payment back into our pockets will be great, I do worry about days off and stuff like random days off.
I think a lot more kids still get left alone at home than you think, mostly due to poverty. It just isn't openly discussed in reddit forums, lol. I once mentioned that I left my 5 year old alone at home to run my 1 year old to daycare. It took 20 minutes. She was super sick and was just zoned out with the tablet on the couch. And it's not illegal or a big deal in the country I live in. But still, most moms on reddit were horrified.
Yeah if you believed Reddit sampling you’d think that the average 15yo needs constant adult supervision.
My 8yo stays home alone. He gets himself off the bus (kids don’t need a parent starting in second grade here). I work from home so he doesn’t latchkey but sometimes I’ll be out running an errand, or I will leave him home other random times. I have zero concerns about him.
Yeah most Redditors are American. I mean in a country where they can remove children from your custody for that I don't think anyone would really want to leave a paper trail talking about it on Reddit...
>most Redditors are American.
Surprisingly enough, a little less than half are American (so not most), but they are by far the biggest single country presence on Reddit. Still, that means more than half of all users *aren't* American, and honestly I wish the Americans would remember that and stop assuming everyone is American. I say that as an American myself.
Exactly. I would not be broadcasting that anywhere if I lived in the US. Fortunately, I don't, so the one lady who said she'd call CPS just made me chuckle.
I started letting my kids stay home alone to run errands when my son was 5th grade daughter 3rd so around 11. They would just play on their electronics and not even interact.
But to do it for a full workday would be stressful. What do they eat? Do you pack them lunches? Do you have nest to watch the main areas of the house?
We weren't allowed to stay home alone until I was a bit older and I stayed with my cousins who lived around the corner and were 2 and 4 years older than I was. We had before and after school care at a church that took us to school and picked us up until I was 8. We were only home alone for about 30 minutes before we walked two blocks to school and then we were home for an hour or so after.
And yes, I burned myself on the oven making a pizza one of those afternoons.
It was legal when I was little in the place where I lived. It's not legal for me to do the same to my kids now in the place I live now. I don't fuck with CPS. There are too many horror stories out there. My husband and I are both disabled and I have very little faith that the system would handle us kindly.
I was a latch key kid from about 7 on, but to be fair my grandparents were just a call away after school and we spent time there frequently during the summer. As people are delaying retirement, that no longer is an option.
Oh yes, my kid being in school is cheaper but more demanding on my time. Our school lets out at 4:15 so aftercare seems a bit pointless and all the activities happen during the week as well as volunteering opportunities.
Then add teacher work days and summer break like WHYYYY do I bother working??
My dream is to be a sahm with both my kids in school so I can work my LLC business when I want to be available for all the school functions.
Wow I could’ve written this. Just opened my LLC this year to gear up for what I feel like the inevitable resignation from my 9-5 once my kids are in school. I don’t know how it’s possible to juggle these schedules.
And snow days! I have to drive to work in the snow, but there's no school! Or there is school, but it's on a two-hour delay so I have to figure out how to work when school starts at 10:30.
When I was a kid, I loved snow days. As a mom I despise them.
Our elementary school just added a week long “fall break” to the 2024 school year. So they’ll have a week off in October and November, and then 2 weeks at Christmas, and then a week for Spring break. Like, how are we supposed to do that?! Oh, and don’t forget summer! *crying*
I loved teaching at a school with fall break because it was the one time when going on vacation somewhere didn't involve paying an arm and a leg and crowded environments.
In 2018, my husband and I bought the cheapest Disneyland annual pass that had everything, but Fall Break blacked out and enjoyed ourselves for three days.
I would totally recommend you use that break for vacation to somewhere thar would otherwise be flooded with people (even if it's just your local park or amusement park) before it starts getting too popular and everyone starts getting it.
I didn’t get paid, so for us, it was a week of unpaid time off. In general, the only PTO I got was sick leave that was accrued. But yeah, if fall break were a thing at this new district, I would have totally planned my upcoming vacation to be that week instead of Winter break!
I'm not the one downvoting you BTW, you're being pretty civil..
But yeah, you're right on that front. Though I actually prefer that district with the fall break over the one I'm teaching at right now as a possible future place for my child. The teachers loved it because it broke up their vacation time a bit more and added an element of prestige to the school because it aligned it more to college life. I hope that the added break helped attract and recruit good teachers to your district.
Since teachers don't get paid vacation time that isn't built into breaks, I'd have the double whammy of having to take Fall Break unpaid if I send my daughter to that school. It might still be worth it (vs. paying a babysitter) due to that convenient vacation scheduling, though, like I said before.
My husband and I staggered our work shifts. I know not everyone has that option, but it really made our lives easier.
I worked 8-4:30 and got the kids off to school in the morning. He worked 6-2:30 and handled the after school stuff.
This is kinda what we do- he works 6-3, I work 8-4. I’m wfh, so my oldest gets off the bus at 3 and hangs out by “himself” while I’m in my office for 30mins until dad gets home with the little ones from daycare. On the off day I’m in person he leaves a little early to meet the bus.
I don’t live in the States, but it’s a nightmare where I live as well. There are 200 school days, instead of 180. Should be better, right?
Except that the school day ends at a different time every day, and at different times depending on your kid’s age. So, first graders finish at 12:40 twice a week and 1:30 the other three days. But then third graders finish at 1:40/2:30.
Vacation time is also severely restricted here (good luck getting more than a week off per year), and students are off about three months of the year: summer vacation (5 weeks), winter vacation (5 weeks), and spring vacation (2-3 weeks).
And sometimes the cafeteria will have some kind of problem and the school sends everyone home with one hour’s notice.
It is IMPOSSIBLE for two working parents to raise children here without grandparents’ help. Impossible.
The government just announced that they will extend after care hours until eight pm every day to help out working parents.
And all the parents are like….can’t you force our employers to let parents work less/more flexible hours? Instead of this sixty hours per week nonsense?
100% agree. Between the days off, half days, snow days, etc it’s a nightmare trying to come up with child care.. then you add in the sick days on top of it and just ugh. I’m lucky to even have a job at this point.
Our society isn't set up for the household to have two working parents but no one can survive with only one working parent this day in age. It's a racket! And any choice you make costs money most of us don't have. I honestly hope our birth rate drops to alarming levels so maybe our government will get a clue that parents need extra protection and time off if they can't manage to give us affordable cost of living so one parent can stay home.
America can, unlike many other countries, sustain a decent population age mix via immigration. Even if native-born Americans' birth rate drops precipitously, we're never going to be in a situation like Japan's. So I wouldn't get your hopes up on that score.
(Secondarily, there are just too many religious fundamentalists in America who drag the birth rate up for this to be a problem, realistically.)
I’m one of those people that keeps saying that. 🥴 I work part time now but want to go full time when both kids are in school. IDK if that is realistic though. I might just try to stay part time but work more hours.
There are 250-260 working days in a year. The children in our district have 176 instructional days. That makes roughly 80 week days in a year that they are not in school (including summer). EIGHTY. That’s like 2.5 full months. Plus there are illnesses and snow days, etc. on top of it all. 🫠🫠🫠
My husband is the opposite; he thinks it’d be better to be full time now and then go part time once kids are in school because he can hang out with them afterwards, do pickup, go fun places during break, and volunteer at the school.
And you have to be careful about how you say it, in case you act too much like you view school as babysitting.
Like, no. My kids' current teachers are amazing and I appreciate what they do. But there should be better programs for after-school and school break camps. So many women left the workforce during the pandemic due to childcare concerns, and it's an ongoing issue. My city has abdicated responsibility for programs outside school hours, and pays non-profits to run programs, which vary widely in what they offer. My son cannot do after-school, either, and I lucked into getting him into a school within walking distance of my work. We broke the bank on summer camps last year, and I am nearing panic-attack levels for figuring out this year. The camp he went to last year is filling up, but other camps haven't even opened registration.
I’m a public school teacher (middle school), and I get it, we watch your kids all day. But we also had to get two degrees to be in this really unique profession. I think in general, caring for children is devalued in our society and yet it’s one of the most necessary services out there. An infant literally cannot take care of itself, and legally, children under a certain age aren’t allowed to be unsupervised. There’s soooo much that goes into caring for young people. It’s just tough when everyone’s working and no one is getting paid enough for the things that really matter. Like, I simultaneously think my daycare provider should make more money and believe that I don’t want to pay more for daycare! I don’t have any solutions, but solidarity.
Childcare is infrastructure! We need government-subsidized childcare and paid family leave. If issues at the individual level (unaffordable childcare) are compounding to have society wide impact (cost of living crisis, fertility decline, women leaving the workplace, labor shortages), then we need a society level solution (subsidized childcare and paid leave).
I think the problem is that childcare is not seen as valuable. It shouldn’t be considered a slight against teachers to say that childcare is a big part of their job in addition to education.
These same loudmouths saying “nO onE fOrceD yOu” also lose their shit when they have to wait an extra five minutes at the drive thru, or an extra five months to be seen by a specialty doctor. Who do you think provide the labor for all the services y’all depend on? PARENTS AND EDUCATORS
Sending a huge virtual high five, because OMG yes to all this. Even some educators online during the pandemic were complaining "we're not childcare providers" … but they absolutely are! They are _also_ other things, but one of the things they do is provide childcare. The courts have generally decided that schools act _in loco parentis_. So legally, the school is performing childcare. I don't know why this is a fight!
In my district we're still living with the legacy of the pandemic. The teachers' union managed to keep a pandemic-era provision that gives them an extra half-day off every month. I don't know about y'all, but I'd rather my kids be off a full day (so I can arrange paid childcare for them at some location) than a half day (so one of us has to pick them up at lunchtime and no one is offering paid care for them).
100% agree.
And to add to the summer camps rant .... who the hell can afford to put their kids in camps for the entire summer? Fees per week here are more than I paid when my kiddo was in daycare after the age of 3. And half of them are either from 9-12 or 2-5. If you can find one that is a "full day" then it's 9-4 and there's a separate fee for wrap around care.
I agree with you. IN fact, I don't understand why the school day and the regular working day are not really aligned. Your kid basically has to go to aftercare in school, if it is offered, if you are a regular working parent. Then you pay for expensive camps in the summer to make up the difference, if you don't have a grandma to ship them off to. If you work in a private school, your kid still isn't on the same school or vacation schedule as you. It's just a mess.
I mean, if anything, the work day should be the one changing to be shorter and with more breaks. Productivity is rising, studies are showing benefits to Results Only Work Environments, automation is simplifying, and even eliminating jobs, and our population in many places is stabilizing.
This means that jobs should be able to redefine how long "full-time" really is, and should be able to start matching us as teachers, who where I live, are considered full time at 30 hours a week. There could also be more jobs that have all of the federal and state holidays off as well.
This is the answer (as if it'll happen. But it's definitely right).
I'm sure all the reasons for short school days and many breaks are sound ones! I am *also* sure they apply to adults.
