Childcare centres, Nannies, waiting lists, and working after hours

Mr Cholet and I were talking about how good it would be to have a nanny the other day or rather to make it more affordable, a nanny share. My son is in day care four days a week – two of those in family day care and two in a day care centre. He loves the day care centre but is getting bored with family day care – just not enough to interest him. We can’t get four days at the day care centre as they don’t offer that amount of days, which is understandable as they would find it hard to off-load the fifth day.

Being able to share a nanny with another family would certainly take the load off of day-care centres, however there does need to be minimum qualifications applied – perhaps not so stringent – but you can’t just get a rebate for having the old lady next door look after them.

Back in my heyday when I was not yet Australian, I did a one year course at Montessori in London. That was all I needed to get a diploma in childcare. I was then let loose on unsuspecting children at the ripe old age of 19. Perhaps needs to be a bit more rigorous than that though.

I have so far been lucky enough to structure work so that we can drop off Master Cholet around 8am and pick him up at 4.30, but I know that might not be the case in the future. I detest the thought of after-school care or leaving him for so long at day-care that I don’t get any quality time with him at the end of the day that is not interrupted by making meals, bath time, and ultimately his relatively early bed time.

The thing that annoys me more than the lack of choice in child care, is the fact that Master Cholet will not be able to go to school until he is 5 and a half. because his birthday is mid-year I went to school before I turned 5 as there was a spare spot available. I had no experience of child care or kindy, nothing, but did not find going straight to school too traumatic. I think our children are ready for school earlier because of the fact that they have been in child care since they can remember. Couple that with the financial side of things and I think parents are aching for school days to come along! For the cost of day-care at the moment, I could send Master Cholet to Canberra Grammar.

I’ve cast an eye over pre-school around my area and it just does not fit with what I could do in terms of minimum hours at work – have to earn that crust unfortunately and I have to do it between longer hours than 9-3!

I believe that au-pairs/home helps can be tax deductible. It’s whether or not you trust them with your children is the question. Plus you may have to provide accommodation which is not possible or wanted in most cases.

Spaces come up in childcare in December/Jan and Feb and rarely at other times of year.

There are just not many spaces to go around. a childcare baby room may have 9 or 12 babies a day (kids up to 2), and of those not many families will leave town, or babies turn two in the space of a year, so for any good childcare centre, they will only get about 5 new babies in a year, and those will be siblings of other kids at the centre who have priority.

It gets slightly easier for kids over 2, but still very hard to get in.

For those who are in a centre, Canberra’s growing peak hour traffic is making the 6.00 pick up harder and harder. I have suggested our centre stay open til 6.30 but the staff were not keen.

I think any centre that opened late would be overrun, but they would have to run a bus to all the other centres to pick up the kids at closing time – if parents had to leave work to move the kids over it would defeat the point.

threepaws said :

The waiting lists for childcare centres are ridiculous. I have had my name on the list at six centres since November 2010 (when pregnant), and I’m not even close to getting a place. I have since returned to work part time and was lucky enough to find a fabulous family day carer. I have now left my name on the lists at centres out of sheer curiosity, just to see how long it actually takes before I receive that long awaited call.

You probably won’t even get a call. I’m just going through the process now and a couple of centres have asked me to ring back every 6 weeks or so and have basically said that if they don’t hear from people they assume that they’ve found care and are no longer looking.

Unfortunately it’s also impossible to tell how long the waiting lists really are as everyone is putting their name down on multiple centres and often not taking their name off so it’s impossible to guess what the waiting times really are.

I want to return to work but am not prepared to start job hunting before I’ve got childcare confirmed. It’s a tedious process but I’m lucky because I don’t know what I’d do if I had to work….

The waiting lists for childcare centres are ridiculous. I have had my name on the list at six centres since November 2010 (when pregnant), and I’m not even close to getting a place. I have since returned to work part time and was lucky enough to find a fabulous family day carer. I have now left my name on the lists at centres out of sheer curiosity, just to see how long it actually takes before I receive that long awaited call.

In one of my many phone calls to the centres trying to scrounge a day or two so I could work, I asked why, if the demand is so high, that there aren’t more centres operating? The short answer was ‘too expensive to set up and run’.

Mr Threepaws is a shift worker and could actually care for Baby Threepaws some of the time thanks to his rotating roster. We can’t actually do this though – of course we have to book a permanent place, and we can only have a certain amount of absences per year before the government pulls the pin on the rebate (which is fairly hefty).

In answer to your questions, in my experience of searching for care, there are very few (if any) places that offer flexibilty outside of normal working hours and allow for fixed rotating rosters or shift work. For people under these conditions, a nanny would be the best option. However, the expense of a nanny is prohibitive for most unless you have more than one child in care.

I am only assuming that nannies need to be suitably qualified and must adhere to the same ratios as family day carers (at any one time, four children under school age and three children of school age ie before and after school). If you had two families in the same street with four littles and three biggies between them, I think a nanny would be a good choice!

Do nannies charge for time or per child?