Do You Ever....?

[Unregistered]

Maybe I'm just the odd man out, but I don't see why it matters?

I mean, I get that you want the mother to spend time with her child. It's perfectly understandable, however it shouldn't impact you in any way. As long as she is following your contact, paying on time, and being a good parent over all, you don't really have anything valid to be upset about.

We all need breaks and it definitely sounds like you need one. But you don't know what she is doing while dck is in your care. You don't know anything about how or what she's thinking, and frankly it's none of your business.

Your job is to take care of children. You can't just put up stipulations like "parent must be employed" or "parent must spend a minimum of blank hours with child in order to be eligible."

You care, and that's great, but just do your job. :/

[Blackcat31]

Maybe I'm just the odd man out, but I don't see why it matters?

I mean, I get that you want the mother to spend time with her child. It's perfectly understandable, however it shouldn't impact you in any way. As long as she is following your contact, paying on time, and being a good parent over all, you don't really have anything valid to be upset about.

We all need breaks and it definitely sounds like you need one. But you don't know what she is doing while dck is in your care. You don't know anything about how or what she's thinking, and frankly it's none of your business.

Your job is to take care of children. You can't just put up stipulations like "parent must be employed" or "parent must spend a minimum of blank hours with child in order to be eligible."

You care, and that's great, but just do your job. :/

Many others in this thread said they did not care what parents do when using their services so you are not the odd man out.

But your ending comments are false, as a self-employed business owner I CAN (and many do) state that care/services will ONLY be provided if the parent is working.

As a self-employed business owner, I can put up any stipulations I'd like (within the law) and choose to have whatever rules I want to have. Parents get to choose if they can or can't abide by MY stipulations.

Parents do not define "my job" and what it entails.
I do.

If a parent wants to dump their kid and get tons of "me time", they are certainly welcome to do so as individual parenting style is a choice too but the child care provider doesn't have to just turn a blind eye and do "her job"....she/he gets to choose whether or not she will provide services to a family and for what reason.

[MarinaVanessa]

An easy way to have parents keep their kids home with them when they are not working or at school is to charge for days/hours that they use only. Clients of providers that pay for the week no matter if their child attends or not will want to get their money's worth and I'll admit it, so would I. I wouldn't like being charged for a service that I wasn't able to use. Before I did daycare I had a provider that charged weekly and I didn't like paying for days that I was off so I switched (among other reasons) to a provider that only charged me for the days I needed to use. I didn't take my daughter to daycare on days that I didn't work.

I think here what's bizarre is that many of us here like me, wouldn't think of leaving our kids with someone else unless we couldn't physically have them with us because we know that they are our kids and therefore our responsibility. Kids aren't easy and if we'd had wanted easy we wouldn't have chosen to have kids. But there is also a significant number of parents out there that don't think that way and like easy and have no problem taking their kids to daycare on weekdays whether they work or not on a regular basis and then to grandmas house on weekends etc. That's what bizarre and I think that's what leaves a bad taste in everyone's mouth BUT not much we can do about how other people parent and if we let it .. it'll stress us out.

Not all parents are great parents

[Unregistered]

At one time I considered changing my business name to T's Child Care For Working Parents.
Instead I changed to contracted hours. Note: if no $$ are attached to your contracted hours, parents just ignore them and come whenever they want (dropoff and pickup). Totally sold it as "take control of your care costs."

In the horse and buggy days I expected parents to tell me if they were not at work, in case of emergency. But now I rarely call a work # b/c most prefer to be called on their cell.