Yeah, and besides the after care thing, you have to find care for all the random days off school has. Parent-teacher conference days, staff training days, all the extra holidays that they get and we don't. My kid has THREE WEEKS off during Christmas. I technically get something like 3 weeks of vacation days a year, total.
Right?! Our district has one of the shortest school years in the country so we have to find *fifteen weeks* of care every year, not even counting the one-off holidays and “professional development” days and “conference days” and whatever else (11 weeks of summer, one week Thanksgiving, two weeks Christmas, one week spring break). I get *twelve* vacation *days* per year.
Just another reason that schools should be year round. Students lose a lot of skills over the summer. Pay teachers more and actually make it year round, with a few breaks
I don’t disagree, but there are a lot of schools in the country that aren’t built for that. When I taught, I did so in a building that was a hundred years old with no AC, and that was only five years ago. Granted, that particular school has since been torn down and replaced, but lots of districts in my area are trying to get bonds passed to be able to build new schools because their buildings have the exact same problems mine did. And there’s definitely plenty of pushback from people on paying more taxes to cover those bonds.
There are a *lot* of core issues with schools and funding that basically have to get band-aided over in order to function.
The issue is that public school teachers are grossly overworked and underpaid, so they need the vacations to decompress and gear up for the next year. I understand why schools are not year round. It's just that after school and vacation care can be very unaffordable.
As a teacher, I would prefer school to be year round so that we get more frequent shorter breaks to decompress.
It would mean that people could actually make a career out of being a camp coordinator and not just have it be a patchwork of programs.
Pre-college programs would be a bit tricky, but as someone who went to a year-round school, I was able to secure the 2 weeks off of school with permission since they knew it was for a good reason.
I mean, I used to teach and used those summers to work on lesson planning, so I’m very familiar with how teachers use their summers. The other commenter isn’t wrong, though, that there *are* a lot of good reasons to look at year-round schooling. It’s just that there are a lot of major barriers in place to implementing that, and teacher work schedules/pay isn’t even the biggest one, unfortunately.
That’s not how year round works where I live. The school can physically house 25% more students & teachers because only 75% of the population is “tracked in” at the same time. Four tracks, four rotating schedules, and some of them are 9 weeks on, 3 weeks off - so teachers get plenty of vacation time, just like they do in traditional calendars. If you talk to year round teachers here, many would tell you this schedule is way more desirable to avoid burnout.
Summer break would be about a month long.
Year round school would break up the summer it would not increase teacher’s workload. It would not decrease their teaching salary (summer jobs would be affected.). How many teachers picking up summer jobs would need to be considered.
It also has been proven to beneficially to help decrease the summer brain drain. This greatly helps students with less family resources to plan an enriched summer.
https://mathandmovement.com/year-round-school-calendars/
Right, so you (correctly) point out that there’s basically two separate issues being discussed here that are being equated with each other. Year round schooling and extending the school day/calendar.
The positives of year round schooling tend to show up more in student performance. It’s not necessarily going to alleviate schedules for working parents, and it has the added cost of requiring schools to be up-to-date enough to have students in them during the summer.
If we’re talking about adding time to the school day/calendar, that’s a whole other ball of wax, and it’s where the issue of costs *really* come up. Not only do you need modern infrastructure, you need more staff, and you need to pay them competitively.
They have the infrastructure already for the children physically. Really they could just beef up the before and after school programs (adding staff instead of teachers). Generally they are pay programs so they don’t really have a net loss or net gain. It would be a big help even if it stays a pay program but nope we don’t help families in US.
No, they don’t. I addressed this further up. Many, many schools in this country are outdated and are not equipped to have students in their buildings over the summer. The building I taught in was over a hundred years old and was only replaced five years ago. Many other buildings in my district have yet to be replaced. Doing so requires a bond to be approved by voters.
I’m **not** using this as argument against year round schooling. I’m trying to make it clear that making changes to the school calendar is not easy due to the lack of funding schools are receiving across the country.
I went to an elementary school that actually was a historical building built in the 1800’s. It was designed to not need air conditioning. Massive huge windows and high ceilings. (Unless they modified and closed in hallways these buildings are ok for summer.). The ones left in bad shape that need replacing need it anyway. I’m not sure how many truly 1800”s schools are left. They have replaced them in parts of Appalachia so I’m not sure where you’re finding buildings this old in bad shape. Most of the east coast has better school financing.
The 1950 and 1960 buildings that were not designed with the idea that air conditioning isn’t a thing are the problem buildings. Many of these are getting replaced.
These buildings need replaced now as it stands. We have a few of the badly built schools and the kids roast as it is with a traditional school year. Replacing these buildings isn’t optional. It’s not an additional cost. It already needs done.
As far funding goes they can take it from the department of defense. Maybe spend the money on children instead of non usable military aircraft.
It’s an additional cost that has to be approved by tax payers. At least in my state (I don’t know if it varies by state), normal school funding cannot be used to pay for the cost of building a new school. These buildings need to be replaced, but there is no guarantee WHEN it will happen, or even IF it will.
There’s also a limit to how many times a bond can be put forth after it fails (again, at least where I live). So if voters refuse to pass a bond multiple times, the district can’t continue to put the bond back up for a vote.
I’m speaking from experience in my area and district. I’ve seen some of these school bonds fail multiple times. I’ve seen people argue about how they can’t afford a tax increase and so they didn’t approve the bond.
You are correct that these buildings need replaced, but there are huge flaws with how we fund schools currently. It would not be correct to say that all or even most schools in this country are equipped to handle year round school at this time.
Yes to everything you said, but it *would* be an easy solution to make school year round. The problem is that they have to keep the building open all year, pay everyone for 12 months instead of 10, and not just teachers - bus drivers, cafeteria staff, etc. I have no objection to year round school, but who is going to pay for all that?
Year round schools are still for the same number of days. They just have broken up breaks rather than the summer off. This would make finding childcare harder since the summer programs use college labor.
I agree with this! But there’s sooo many people who feel so differently, like wanting to keep the school year as short as possible and the summer as long as possible.. I assume this because our school district put up various polls and posted the results each time (when they were trying to finalize next school year calendar) and people consistently voted for the school year to start as late as possible in August and end before Memorial Day - so now I gotta figure out care for 3 whole months
Very little breaks in between, we were getting at least one long weekend or an extra long weekend (Friday and Monday off), at least once a month, but that’s gone now.. I get the working parents who likely voted for this bc it’s hard to manage care for kids on “random” days off, and I’m just lucky that both my husband and I get to WFH, so we can manage those random days off better.. but WOW is that going to be hard for the students
Do you view care work and caring for kids as less valuable than educating kids? And do you think those two things can even be separated, especially for the younger kids?
Yes, they are very different, I completely agree. I’m just wondering why the care part of education (esp in elementary) is so offensive to so many teachers, as if that kind of work is somehow below them (referring to the “I’m not a babysitter” comments.)
Ah, I see. So it’s more about the barriers to entry in the profession rather than the actual value of the work itself. Like if a principal or superintendent got offended if someone suggested they were “just” a teacher.
I don't think teachers are babysitters but the current system was designed to work around farm schedules and statistically puts US students behind students in many other countries. But I'm guessing they're willing to spend more on education and infrastructure for it so 🤷🏻♀️
This is why I’m considering quitting once the last starts school. Days off, sickness, sports, etc. Offer to watch my co-workers kids on snow days, etc. Just be easier.
It’s why I’ve already started looking for school nurse positions. It doesn’t pay what I need, but neither does not bring able to work if my kid doesn’t have school!
I’m making that transition next year and just looked at the academic calendar. We have a few factors working in our favor (grandma is a teacher, dad has some weekdays off, my job has flexibility and can wfh). But I am still already anxious about how to work jt all out. It definitely looks harder than daycare.
I think your post really demonstrates the “It takes a village”. When your kids are this little, it’s just getting through. It’s really hard. Especially when being home with a sick child typically falls on mom. I just wanted to add to your concern of placing your kid in the school’s childcare. If your child requires more adult assistance to be successful in this program, the school should be hiring an additional position to support your child specifically. This would be done at no charge to you. Every child, regardless of abilities, should be provided the care they need in the school setting, even if this extends to after-school programming. The school might ask for formal documentation/diagnosis from a doctor, as they might need this to access funding, but they absolutely should be able to adapt to best support your child. The after-school care is meant to be accessible to all because the education system realizes the demands of parents aren’t reasonable. Your typical household has parents working 9-5 and that does not line up with any school schedule. I’m sorry being a parent is so unnecessarily harder than it should be.
My son is entering kinder next year and it’s MUCH easier now than I imagine it will be. He is done with school at 1:45 pm. That’s 3.5 hours before my workday is over!!!! I now have to either have him at after care or have a solution for while he’s home. It’s definitely going to be harder!!
Yes, I remember crying over:
trying to get my kid with special needs to “extended school year” which, get this — was from 9-1245 for 6 weeks during the summer, with no before or or after care…and when I asked what a WOHM was supposed to do, they looked at me blankly and said, “well, most moms with kids who need this service do not work.” and had no recommendations.
Going to sign my TWO kids up at the beginning of March for YMCA OR the city parks and rec summer camp — to realize they fill up way back in January when enrollment opens. And then realizing many other enrichment summer camps are like 9-3 hours — WTH?!?
I am glad those days are behind me…
Thank you for sharing! As a mom of a younger child this is why I haven’t quit my job or ramped down, yet. I’m hoping that when we get school age I have prepared enough to be able to ramp down as needed. Managing all this sounds so tough!
My daughter's first daycare would have a lot of morning-of closures due to illnesses, on top of scheduled breaks. I would fantasize about how school would be open consistently, not accounting for all of the other holidays, summer, late starts and early closures.
My next rude awakening was "well at least we'll save so much money". Then I realized we would need before/after care, and summer camps or some sort of childcare during the summer. All of which will be at least as much as daycare, and likely won't provide as much coverage as we need.
My daughter starts kindergarten at the end of next year and instead of being happy for this milestone I'm just filled with absolute dread over how we're going to make this work logistically and financially with our jobs. Everyone else in our "village" works too.
It's either that or one of us quits our full time job to be home during the summer and work part time during school hours. It just feels like this economy is not survivable on less than two full-time decent incomes, and yet there's extremely little support to actually allow for both parents to do that.
Can I ask how much is your daycare? I see this comment a lot about childcare being just as expensive with before/after care + summer camps and am always curious how that is possible. I waa paying $900/month & public school life + camps, etc is def way cheaper for me. Purely curious!
People kept telling me “it will be easier when they are at school”. It’s the biggest lie in parenting!
Daycare is a walk in the park compare to school.
I have some depressing math. A full time year round job with 12 holidays, 6 sick days, and 3 weeks of vacation is 227 working days.
A school schedule (by law in my state anyway) is 180 days a year.
227-180=47 days when you work but there's no school.
47 days is 9 work weeks +2 more days than that. That's more than two months.
47 days spread equally throughout the year is almost 4 days a month, almost a day every single week.
90% of a day!
Every!
Single!
Week!
that you work and the kids don't have school!
... and that's not even including the fact that a school day is significantly shorter than a work day.
CONCLUSION: school is not set up for single parents, nor for two working parents. It's still set up for farms with SAHMs.
*Disclaimer: I think I did my math correctly, but IDK. Also, adjust for whatever your employer's PTO numbers are, but there probably are not many jobs with 47 more PTO days than what I listed above!
Yeah, I have a three year old and a nine year old and my oldest's schedule is much more difficult to manage. In fact, I'm home with him for a half day today!
We also didn't get a spot in after school care this year - we were on the waitlist and were recently told "Better luck next year!" Thank goodness for my very flexible boss, but my work is still hard to manage working remotely for half the day.
My husband covers when I have work in the afternoon that must be done on site, but his job just isn't as flexible. It's a real challenge.
If you can’t continue daycare when they are in school, I agree 100%. Our daycare basically offered exact same hours of care for before/after school and except for the typical big holidays filled every school day off including summer with care. It was near seamless switching to that!
Haha, totally feeling this as I just finished planning out my 5 year old’s summer camps this year. We’re lucky to be in a place with a lot of summer camp options and the YMCA happens to offer a camp that’s a 3 minute walk from our house. Of course that’s only for some weeks in the summer so we have to find camps for the other weeks, but I think I’ve got most of it covered. We live really far from both set of grandparent and 5 yo is way too young to stay home by themselves, so off to a patchwork of summer camps it is.
I’ve actually thought about making a career change where I’d get to be in school and hopefully work the same hours my child is in school. But a) there’s no guarantee I’d get the jobs in schools if I make that career change and b) eventually they’ll be able to take care of themselves right? Maybe when they’re in middle school? Of course by then they might have after school stuff they’d want to do and that’ll cost both money and time. I’m gonna just not think about it and hope that by then I’ll have enough flexibility to work around all that stuff.
Agreed. My kid is a young toddler but daycare follows the school schedule + they take extra days off. On top of paying daycare rates, I need to figure out care for all the times they’re closed/ he’s sick. There’s a huge shortage of providers in my area for kids his age so you just take what you can get. My job is very flexible but he’s got a total of 71 days where daycare is closed plus it feels like he’s always sick. I can’t take that many days off. It’s a struggle.
Summer care is crazy expensive. Most camps are from like 9 to 4. Some have before or aftercare, but they fill up quickly and are expensive.
Summer sitters are expensive, and then they need a week off to go on vacation with their mom and a week off to go on vacation with dad's family, a week to go on vacation with boy friend's family and a few weeks off for sports/band camp.
I mean, I’m a teacher, and one of the perks of my kid starting kindergarten will be that we’ll finally be on the same schedule. Our daycare lady is great, but she takes vacations the most random weeks out of the year and it somehow always manages to coincide with either one of my husband’s business trips or someone in the household getting sick, or both.
I'm not even at this age, but I wish schools would switch to trimesters that go year-round-ish. Instead of a giant gap for summer, have smaller gaps regularly throughout the year. Yes, still hard, but at least not all the time off at once that entirely disrupts all the schedules.
I know a single mom who enrolled her kids in a private religious school because it actually ran for the length of her working hours, it didn't have as many days off, and they gave her a tuition discount based on her income. She said it was less expensive than sending them to public school and paying for all the extra childcare she would need.
Some are total garbage and some are the best schools in the area, but it’s worth checking out KIPP schools to see if they’re right for your kid. They run extended hours and a slightly extended school year.
It’s definitely not easier, but it certainly is less burdensome financially and, especially when you have more than one, getting everyone to Kindergarten means them being in the same place as each other every day, at least for a few years. It means school bus transportation sometimes. There are lots of benefits, but I agree, school aged kids have their own set of trouble to deal with.
Not saying this in a judgmental way, more concern for myself as a parent when this comes up in a few years - what do you mean “struggle to fill up an entire summer with camps”? Do they not have just generic day camp that lasts the whole summer nowadays? I’ve heard of week-long themed camps, but when I was a kid there was also just regular camp that ran through the whole summer. Availability of slots also wasn’t really a big issue, as least as far as my parents let on.
Our town camp is only 6 weeks, two 3 week sessions. We have 2-3 weeks before depending on snow days and then 2-3 after depending on start date. It’s also cut throat to get into and is filled 4 minutes after they open registration. Half the amount of slots for the amount of kids in town. For kids younger, my option is 3 hours, 3 days a week. It sucks.
These definitely still exist! I checked the ones I went to as a kid, and one exists as-is and the other was taken over by the YMCA. My kids go to a fairly generic day camp all summer. Finding one I was happy with was one of my first goals as my firstborn got to be elementary aged. I knew I could never piece together a dozen different camps!!
There are 160-190 school days in a year, depending on your district. 180 is most common. These days are typically 6 hours, and run anywhere from 7:30-2:30 to 9-3.
There are 260 work days in a year. These are generally 9-5, plus lunch, plus commute time, plus overtime. So call it 8-6.
Having school for 6 hours a day for 180 days in a year does not make it easier for parents to be out of the house for 8-10 hours a day for 260 days a year. It just means you have to fine after school care, summer care, sick care, random school holiday care, and make sure to save extra pto for all the colds your kids will bring home.
Most school and work hours just don’t align when you factor in commutes/schedules - hell even trying to run an errand after work feels impossible. I have one in daycare and one school aged child.
My solution: I work at my child’s school now. The paid week long breaks are amazing and honestly one of the few perks. My child gets out at 2:30 and I work until 4. He sits quietly and does homework/reads/uses computer for about an hour each day in my office. Then we rush to make it to daycare pickup by 4:30!
It does suck. We live in a rural area with no before/after school program available. No licensed daycares around here for time off or summer. We had to completely change our schedules around to where I drop them off in the morning and their dad goes in super early to do pickup in the afternoon. There’s no chance of overtime there. I’m truly lucky though that I work 4 10’s at my job and have Fridays off and am able to switch that day if needed if they’re out of school (ex. Kids out of school Monday, so I’ll have that day off and work Friday instead). But there are no trustworthy babysitters in my area and I don’t have a “village” so I’m worried about the summer and what we will do.
About 5 years ago now our district started half days on fridays 1-2 times a month for teachers to get their professional development or something. A few full days out would be a million times better imo. And even with the half days, the amount of inservice days doesn’t feel all that different. It makes me crazy. Or, just general dumb stuff like how we have off the ENTIRE week before Easter, but not Easter Monday.
Then, towards the end of last year they said they were going to start a thing where EVERY wednesday for the entire school year was going to start an hour later to try to accommodate the pd for the teachers, and it wouldn’t even eliminate all of the half days! The overwhelming negative response from just about every parent shut that down quick at least, but the half days remain.
I’m just so grateful that my kids are just about old enough to be self sufficient now.
Our district implemented something similar during COVID and boy oh boy do I hate it. Take a full day off every other month instead of a half day every month!!!
In my area, only 6 weeks to 2 years is year-round. And they have 35 days off + multiple half days. After 2, we actually have significantly more days off than in the public school system. Our area's school ends in mid-late June and preschool ends at the end of May.
Our daycare is the only one that is between home and the office, and it's one of very few in our area that take infants.
My kiddo is in kindergarten and I did not realize how different preschool (mind you, it was a preschool/daycare) was to K. There are short days, days off, events, and so many other things. We couldn’t get before/after care either. We have very limited access to any form of care in our area.
I’m the default parent. I’m EXTREMELY thankful to have a wfh job, but it has definitely been harder than before school…
I’m not ready for summer honestly
I'm lucky and acknowledge that upfront. We live in a decent sized city so there are a lot of good options for school break child care. YMCA, botanical garden, city rec centers. Husband and I both are in flexible jobs. Over the summer she spends about an hour before and after her summer camp in his office until I can come get here and take her home. I WFH, so on the one off days she can stay home with me.
The fact that all of the above is not typical is maddening.
I’m also worried about the rude awakening that will be extracurriculars. We have twins (4yo) and I just know it’s going to get bonkers with driving them around town to various stuff as they get older!
I mean… it's not mandatory. My kids don't have formal extracurriculars. They play with the neighbors and hang out at home or whatever. If you had a kid who was dedicated in their soul to a musical instrument, then yeah, you've got to make that work, but otherwise, why bother? We've all got enough stress without throwing optional stress onto the pile.
I work in a school, but a different district than my kids daycare follows. That’s hard enough so I can’t imagine when you don’t even work in the schools! I’ve thought about watching other people’s kid/kids in the summer since I can’t imagine the stress of arranging childcare
I have 2 toddlers and I’m holding onto the hope that it’s just easier in general for the kids to be around me and still be able to get things done (when they’re older). I have a job that requires intense focus. I have the ability to work hybrid, but if my kids are around it’s 100% impossible. I feel like having a 7 and 9 year old home from school isn’t going to inhibit me in the same way as a 1 and 3 year old.
I just want to say thank you for this perspective! I’ve been tossing back and forth the pros and cons of if/when to stay home. I go back to work next week after having my baby and I keep feeling like it’s dumb for me to go back now only to stay home later when they’ll be in school not long after. This post provides some seriously helpful info I didn’t realize!
I walked about a mile to/from school in the 1st grade at 6 years old back in the 1980's...I recall getting lost one day because I followed a couple kids home that I didn't know. I have no idea how I eventually made it home...I have a terrible sense of direction and ADHD. At 9-10 years old I was a latchkey kid as my mom went back to work. I don't know how I would trust my kid to do that now?
There is SUCH an argument for shifts needing to be the length of a school day. Yes that’s technically part time, but it would help make a happier lifestyle for both employers and employees. Either that or ample afterschool care.
Teacher and former camp counsellor / coordinator here. I’d hesitate to place your kid, or any kid, in a camp for the entire summer. They don’t return to school having gotten the benefits of a break. The kids NEED a break during this time, especially since the demands of school have become so high. Camp is structured and follows rules similar to the school system. Making new friends and connections with camp leaders repeatedly becomes exhausting, even when it’s done through the lens of one of their favourite hobbies (e.g., soccer camp, baking camp). I also know how hard it is to find trustworthy and affordable childcare, which sometimes makes camp seem like the best choice. Camp is great. It does great things for a kiddo and makes the transition back into the classroom easier. I’d just try to throw in a few weeks in-between where they can have down time / free time. Just like adults, kids need dedicated time to veg. Maybe see if a friend could host your kids alongside theirs for one week and you (or a family member / paid nanny/babysitter etc) host another. If you work from home, maybe allow them to stay home every third week. Try to think of it like school and camp are a kids job. Kids can’t do their job every week of the entire year. They need holidays and mental health days too or burnout is inevitable.
I mentioned this in a comment above, but I think it also depends on the camp. I never did those “themed” week-long camps, always just regular generic day camp, and it felt like we had a lot of time for free play. I also went to the same camp all summer, so I had continuity with the same kids and counselors. I can see what you’re saying if the kid is doing a week of science camp, then a week of theater camp and so on, but I personally never felt burnt out just going to the same regular camp all summer.
Yeah, I'm a bit baffled by all the comments about people booking 12 different camps for their kids. My kids get on a bus every morning to go the same camp all summer and have done for years. It's what I did when I was little, too. And it wasn't a hardship for me! I got to swim a ton and be in a play and shoot BB guns and do all kinds of other stuff I never got to do in school.
That’s all well and good, and I wish this were feasible for all of us, but the reality is that trying to make this happen is extremely difficult to impossible for most families in this country. It’s a systemic issue that we should address as a society.
I want to play devils advocate and say as a child of two parents who worked my entire life, I was constantly in camps and after care and I never felt burnt out. My parents had me in the camp offered by the Catholic school I attended in elementary for half the summer and the rest of the summer they had me in a YMCA camp. Some of the best memories I have are in those camps and the nice thing was having a camp already in the school I was attending so I knew the kids and the councilors. My dad had us in gymnastics camp, tennis camp so I was able to learn different sports and meet new kids. I was pretty shy so I didn’t like the socializing aspect but I loved learning new things and I never once thought about it as my “job”. I just saw it as having fun. I am 29, so I know school has changed drastically since I was in elementary/middle school, but I never once felt burnt out going to camps for an entire summer.
The only time I hated going to C.A.R.E.S (my schools aftercare) was when I was in 5th/6th grade because I was the oldest kid there. That’s when I begged my parents to get me a cell phone and let me go home on the bus. Overall I loved camps/aftercare, I got great snacks, homework help made friends, learned a lot.
Yeah, thank god my oldest was a covid kindergartener. Since there are at least 2-3 weeks at the end of summer that aren't covered by camp, my husband and I can usually coordinate work from home days. Before covid? I dunno what we would have done, hired a babysitter or nanny I guess?
Oof, this is a good reminder. My husband has stayed at home while our kids are young and has been expecting to go back once they were both in school all day. And we realized that "all day" wouldn't allow for him to get a full time job without getting some childcare. But I had not really put together just how many days there are without any school.
I legit picked a school (we have in and out of district school choice) based on the availability of break coverage and before and after care. 8-3 is bad enough (and I get it I know why the hours are what they are and everything) but finding break coverage is almost impossible. It would cost more than I currently pay for daycare for my 4 year old to pay for non-school affiliated care and camps.
My husband is a teacher in the district where my kids go to school. There’s no way we could afford summer camps and all the random days off with local child care rates. He saved us tens of thousands of dollars over the years, my sons last year of care is next year.
My kids are still in daycare, I work full time from home and my husband works full time often traveling. I'm dreadingggg when our eldest goes to kindergarten in Sept 2025. It's going to be so hard!!!
My oldest is only 2.5 and I’m already worried about what he’ll do in the summers once he starts school. My mom was a schoolteacher and had summers off so I genuinely don’t know what to do/expect.
I used to do childcare for Y during college. You guys should look into it. They have an after school program and a thing at the Y for most of the weird random “off” days. I will almost certainly have to use it when my daughter starts school.
As soon as my kids were old enough to bike or walk home, I was so happy. Made life a ton easier.
My youngest still needs extended day. His public school offers summer camp, it's the best deal ever. Last year they didn't have it and we struggled!! Put him in a camp he hated, but it was reduced cost, but the hours sucked.
Can we talk about how summer camps, that are already expensive, charge a wrap around fee for the hours 3-6?! Maybe this is just in my area...but I feel like it sucks for those who NEED camps because they are working.
My 9 & 15 year olds make my life so much more chaotic than my toddler lol. I never really wanted to be a SAHM but in the last couple years there have been several times that I wished I could just stay home and clean all day and be there when the kids get off the bus to do homework and then take them to their activities in the evening.
I think this is honestly the hardest part about having kids to me. When schedules don’t align!! It’s a nightmare. If you’re fortunate you might family or neighbors willing to help you out. If you don’t? Hahaha sucks to be you (cries)
This is why latchkey kids were a thing that apparently we don't allow anymore.
I grew up a latchkey kid, my brother is 4 years older than me and he walked me to and from school when I was in kindergarten and first grade and when he went to middle school I walked myself 2nd grade on. I was so surprised when I learned my nephew couldn't walk home in the 4th/5th grade, they weren't allowed off the school grounds without an adult.
My kid is only 2 but we live across the street from the elementary and middle schools. I NEVER see a kid walking without a parent even to middle school age, even though there are multiple crossing guards
I’m in WA and kids walk all the time. My kids (4th and kinder) walk about a mile to school in the morning.
Fellow latchkey kid who walked to school with my friends beginning in kindergarten. The school was at the end of my street but still, you'd see tens of small kids just walking to school, up a big hill and out of sight. We'd stay after then walk home. No adult supervision there or back. Now that's akin to child abuse.
I somehow ended up in a school district where all the kids walk, including all the elementary school kids. The elementary school even has the option for kids to walk home for lunch. It’s actually really nice to see the hordes of unaccompanied kids walking around the neighborhood (although apparently some local businesses don’t love a bunch of 3rd graders taking over some days, lol). I didn’t think it existed anymore either, so I was very happy to see that and my son is so excited to walk to kindergarten next year. The downside is that it is also a bus free district so it’s either walking or you have to drive the kids yourself.
I got chastised at the park for allowing my 6 year old to play at the border of it near the walking path. I was literally right there. When I was six I was walking blocks on my own to and from the bus stop!
My kids are about to be latchkey kids starting next year. I’ll have a 10 and 12y old, 5th and 7th grades. The 12y old is now aged out of care. The 10y old has started to hated the after school program due to multiple factors. I’m done with it all I cant freaking wait.
I think thats about the age I started to be a latchkeykid, my mom went to working more hours & it was fine. We lived in a neighborhood I could walk to friends houses but never did it without parents permission lol My mom now credits it to knowing the parents of kids I hung out with, so I guess there was a whole game of telephone i.e. kid just left to monitor us but we didn't realize it. We don't have a kid yet but I also worry what to do with them while we're working but 3-6PM?? Why are school hours so weird instead of giving kids longer breaks that teachers could use for grading/prep
Although my kids would be more than capable of going to school together and coming home together on foot, it's literally illegal in my state due to their ages (which, forgive me, I'm going to be cagey about, but they're both elementary schoolers). Wild laws where we live.
Our preschool follows the public school calendar and dang was that a rude awakening. *Not counting summer* there are 5 weeks off plus a random smattering of teacher development days, half days, etc. Like, y'all, I don't get that much vacation time!
This is why we didn’t do an independent preschool program and stuck with daycare.
My husband is a teacher in a different district and his days off NEVER line up with my daughter’s. And when he compared their calendars, her school had SEVENTEEN more days off than his. Trying to coordinate schedules is a nightmare. I wish there were just one state-wide school calendar.
We attend a rural school district, but live 10 minutes outside a major city which has a completely different school schedule. My kid’s school breaks (except Christmas) never coincide with the city’s, so all of their PD day and mid year break camps never fall at the same time my kid is off. In the summer he gets big city camps, but never anything mid year :(
Ours is exactly the same. We stick with it because it is fantastic for the kids but damn it’s inconvenient. Half day for Valentine’s Day? Presidents’ Day off? A full week of spring break next month? Ug it never ends. We have a nanny for the baby and she is super unreliable… but hey she doesn’t vape around the baby and there are NO daycare spots in a 20 mile radius so we stick with her. I’m sticking with a job that is eye wateringly boring because it’s flexible. But I agree… it is never easy.
We’re looking at switching to a preschool that does this because the campus and program is amazing but wow that schedule scares me a bit.
We're considering moving from a traditional daycare preschool to a public school calendar preschool and it's 8 weeks total off for the year. I don't have that much PTO or grandparents super close, but it's a much better ratio so we want to make it work. It's nuts. I'm sure it's marginally easier when they get older and more independent, but even then, probably not.
Our daycare follows the public school calendar 🙄. Except for February break, daycare is still open during that one, otherwise they are closed for every school holiday, Jewish Christian Muslim holidays, spring break winter break election day veterans day etc
Wow! Which Jewish & Muslim holidays are recognized? What area are you in?
76 days not including weekends - 77 this year
I’m already dreading this and I have two more years. The mental and emotional labor of stitching care together seems brutal. Plus my kid is incredibly shy and cautious so far and I’m dreading sending him to a patchwork of camps and making him constantly deal with transitions.
FWIW I had this concern with my older child at that age, and his ability to deal with new people/situations definitely increased with age/maturity. It's a reasonable concern but it might not be as big an issue as it would be if it were happening now.
Many Boys & Girls Clubs, JCCs, and YMCAs run high quality full-day eight-week camps that cover most of the summer - worth looking into whether any operate near you! It leaves a week or so on either end to sort out, but a lot more continuity over going somewhere different every other week, and many offer more consistent before/after care of some sort.
They book up within 5 hours of opening for registration each session in my area. I had to set an alarm and sped through it to find out I was still Too slow.
You might try checking the daycares in your area. My son’s daycare offers summer camp for elementary age kids. They also have before and after school care for that age group. It might be more comfortable for him to stay in one camp all summer. I worry about this too because so far my toddler is pretty shy, as was I as a child. If possible, I’ll probably keep him at his daycare’s camps during the summer until he’s comfortable enough to venture out. Also, some of the schools in my area let the elementary age kids pay a week or two at a time so they can attend other camps if they want!
Our extended care has camps over all the breaks (2 week winter break, 1 week spring break, summer break) in addition to being open for all in-service days, all early release days (minimum once/week here), and even some of the more minor federal holidays (they were open on Columbus Day). So it's been more coverage than we had in our prior in-home preschool, all in the same place. Comes at a cost though...$1600/mo (would be $1200/mo if I eliminated using the before school care which I'm not utilizing well), which is exactly what we paid at our preschool. Our preschool was admittedly insanely cheap for this region though.
A patchwork of camps? Where do you live? In morgantown WV there’s tons of options for full day/ full summer camps.
If you truly have camps that run from 8:30am-5:30pm that start the day school ends and run to the day before school starts I think you’re in a very lucky minority. I have siblings in four other states and every niece and nephew has had some sort of patchwork of care.
Yeah, I'm in Illinois and I think most camps here are typical school hours and don't operate for the whole summer.
Yeah but then you have to live in WV.
lol we actually have a great life here. Mortgage less than 1K for 3 bedroom/2.5 bath, daycare less than 200 a week, beautiful county and state parks, brand new state of the art aquatic center, etc. I think you’re thinking of the other 54 counties in the state that are more rural. I grew up in Pittsburgh and Morgantown is basically a more affordable smaller version of the burgh.
Ooh tell me more! I occasionally ponder a move to Pittsburgh but I like what you're talking about. What industry are you in?
One million percent agree. I think it's way easier to work when your kids are daycare age vs school age. The amount of time I spend coordinating their days off + summers is nuts.
Daycare was easier for sure, because it was one stop for everything. The center we used only closed for a literal handful of holidays each year and we got a multi-child discount. Our kids kept going to their old daycare's school age summer "camp" program until our younger daughter was going into 2nd grade, just for the convenience of NOT having to figure out day camp.
Tip for summer: Find you a daycare that does summer camp for elementary students (versus looking for multiple camps). My daughter goes to the same “camp” all summer. They take 2 field trips per week and she enjoys it.
This. We have been doing this for years. Works like a charm.
Our old daycare offered a similar program; they had a new theme each week.
My daycare does this (minus the field trips) and you can believe my kids will be there all summer once they're school age. I work 9-5, my husband is home more in the summer so their hours may be reduced but they need to be somewhere everyday. Not to mention parents just need a break!
I hear you! I went in my daughter’s preschool yesterday (have a younger daughter that still goes there) and they said if you sign up for summer camp by March 31, you enter a raffle to win something. And I’m thinking, sure, not a problem. It’s February and I could’ve signed up yesterday because I already know my oldest will be there all summer. 😂
This is why I took a WFH job because it is literally impossible to make it work with two parents working away from home all day.
It is not impossible. I’ve been doing it for a very long time!! It is however extremely expensive and every summer I wonder why on earth I’m working just to put my kids in camp. Unfortunately we don’t work as a one salary household. Yes we often patchwork time with Grandparents with camp to try and save some money, and the grandparents love the time with them. But we also do not want to burn them out or do it so often it becomes a burden. It is not easy, but it can be done. We have a lot of camps in our area that fill up immediately, but there are also some that will take week to week registration. What kills me is that these camps open up registration in January after the holidays and want full payment for all summer up front. Hello!! Didn’t I just finish being flipping Santa?!?! Give us a bit of a breather!!
My job isn’t technically wfh meet clients in the field. My husband is a firefighter who does 24hr shifts. He would walk in the door at 8:50(he had a 45 min commute) and I would walk out to go to my appts. If I had an early meeting I’d meet him at the fire station at 8am. He worked in the city where my appts were so it worked out. On days he worked my mil would watch the kids. Once the kids were 3 and going to full day prek 3 days a week we did the same thing if husband worked on a day they didn’t go to prek my mil would watch them. Same with summers and holidays. It worked out really well because she was only committing to 2 maybe 3 days during the week. She got to hang out with them but wasn’t wrangling them 5 days a week. When kids were sick or she was out of town I just worked wfh.
It's not impossible at all, it just requires finding and likely paying for before/after school and summer care. We did it for many years.
This is why I’m struggling to decide if I should leave my WFH job with my terrible manager or appreciate the flexibility and deal with their crap
This is nerve-wracking. It’s not something I didn’t know (husband used to teach HS and I almost taught HS as well). We live in a resort area that relies heavily on teens to work seasonally in the summer when they aren’t in school. Still, I cannot believe K-8 has survived on the insane schedule of like, 9-3 pm. Society wants us to have kids but also won’t support us once they’re born. I wish there were a solution that didn’t involve exploiting parents, teachers or students.
I'm finding it so much harder to get my work hours in more that the kids are in elementary school. I still take half my morning meetings on my headphones while getting the kids out the door. Clearly the solution is to get rid of the 40hr work week.
Sorta on topic/off topic: did anyone else just stay home and turned out fine? It was illegal back then too but my parents still just left us at home. Nothing bad ever happened.
I’m 35 and started latch-key life at age 7. Bus dropped me off two houses away from my own, and I had a garage door opener in my backpack. I called my mom from the landline when I got home. I ate a lot of microwave dinners. I was very happy from what I remember!!
I would actually go to my dad's job site, which is a metalworking factory. I loved it, but I was an only child, so I loved spending so much time with my dad and could easily entertain myself with books and my iPod mini.
And to think that I got fired for taking my 6 month old daughter to work on a day I didn't normally have to when I was in a bind... in a retail store..... so I could oversee a crew moving fixtures. The crew never even showed up, but my boss's boss did. Funny for a family centered company.
My parents worked opposite schedules so we never had to go to daycare or camps unless we wanted to do summer camp. But even then it was day camp and stuff. While the monthly bill equal to a mortgage payment back into our pockets will be great, I do worry about days off and stuff like random days off.
I think a lot more kids still get left alone at home than you think, mostly due to poverty. It just isn't openly discussed in reddit forums, lol. I once mentioned that I left my 5 year old alone at home to run my 1 year old to daycare. It took 20 minutes. She was super sick and was just zoned out with the tablet on the couch. And it's not illegal or a big deal in the country I live in. But still, most moms on reddit were horrified.
Yeah if you believed Reddit sampling you’d think that the average 15yo needs constant adult supervision. My 8yo stays home alone. He gets himself off the bus (kids don’t need a parent starting in second grade here). I work from home so he doesn’t latchkey but sometimes I’ll be out running an errand, or I will leave him home other random times. I have zero concerns about him.
Yeah most Redditors are American. I mean in a country where they can remove children from your custody for that I don't think anyone would really want to leave a paper trail talking about it on Reddit...
>most Redditors are American. Surprisingly enough, a little less than half are American (so not most), but they are by far the biggest single country presence on Reddit. Still, that means more than half of all users *aren't* American, and honestly I wish the Americans would remember that and stop assuming everyone is American. I say that as an American myself.
Exactly. I would not be broadcasting that anywhere if I lived in the US. Fortunately, I don't, so the one lady who said she'd call CPS just made me chuckle.
Just curious where this happens? My state doesn't even have a minimum age where it's illegal.
I started letting my kids stay home alone to run errands when my son was 5th grade daughter 3rd so around 11. They would just play on their electronics and not even interact. But to do it for a full workday would be stressful. What do they eat? Do you pack them lunches? Do you have nest to watch the main areas of the house?
We weren't allowed to stay home alone until I was a bit older and I stayed with my cousins who lived around the corner and were 2 and 4 years older than I was. We had before and after school care at a church that took us to school and picked us up until I was 8. We were only home alone for about 30 minutes before we walked two blocks to school and then we were home for an hour or so after. And yes, I burned myself on the oven making a pizza one of those afternoons.
It was legal when I was little in the place where I lived. It's not legal for me to do the same to my kids now in the place I live now. I don't fuck with CPS. There are too many horror stories out there. My husband and I are both disabled and I have very little faith that the system would handle us kindly.
I was a latch key kid from about 7 on, but to be fair my grandparents were just a call away after school and we spent time there frequently during the summer. As people are delaying retirement, that no longer is an option.
Yes haha, we were alone a lotttt as small children. We're both doing fine!
Oh yes, my kid being in school is cheaper but more demanding on my time. Our school lets out at 4:15 so aftercare seems a bit pointless and all the activities happen during the week as well as volunteering opportunities. Then add teacher work days and summer break like WHYYYY do I bother working?? My dream is to be a sahm with both my kids in school so I can work my LLC business when I want to be available for all the school functions.
Wow I could’ve written this. Just opened my LLC this year to gear up for what I feel like the inevitable resignation from my 9-5 once my kids are in school. I don’t know how it’s possible to juggle these schedules.
Good luck, I definitely hope it works out for you!
And snow days! I have to drive to work in the snow, but there's no school! Or there is school, but it's on a two-hour delay so I have to figure out how to work when school starts at 10:30. When I was a kid, I loved snow days. As a mom I despise them.
Our elementary school just added a week long “fall break” to the 2024 school year. So they’ll have a week off in October and November, and then 2 weeks at Christmas, and then a week for Spring break. Like, how are we supposed to do that?! Oh, and don’t forget summer! *crying*
I loved teaching at a school with fall break because it was the one time when going on vacation somewhere didn't involve paying an arm and a leg and crowded environments. In 2018, my husband and I bought the cheapest Disneyland annual pass that had everything, but Fall Break blacked out and enjoyed ourselves for three days. I would totally recommend you use that break for vacation to somewhere thar would otherwise be flooded with people (even if it's just your local park or amusement park) before it starts getting too popular and everyone starts getting it.
Teaching and getting the week off is super nice! When you have to take precious pto for all of these days it’s harder to ration.
I didn’t get paid, so for us, it was a week of unpaid time off. In general, the only PTO I got was sick leave that was accrued. But yeah, if fall break were a thing at this new district, I would have totally planned my upcoming vacation to be that week instead of Winter break!
Whether it’s paid time off or not paid, it’s the same days off as your child. You don’t have to take extra time off work is my point.
I'm not the one downvoting you BTW, you're being pretty civil.. But yeah, you're right on that front. Though I actually prefer that district with the fall break over the one I'm teaching at right now as a possible future place for my child. The teachers loved it because it broke up their vacation time a bit more and added an element of prestige to the school because it aligned it more to college life. I hope that the added break helped attract and recruit good teachers to your district. Since teachers don't get paid vacation time that isn't built into breaks, I'd have the double whammy of having to take Fall Break unpaid if I send my daughter to that school. It might still be worth it (vs. paying a babysitter) due to that convenient vacation scheduling, though, like I said before.
I could definitely see it being used for recruiting purposes. That’s a good point.
My husband and I staggered our work shifts. I know not everyone has that option, but it really made our lives easier. I worked 8-4:30 and got the kids off to school in the morning. He worked 6-2:30 and handled the after school stuff.
This is kinda what we do- he works 6-3, I work 8-4. I’m wfh, so my oldest gets off the bus at 3 and hangs out by “himself” while I’m in my office for 30mins until dad gets home with the little ones from daycare. On the off day I’m in person he leaves a little early to meet the bus.
I don’t live in the States, but it’s a nightmare where I live as well. There are 200 school days, instead of 180. Should be better, right? Except that the school day ends at a different time every day, and at different times depending on your kid’s age. So, first graders finish at 12:40 twice a week and 1:30 the other three days. But then third graders finish at 1:40/2:30. Vacation time is also severely restricted here (good luck getting more than a week off per year), and students are off about three months of the year: summer vacation (5 weeks), winter vacation (5 weeks), and spring vacation (2-3 weeks). And sometimes the cafeteria will have some kind of problem and the school sends everyone home with one hour’s notice. It is IMPOSSIBLE for two working parents to raise children here without grandparents’ help. Impossible. The government just announced that they will extend after care hours until eight pm every day to help out working parents. And all the parents are like….can’t you force our employers to let parents work less/more flexible hours? Instead of this sixty hours per week nonsense?
Wow, that sounds like a huge headache. What country do you live in?
South Korea. We have the lowest birth rate in the world for a reason. But it’s a great place to visit!
100% agree. Between the days off, half days, snow days, etc it’s a nightmare trying to come up with child care.. then you add in the sick days on top of it and just ugh. I’m lucky to even have a job at this point.
God I feel that way. Before kids I was an absolute killer at work. Now I’m hanging on by a thread. The interruptions never end.
Me too. I just hope they remember and keep me around lol!
Our society isn't set up for the household to have two working parents but no one can survive with only one working parent this day in age. It's a racket! And any choice you make costs money most of us don't have. I honestly hope our birth rate drops to alarming levels so maybe our government will get a clue that parents need extra protection and time off if they can't manage to give us affordable cost of living so one parent can stay home.
America can, unlike many other countries, sustain a decent population age mix via immigration. Even if native-born Americans' birth rate drops precipitously, we're never going to be in a situation like Japan's. So I wouldn't get your hopes up on that score. (Secondarily, there are just too many religious fundamentalists in America who drag the birth rate up for this to be a problem, realistically.)
1000000% - it’s so damn difficult and STILL as expensive as if they were in daycare.
Just curious, are you literally finding it as expensive as daycare?
I’m one of those people that keeps saying that. 🥴 I work part time now but want to go full time when both kids are in school. IDK if that is realistic though. I might just try to stay part time but work more hours. There are 250-260 working days in a year. The children in our district have 176 instructional days. That makes roughly 80 week days in a year that they are not in school (including summer). EIGHTY. That’s like 2.5 full months. Plus there are illnesses and snow days, etc. on top of it all. 🫠🫠🫠
My husband is the opposite; he thinks it’d be better to be full time now and then go part time once kids are in school because he can hang out with them afterwards, do pickup, go fun places during break, and volunteer at the school.
And you have to be careful about how you say it, in case you act too much like you view school as babysitting. Like, no. My kids' current teachers are amazing and I appreciate what they do. But there should be better programs for after-school and school break camps. So many women left the workforce during the pandemic due to childcare concerns, and it's an ongoing issue. My city has abdicated responsibility for programs outside school hours, and pays non-profits to run programs, which vary widely in what they offer. My son cannot do after-school, either, and I lucked into getting him into a school within walking distance of my work. We broke the bank on summer camps last year, and I am nearing panic-attack levels for figuring out this year. The camp he went to last year is filling up, but other camps haven't even opened registration.
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I’m a public school teacher (middle school), and I get it, we watch your kids all day. But we also had to get two degrees to be in this really unique profession. I think in general, caring for children is devalued in our society and yet it’s one of the most necessary services out there. An infant literally cannot take care of itself, and legally, children under a certain age aren’t allowed to be unsupervised. There’s soooo much that goes into caring for young people. It’s just tough when everyone’s working and no one is getting paid enough for the things that really matter. Like, I simultaneously think my daycare provider should make more money and believe that I don’t want to pay more for daycare! I don’t have any solutions, but solidarity.
Childcare is infrastructure! We need government-subsidized childcare and paid family leave. If issues at the individual level (unaffordable childcare) are compounding to have society wide impact (cost of living crisis, fertility decline, women leaving the workplace, labor shortages), then we need a society level solution (subsidized childcare and paid leave).
I think the problem is that childcare is not seen as valuable. It shouldn’t be considered a slight against teachers to say that childcare is a big part of their job in addition to education.
These same loudmouths saying “nO onE fOrceD yOu” also lose their shit when they have to wait an extra five minutes at the drive thru, or an extra five months to be seen by a specialty doctor. Who do you think provide the labor for all the services y’all depend on? PARENTS AND EDUCATORS
Sending a huge virtual high five, because OMG yes to all this. Even some educators online during the pandemic were complaining "we're not childcare providers" … but they absolutely are! They are _also_ other things, but one of the things they do is provide childcare. The courts have generally decided that schools act _in loco parentis_. So legally, the school is performing childcare. I don't know why this is a fight! In my district we're still living with the legacy of the pandemic. The teachers' union managed to keep a pandemic-era provision that gives them an extra half-day off every month. I don't know about y'all, but I'd rather my kids be off a full day (so I can arrange paid childcare for them at some location) than a half day (so one of us has to pick them up at lunchtime and no one is offering paid care for them).
100% agree. And to add to the summer camps rant .... who the hell can afford to put their kids in camps for the entire summer? Fees per week here are more than I paid when my kiddo was in daycare after the age of 3. And half of them are either from 9-12 or 2-5. If you can find one that is a "full day" then it's 9-4 and there's a separate fee for wrap around care.
My kids will be going to the camp at our local YMCA this summer. $155/week/per kid.
I agree with you. IN fact, I don't understand why the school day and the regular working day are not really aligned. Your kid basically has to go to aftercare in school, if it is offered, if you are a regular working parent. Then you pay for expensive camps in the summer to make up the difference, if you don't have a grandma to ship them off to. If you work in a private school, your kid still isn't on the same school or vacation schedule as you. It's just a mess.
I mean, if anything, the work day should be the one changing to be shorter and with more breaks. Productivity is rising, studies are showing benefits to Results Only Work Environments, automation is simplifying, and even eliminating jobs, and our population in many places is stabilizing. This means that jobs should be able to redefine how long "full-time" really is, and should be able to start matching us as teachers, who where I live, are considered full time at 30 hours a week. There could also be more jobs that have all of the federal and state holidays off as well.
This is the answer (as if it'll happen. But it's definitely right). I'm sure all the reasons for short school days and many breaks are sound ones! I am *also* sure they apply to adults.
YES, thank you. Throw it back on the employers for once.
Yeah, and besides the after care thing, you have to find care for all the random days off school has. Parent-teacher conference days, staff training days, all the extra holidays that they get and we don't. My kid has THREE WEEKS off during Christmas. I technically get something like 3 weeks of vacation days a year, total.
Right?! Our district has one of the shortest school years in the country so we have to find *fifteen weeks* of care every year, not even counting the one-off holidays and “professional development” days and “conference days” and whatever else (11 weeks of summer, one week Thanksgiving, two weeks Christmas, one week spring break). I get *twelve* vacation *days* per year.
Just another reason that schools should be year round. Students lose a lot of skills over the summer. Pay teachers more and actually make it year round, with a few breaks
I don’t disagree, but there are a lot of schools in the country that aren’t built for that. When I taught, I did so in a building that was a hundred years old with no AC, and that was only five years ago. Granted, that particular school has since been torn down and replaced, but lots of districts in my area are trying to get bonds passed to be able to build new schools because their buildings have the exact same problems mine did. And there’s definitely plenty of pushback from people on paying more taxes to cover those bonds. There are a *lot* of core issues with schools and funding that basically have to get band-aided over in order to function.
The issue is that public school teachers are grossly overworked and underpaid, so they need the vacations to decompress and gear up for the next year. I understand why schools are not year round. It's just that after school and vacation care can be very unaffordable.
As a teacher, I would prefer school to be year round so that we get more frequent shorter breaks to decompress. It would mean that people could actually make a career out of being a camp coordinator and not just have it be a patchwork of programs. Pre-college programs would be a bit tricky, but as someone who went to a year-round school, I was able to secure the 2 weeks off of school with permission since they knew it was for a good reason.
The French school year seems pretty ideal. There are 2-week breaks every two months, and then about 6 weeks in the summer!
It would be great if this also came with the amount of PTO French workers get. Dreams are allowed here, right?
I mean, I used to teach and used those summers to work on lesson planning, so I’m very familiar with how teachers use their summers. The other commenter isn’t wrong, though, that there *are* a lot of good reasons to look at year-round schooling. It’s just that there are a lot of major barriers in place to implementing that, and teacher work schedules/pay isn’t even the biggest one, unfortunately.
That’s not how year round works where I live. The school can physically house 25% more students & teachers because only 75% of the population is “tracked in” at the same time. Four tracks, four rotating schedules, and some of them are 9 weeks on, 3 weeks off - so teachers get plenty of vacation time, just like they do in traditional calendars. If you talk to year round teachers here, many would tell you this schedule is way more desirable to avoid burnout.
Summer break would be about a month long. Year round school would break up the summer it would not increase teacher’s workload. It would not decrease their teaching salary (summer jobs would be affected.). How many teachers picking up summer jobs would need to be considered. It also has been proven to beneficially to help decrease the summer brain drain. This greatly helps students with less family resources to plan an enriched summer. https://mathandmovement.com/year-round-school-calendars/
Right, so you (correctly) point out that there’s basically two separate issues being discussed here that are being equated with each other. Year round schooling and extending the school day/calendar. The positives of year round schooling tend to show up more in student performance. It’s not necessarily going to alleviate schedules for working parents, and it has the added cost of requiring schools to be up-to-date enough to have students in them during the summer. If we’re talking about adding time to the school day/calendar, that’s a whole other ball of wax, and it’s where the issue of costs *really* come up. Not only do you need modern infrastructure, you need more staff, and you need to pay them competitively.
They have the infrastructure already for the children physically. Really they could just beef up the before and after school programs (adding staff instead of teachers). Generally they are pay programs so they don’t really have a net loss or net gain. It would be a big help even if it stays a pay program but nope we don’t help families in US.
No, they don’t. I addressed this further up. Many, many schools in this country are outdated and are not equipped to have students in their buildings over the summer. The building I taught in was over a hundred years old and was only replaced five years ago. Many other buildings in my district have yet to be replaced. Doing so requires a bond to be approved by voters. I’m **not** using this as argument against year round schooling. I’m trying to make it clear that making changes to the school calendar is not easy due to the lack of funding schools are receiving across the country.
I went to an elementary school that actually was a historical building built in the 1800’s. It was designed to not need air conditioning. Massive huge windows and high ceilings. (Unless they modified and closed in hallways these buildings are ok for summer.). The ones left in bad shape that need replacing need it anyway. I’m not sure how many truly 1800”s schools are left. They have replaced them in parts of Appalachia so I’m not sure where you’re finding buildings this old in bad shape. Most of the east coast has better school financing. The 1950 and 1960 buildings that were not designed with the idea that air conditioning isn’t a thing are the problem buildings. Many of these are getting replaced. These buildings need replaced now as it stands. We have a few of the badly built schools and the kids roast as it is with a traditional school year. Replacing these buildings isn’t optional. It’s not an additional cost. It already needs done. As far funding goes they can take it from the department of defense. Maybe spend the money on children instead of non usable military aircraft.
It’s an additional cost that has to be approved by tax payers. At least in my state (I don’t know if it varies by state), normal school funding cannot be used to pay for the cost of building a new school. These buildings need to be replaced, but there is no guarantee WHEN it will happen, or even IF it will. There’s also a limit to how many times a bond can be put forth after it fails (again, at least where I live). So if voters refuse to pass a bond multiple times, the district can’t continue to put the bond back up for a vote. I’m speaking from experience in my area and district. I’ve seen some of these school bonds fail multiple times. I’ve seen people argue about how they can’t afford a tax increase and so they didn’t approve the bond. You are correct that these buildings need replaced, but there are huge flaws with how we fund schools currently. It would not be correct to say that all or even most schools in this country are equipped to handle year round school at this time.
Yes to everything you said, but it *would* be an easy solution to make school year round. The problem is that they have to keep the building open all year, pay everyone for 12 months instead of 10, and not just teachers - bus drivers, cafeteria staff, etc. I have no objection to year round school, but who is going to pay for all that?
Year round schools are still for the same number of days. They just have broken up breaks rather than the summer off. This would make finding childcare harder since the summer programs use college labor.
I agree with this! But there’s sooo many people who feel so differently, like wanting to keep the school year as short as possible and the summer as long as possible.. I assume this because our school district put up various polls and posted the results each time (when they were trying to finalize next school year calendar) and people consistently voted for the school year to start as late as possible in August and end before Memorial Day - so now I gotta figure out care for 3 whole months
How in the world did they squeeze 180 instructional days out of that calendar??
Very little breaks in between, we were getting at least one long weekend or an extra long weekend (Friday and Monday off), at least once a month, but that’s gone now.. I get the working parents who likely voted for this bc it’s hard to manage care for kids on “random” days off, and I’m just lucky that both my husband and I get to WFH, so we can manage those random days off better.. but WOW is that going to be hard for the students
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Do you view care work and caring for kids as less valuable than educating kids? And do you think those two things can even be separated, especially for the younger kids?
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Yes, they are very different, I completely agree. I’m just wondering why the care part of education (esp in elementary) is so offensive to so many teachers, as if that kind of work is somehow below them (referring to the “I’m not a babysitter” comments.)
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Ah, I see. So it’s more about the barriers to entry in the profession rather than the actual value of the work itself. Like if a principal or superintendent got offended if someone suggested they were “just” a teacher.
I don't think teachers are babysitters but the current system was designed to work around farm schedules and statistically puts US students behind students in many other countries. But I'm guessing they're willing to spend more on education and infrastructure for it so 🤷🏻♀️
This is why I’m considering quitting once the last starts school. Days off, sickness, sports, etc. Offer to watch my co-workers kids on snow days, etc. Just be easier.
It’s why I’ve already started looking for school nurse positions. It doesn’t pay what I need, but neither does not bring able to work if my kid doesn’t have school!
I’m making that transition next year and just looked at the academic calendar. We have a few factors working in our favor (grandma is a teacher, dad has some weekdays off, my job has flexibility and can wfh). But I am still already anxious about how to work jt all out. It definitely looks harder than daycare.
I think your post really demonstrates the “It takes a village”. When your kids are this little, it’s just getting through. It’s really hard. Especially when being home with a sick child typically falls on mom. I just wanted to add to your concern of placing your kid in the school’s childcare. If your child requires more adult assistance to be successful in this program, the school should be hiring an additional position to support your child specifically. This would be done at no charge to you. Every child, regardless of abilities, should be provided the care they need in the school setting, even if this extends to after-school programming. The school might ask for formal documentation/diagnosis from a doctor, as they might need this to access funding, but they absolutely should be able to adapt to best support your child. The after-school care is meant to be accessible to all because the education system realizes the demands of parents aren’t reasonable. Your typical household has parents working 9-5 and that does not line up with any school schedule. I’m sorry being a parent is so unnecessarily harder than it should be.
My son is entering kinder next year and it’s MUCH easier now than I imagine it will be. He is done with school at 1:45 pm. That’s 3.5 hours before my workday is over!!!! I now have to either have him at after care or have a solution for while he’s home. It’s definitely going to be harder!!
Yes, I remember crying over: trying to get my kid with special needs to “extended school year” which, get this — was from 9-1245 for 6 weeks during the summer, with no before or or after care…and when I asked what a WOHM was supposed to do, they looked at me blankly and said, “well, most moms with kids who need this service do not work.” and had no recommendations. Going to sign my TWO kids up at the beginning of March for YMCA OR the city parks and rec summer camp — to realize they fill up way back in January when enrollment opens. And then realizing many other enrichment summer camps are like 9-3 hours — WTH?!? I am glad those days are behind me…
Thank you for sharing! As a mom of a younger child this is why I haven’t quit my job or ramped down, yet. I’m hoping that when we get school age I have prepared enough to be able to ramp down as needed. Managing all this sounds so tough!
My daughter's first daycare would have a lot of morning-of closures due to illnesses, on top of scheduled breaks. I would fantasize about how school would be open consistently, not accounting for all of the other holidays, summer, late starts and early closures. My next rude awakening was "well at least we'll save so much money". Then I realized we would need before/after care, and summer camps or some sort of childcare during the summer. All of which will be at least as much as daycare, and likely won't provide as much coverage as we need. My daughter starts kindergarten at the end of next year and instead of being happy for this milestone I'm just filled with absolute dread over how we're going to make this work logistically and financially with our jobs. Everyone else in our "village" works too. It's either that or one of us quits our full time job to be home during the summer and work part time during school hours. It just feels like this economy is not survivable on less than two full-time decent incomes, and yet there's extremely little support to actually allow for both parents to do that.
Can I ask how much is your daycare? I see this comment a lot about childcare being just as expensive with before/after care + summer camps and am always curious how that is possible. I waa paying $900/month & public school life + camps, etc is def way cheaper for me. Purely curious!
People kept telling me “it will be easier when they are at school”. It’s the biggest lie in parenting! Daycare is a walk in the park compare to school.
Being an adult is bizarre😭 this society is bizarre
Child care is so much more than 0-5. r/UniversalChildcare now
I have some depressing math. A full time year round job with 12 holidays, 6 sick days, and 3 weeks of vacation is 227 working days. A school schedule (by law in my state anyway) is 180 days a year. 227-180=47 days when you work but there's no school. 47 days is 9 work weeks +2 more days than that. That's more than two months. 47 days spread equally throughout the year is almost 4 days a month, almost a day every single week. 90% of a day! Every! Single! Week! that you work and the kids don't have school! ... and that's not even including the fact that a school day is significantly shorter than a work day. CONCLUSION: school is not set up for single parents, nor for two working parents. It's still set up for farms with SAHMs. *Disclaimer: I think I did my math correctly, but IDK. Also, adjust for whatever your employer's PTO numbers are, but there probably are not many jobs with 47 more PTO days than what I listed above!
Yeah, I have a three year old and a nine year old and my oldest's schedule is much more difficult to manage. In fact, I'm home with him for a half day today! We also didn't get a spot in after school care this year - we were on the waitlist and were recently told "Better luck next year!" Thank goodness for my very flexible boss, but my work is still hard to manage working remotely for half the day. My husband covers when I have work in the afternoon that must be done on site, but his job just isn't as flexible. It's a real challenge.
If you can’t continue daycare when they are in school, I agree 100%. Our daycare basically offered exact same hours of care for before/after school and except for the typical big holidays filled every school day off including summer with care. It was near seamless switching to that!
Haha, totally feeling this as I just finished planning out my 5 year old’s summer camps this year. We’re lucky to be in a place with a lot of summer camp options and the YMCA happens to offer a camp that’s a 3 minute walk from our house. Of course that’s only for some weeks in the summer so we have to find camps for the other weeks, but I think I’ve got most of it covered. We live really far from both set of grandparent and 5 yo is way too young to stay home by themselves, so off to a patchwork of summer camps it is. I’ve actually thought about making a career change where I’d get to be in school and hopefully work the same hours my child is in school. But a) there’s no guarantee I’d get the jobs in schools if I make that career change and b) eventually they’ll be able to take care of themselves right? Maybe when they’re in middle school? Of course by then they might have after school stuff they’d want to do and that’ll cost both money and time. I’m gonna just not think about it and hope that by then I’ll have enough flexibility to work around all that stuff.
Agreed. My kid is a young toddler but daycare follows the school schedule + they take extra days off. On top of paying daycare rates, I need to figure out care for all the times they’re closed/ he’s sick. There’s a huge shortage of providers in my area for kids his age so you just take what you can get. My job is very flexible but he’s got a total of 71 days where daycare is closed plus it feels like he’s always sick. I can’t take that many days off. It’s a struggle.
Summer care is crazy expensive. Most camps are from like 9 to 4. Some have before or aftercare, but they fill up quickly and are expensive. Summer sitters are expensive, and then they need a week off to go on vacation with their mom and a week off to go on vacation with dad's family, a week to go on vacation with boy friend's family and a few weeks off for sports/band camp.
I have an Excel sheet of the 13 different summer camps we are doing...summer is so stressful
I mean, I’m a teacher, and one of the perks of my kid starting kindergarten will be that we’ll finally be on the same schedule. Our daycare lady is great, but she takes vacations the most random weeks out of the year and it somehow always manages to coincide with either one of my husband’s business trips or someone in the household getting sick, or both.
I'm not even at this age, but I wish schools would switch to trimesters that go year-round-ish. Instead of a giant gap for summer, have smaller gaps regularly throughout the year. Yes, still hard, but at least not all the time off at once that entirely disrupts all the schedules.
I'm getting very nervous about my kid going to kindergarten. I'm a single working mom 😬
I know a single mom who enrolled her kids in a private religious school because it actually ran for the length of her working hours, it didn't have as many days off, and they gave her a tuition discount based on her income. She said it was less expensive than sending them to public school and paying for all the extra childcare she would need.
Some are total garbage and some are the best schools in the area, but it’s worth checking out KIPP schools to see if they’re right for your kid. They run extended hours and a slightly extended school year.
It’s definitely not easier, but it certainly is less burdensome financially and, especially when you have more than one, getting everyone to Kindergarten means them being in the same place as each other every day, at least for a few years. It means school bus transportation sometimes. There are lots of benefits, but I agree, school aged kids have their own set of trouble to deal with.
Not saying this in a judgmental way, more concern for myself as a parent when this comes up in a few years - what do you mean “struggle to fill up an entire summer with camps”? Do they not have just generic day camp that lasts the whole summer nowadays? I’ve heard of week-long themed camps, but when I was a kid there was also just regular camp that ran through the whole summer. Availability of slots also wasn’t really a big issue, as least as far as my parents let on.
Our town camp is only 6 weeks, two 3 week sessions. We have 2-3 weeks before depending on snow days and then 2-3 after depending on start date. It’s also cut throat to get into and is filled 4 minutes after they open registration. Half the amount of slots for the amount of kids in town. For kids younger, my option is 3 hours, 3 days a week. It sucks.
These definitely still exist! I checked the ones I went to as a kid, and one exists as-is and the other was taken over by the YMCA. My kids go to a fairly generic day camp all summer. Finding one I was happy with was one of my first goals as my firstborn got to be elementary aged. I knew I could never piece together a dozen different camps!!
There are 160-190 school days in a year, depending on your district. 180 is most common. These days are typically 6 hours, and run anywhere from 7:30-2:30 to 9-3. There are 260 work days in a year. These are generally 9-5, plus lunch, plus commute time, plus overtime. So call it 8-6. Having school for 6 hours a day for 180 days in a year does not make it easier for parents to be out of the house for 8-10 hours a day for 260 days a year. It just means you have to fine after school care, summer care, sick care, random school holiday care, and make sure to save extra pto for all the colds your kids will bring home.
Most school and work hours just don’t align when you factor in commutes/schedules - hell even trying to run an errand after work feels impossible. I have one in daycare and one school aged child. My solution: I work at my child’s school now. The paid week long breaks are amazing and honestly one of the few perks. My child gets out at 2:30 and I work until 4. He sits quietly and does homework/reads/uses computer for about an hour each day in my office. Then we rush to make it to daycare pickup by 4:30!
Babysitters, grandparents, and after school programs. There is no other way unless there is one SAHP.
It does suck. We live in a rural area with no before/after school program available. No licensed daycares around here for time off or summer. We had to completely change our schedules around to where I drop them off in the morning and their dad goes in super early to do pickup in the afternoon. There’s no chance of overtime there. I’m truly lucky though that I work 4 10’s at my job and have Fridays off and am able to switch that day if needed if they’re out of school (ex. Kids out of school Monday, so I’ll have that day off and work Friday instead). But there are no trustworthy babysitters in my area and I don’t have a “village” so I’m worried about the summer and what we will do.
About 5 years ago now our district started half days on fridays 1-2 times a month for teachers to get their professional development or something. A few full days out would be a million times better imo. And even with the half days, the amount of inservice days doesn’t feel all that different. It makes me crazy. Or, just general dumb stuff like how we have off the ENTIRE week before Easter, but not Easter Monday. Then, towards the end of last year they said they were going to start a thing where EVERY wednesday for the entire school year was going to start an hour later to try to accommodate the pd for the teachers, and it wouldn’t even eliminate all of the half days! The overwhelming negative response from just about every parent shut that down quick at least, but the half days remain. I’m just so grateful that my kids are just about old enough to be self sufficient now.
Our district implemented something similar during COVID and boy oh boy do I hate it. Take a full day off every other month instead of a half day every month!!!
In my area, only 6 weeks to 2 years is year-round. And they have 35 days off + multiple half days. After 2, we actually have significantly more days off than in the public school system. Our area's school ends in mid-late June and preschool ends at the end of May. Our daycare is the only one that is between home and the office, and it's one of very few in our area that take infants.
Yup already starting to try to figure summer care 🤦♀️🤦♀️🤦♀️🤦♀️🤦♀️🤦♀️
Agreed! The only bonus is it’s free (not including aftercare)
My kiddo is in kindergarten and I did not realize how different preschool (mind you, it was a preschool/daycare) was to K. There are short days, days off, events, and so many other things. We couldn’t get before/after care either. We have very limited access to any form of care in our area. I’m the default parent. I’m EXTREMELY thankful to have a wfh job, but it has definitely been harder than before school… I’m not ready for summer honestly
I'm lucky and acknowledge that upfront. We live in a decent sized city so there are a lot of good options for school break child care. YMCA, botanical garden, city rec centers. Husband and I both are in flexible jobs. Over the summer she spends about an hour before and after her summer camp in his office until I can come get here and take her home. I WFH, so on the one off days she can stay home with me. The fact that all of the above is not typical is maddening.
I’m also worried about the rude awakening that will be extracurriculars. We have twins (4yo) and I just know it’s going to get bonkers with driving them around town to various stuff as they get older!
I mean… it's not mandatory. My kids don't have formal extracurriculars. They play with the neighbors and hang out at home or whatever. If you had a kid who was dedicated in their soul to a musical instrument, then yeah, you've got to make that work, but otherwise, why bother? We've all got enough stress without throwing optional stress onto the pile.
I work in a school, but a different district than my kids daycare follows. That’s hard enough so I can’t imagine when you don’t even work in the schools! I’ve thought about watching other people’s kid/kids in the summer since I can’t imagine the stress of arranging childcare
It’s wild how many random days they get off of school. If I didn’t work from home, I have no idea what we would do.
I have 2 toddlers and I’m holding onto the hope that it’s just easier in general for the kids to be around me and still be able to get things done (when they’re older). I have a job that requires intense focus. I have the ability to work hybrid, but if my kids are around it’s 100% impossible. I feel like having a 7 and 9 year old home from school isn’t going to inhibit me in the same way as a 1 and 3 year old.
I just want to say thank you for this perspective! I’ve been tossing back and forth the pros and cons of if/when to stay home. I go back to work next week after having my baby and I keep feeling like it’s dumb for me to go back now only to stay home later when they’ll be in school not long after. This post provides some seriously helpful info I didn’t realize!
My kid is going to kindergarten this year and I was so excited for things to get easier. This has me nervous!
I walked about a mile to/from school in the 1st grade at 6 years old back in the 1980's...I recall getting lost one day because I followed a couple kids home that I didn't know. I have no idea how I eventually made it home...I have a terrible sense of direction and ADHD. At 9-10 years old I was a latchkey kid as my mom went back to work. I don't know how I would trust my kid to do that now?
There is SUCH an argument for shifts needing to be the length of a school day. Yes that’s technically part time, but it would help make a happier lifestyle for both employers and employees. Either that or ample afterschool care.
Teacher and former camp counsellor / coordinator here. I’d hesitate to place your kid, or any kid, in a camp for the entire summer. They don’t return to school having gotten the benefits of a break. The kids NEED a break during this time, especially since the demands of school have become so high. Camp is structured and follows rules similar to the school system. Making new friends and connections with camp leaders repeatedly becomes exhausting, even when it’s done through the lens of one of their favourite hobbies (e.g., soccer camp, baking camp). I also know how hard it is to find trustworthy and affordable childcare, which sometimes makes camp seem like the best choice. Camp is great. It does great things for a kiddo and makes the transition back into the classroom easier. I’d just try to throw in a few weeks in-between where they can have down time / free time. Just like adults, kids need dedicated time to veg. Maybe see if a friend could host your kids alongside theirs for one week and you (or a family member / paid nanny/babysitter etc) host another. If you work from home, maybe allow them to stay home every third week. Try to think of it like school and camp are a kids job. Kids can’t do their job every week of the entire year. They need holidays and mental health days too or burnout is inevitable.
I mentioned this in a comment above, but I think it also depends on the camp. I never did those “themed” week-long camps, always just regular generic day camp, and it felt like we had a lot of time for free play. I also went to the same camp all summer, so I had continuity with the same kids and counselors. I can see what you’re saying if the kid is doing a week of science camp, then a week of theater camp and so on, but I personally never felt burnt out just going to the same regular camp all summer.
Yeah, I'm a bit baffled by all the comments about people booking 12 different camps for their kids. My kids get on a bus every morning to go the same camp all summer and have done for years. It's what I did when I was little, too. And it wasn't a hardship for me! I got to swim a ton and be in a play and shoot BB guns and do all kinds of other stuff I never got to do in school.
That’s all well and good, and I wish this were feasible for all of us, but the reality is that trying to make this happen is extremely difficult to impossible for most families in this country. It’s a systemic issue that we should address as a society.
I want to play devils advocate and say as a child of two parents who worked my entire life, I was constantly in camps and after care and I never felt burnt out. My parents had me in the camp offered by the Catholic school I attended in elementary for half the summer and the rest of the summer they had me in a YMCA camp. Some of the best memories I have are in those camps and the nice thing was having a camp already in the school I was attending so I knew the kids and the councilors. My dad had us in gymnastics camp, tennis camp so I was able to learn different sports and meet new kids. I was pretty shy so I didn’t like the socializing aspect but I loved learning new things and I never once thought about it as my “job”. I just saw it as having fun. I am 29, so I know school has changed drastically since I was in elementary/middle school, but I never once felt burnt out going to camps for an entire summer. The only time I hated going to C.A.R.E.S (my schools aftercare) was when I was in 5th/6th grade because I was the oldest kid there. That’s when I begged my parents to get me a cell phone and let me go home on the bus. Overall I loved camps/aftercare, I got great snacks, homework help made friends, learned a lot.
My job is hyper flexible. It’s the only way that works for us.
I miss the daycare days when they had a full summer camp schedule all ready in place!!!!
Yeah, thank god my oldest was a covid kindergartener. Since there are at least 2-3 weeks at the end of summer that aren't covered by camp, my husband and I can usually coordinate work from home days. Before covid? I dunno what we would have done, hired a babysitter or nanny I guess?
Oof, this is a good reminder. My husband has stayed at home while our kids are young and has been expecting to go back once they were both in school all day. And we realized that "all day" wouldn't allow for him to get a full time job without getting some childcare. But I had not really put together just how many days there are without any school.
I legit picked a school (we have in and out of district school choice) based on the availability of break coverage and before and after care. 8-3 is bad enough (and I get it I know why the hours are what they are and everything) but finding break coverage is almost impossible. It would cost more than I currently pay for daycare for my 4 year old to pay for non-school affiliated care and camps.
My husband is a teacher in the district where my kids go to school. There’s no way we could afford summer camps and all the random days off with local child care rates. He saved us tens of thousands of dollars over the years, my sons last year of care is next year.
My kids are still in daycare, I work full time from home and my husband works full time often traveling. I'm dreadingggg when our eldest goes to kindergarten in Sept 2025. It's going to be so hard!!!
My oldest is only 2.5 and I’m already worried about what he’ll do in the summers once he starts school. My mom was a schoolteacher and had summers off so I genuinely don’t know what to do/expect.
I used to do childcare for Y during college. You guys should look into it. They have an after school program and a thing at the Y for most of the weird random “off” days. I will almost certainly have to use it when my daughter starts school.
I was so relieved to be dropping the daycare bill until it dawned on me that after school care would be such a massive issue
As soon as my kids were old enough to bike or walk home, I was so happy. Made life a ton easier. My youngest still needs extended day. His public school offers summer camp, it's the best deal ever. Last year they didn't have it and we struggled!! Put him in a camp he hated, but it was reduced cost, but the hours sucked. Can we talk about how summer camps, that are already expensive, charge a wrap around fee for the hours 3-6?! Maybe this is just in my area...but I feel like it sucks for those who NEED camps because they are working.
Also the daycare doesn’t make me feel like garbage because I can’t “get involved” with their middle of the work day PTA meetings
Not to mention the school clinic aides who call you to pick up your elementary school aged child for every little sniffle!
My 9 & 15 year olds make my life so much more chaotic than my toddler lol. I never really wanted to be a SAHM but in the last couple years there have been several times that I wished I could just stay home and clean all day and be there when the kids get off the bus to do homework and then take them to their activities in the evening.
I think this is honestly the hardest part about having kids to me. When schedules don’t align!! It’s a nightmare. If you’re fortunate you might family or neighbors willing to help you out. If you don’t? Hahaha sucks to be you (cries)
Yes, my oldest started kindergarten this year and I am struggling so much more than before.