A Little Big Deal
October 23, 2007 by Kristina Chew, PhD
Filed under Health
Babysitting and an afterschool program. Babysitting and an afterschool program. Good babysitting and a good afterschool program.
When I was recently asked what I most needed to manage things at work, those were the only two things that came to mind. Work is busy, things get done. But good babysitting and an afterschool program in which Charlie could be together with other kids his age, be active and be engaged: These would make the hugest difference, to me (which is why I have written about both before, as a working mother, and the mother of a special needs child). And not only because it would be nice (it would be extremely helpful) to be able to sit at my desk and attend to things without scheduling everything around 3.15pm, when Charlie’s schoolbus pulls up. Charlie has seemed very much interested in being with other people, with other kids, since this past summer—great news to me, and seeking out such a program has become a new quest.
That said, I surprised myself with a realization today. Charlie usually has a regular schedule of afternoon ABA to work on his academics and also speech therapy, but this schedule has been rather erratic recently, with therapists getting sick, parent-teacher conferences, open houses, and various adjustments. Jim puts Charlie on the bus and then works long days teaching and working in his office and Charlie has been looking expectantly at the door in the afternoons and calling for therapists who, I have had to inform him, “can’t come today.” And then, without further ado, Charlie has been finding things to do. Today, he did just this, leaving me with some minutes to write mid-semester reports and a midterm.
No big deal? I guess it isn’t.
But it was.
Charlie wanted to go swimming and put on his suit and—when I said we would have to wait an hour, until 6pm, when the pool opened for “family swim”—he sat in a chair and we worked a bit on writing some letters. (Some of which—W and R—while a bit bloblike and freeform, Charlie was clearly writing on his own.) We went to the pool, where the water slide was turned off and Charlie did some kicking and moved through the water, looking over at me often and (for several minutes) hopping up and down—I’m not sure why; he looked quite agile and was smiling. We have been trying to talk to the pool manager about getting Charlie some swim time in the big pool during adult lap swim; so far, we have been met with voice mail………
After showeing at the pool, we went grocery shopping and Charlie pushed the cart. And carried his share of bags to the car, unloaded them, carried them up the stairs to our apartment, and put everything in more or less the right places in the kitchen. (Without my asking.)
I’m still actively searching for more varied ways—preferably with other children—for Charlie to spend his afternoons. It is the case that a program for kids his age would not be the right thing for him; Charlie does not have the communication and social skills to spend long periods of time with other, “typical” 5th graders. But, as I realized today, he does not need the same kind of 24/7 supervision of just a few years ago, when I had to follow him everywhere in the house and, indeed, everywhere. Today Charlie was quite fine hanging in his room, and he also understood that he had to wait a while before going to do what he liked. He repeated my own words back: “Mom has to get some work done. Have to wait.”
Those words, said by Charlie, are a very, very big deal.
Way to go Charlie! You sure are an awesome kiddo
I can’t wait til K.C. understands more of whats said to him, that will be a super day!
You are doing so beautifully!
This is a very big deal indeed. Wonderful for both you and Charlie —and wonderful for me to be able to imagine that a day *will*( come when I don’t have to constantly supervise Nik quite so closely.
Sounds like Charlie really enjoys being your “helper,” too.
Being a Helper is incredibly important to my son. It’s a great way to refocus him when he’s getting a little too agitated. And I think that, like any kid, it gives him a feeling of importance and competence. It took a while for him to get it, but now, using keywords like “Daddy needs help to set the table” or “Daddy needs help to sort laundry” sets him into action, usually with the chant “set-da-table! set-da-table!” spoken with genuine excitement.
And man, oh, man, there is nothing like that feeling when he finally gets it and for that blessed, fleeting moment, the two of you are on exactly the same page.
That describes our afternoon and evening perfectly! Charlie and I often have the best times when we’re doing “nothing special.” I can’t say enough how proud I was to see him put away all the groceries by himself—-and he was also able to do that before eating (when he was younger, if there was food he wanted, he had to eat it on the spot).
Babysitting and after school programs are huge, no doubt about it.
It’s always great to hear of Charlie’s accomplishments. He’s a very thoughtful kid.
Joe
Great post!
I like those moments when you realize the little big deals, that’s a good way to put it. In our house, Bede has been able to deal with frustration so much more calmly than even 6 months ago. When things don’t go his way, he copes. There’s still some crying, some yelling, some thrashing – but it works out.
It’s huge.
It sounds like you have the preschool problem writ large. Or long. Yesterday I went to sign my daughter up for after-school care at her elementary school. A year in advance, mind. I was told the waiting list is 2.5 years long (and no, you can’t get a jump on it by coming in more than a year before the child starts K). How is this supposed to work for most single parents? At least at a daycare, the kid is in one place all day. Most workplaces are not going to accommodate a single mother’s leaving at various midday hours to ferry a child across town to an afternoon daycare.
A domestic question: Why is this your problem? What is Jim’s involvement in finding or providing afternoon childcare? And why are you the one looking for flexible jobs, and fending off impatient employers?
The very question makes me laugh. What do you need (which mentor or committee chair is asking)? Exactly what you said. Reliable after-school care for a child for whom specialized, hard-to-get, hard-to-keep care must be hired. Or a department that recognizes that faculty members have caregiving duties which cannot be farmed out. Care of frail parents, or parents with Alzheimers. Care of chronically ill or special-needs children. Care of chronically ill spouses, and is willing to structure a part-time position as if it is genuinely part-time.
I would cheerfully recommend to your patient mentor _Beyond Work-Family Balance: Advancing Gender Equity and Workplace Performance_, by Rapoport, Bailyn, Fletcher, and Pruitt. That is, of course, unless you want tenure.
More seriously, I would make it plain that realistically, there is probably no tenable way of scheduling you reliably for late afternoon, unless Jim is willing to take a career hit. And that you’re fortunate, given the circumstances, that the school can reliably keep your days open as it does, and that you appreciate the dept’s forward-thinkingness in recognizing these social realities. Maybe there are service or online duties you can take on that will allow you to be the sort of department person they want, without struggling to make something unlikely happen.
If the pay is good and tenure is an issue, I imagine you and Jim have already considered his scaling back until you’re tenured. I know there are people who get very angry about the idea of using the tenure system this way, but (shrug) this is what happen to colleges that refuse institutionally to acknowledge that it isn’t 1960.
If there’s not a tenure issue, you may end up — and I bet you’ve considered this, too — teaching K-12, so you get out when Charlie does. I can’t say I envy K-12 teachers but given your posts here I bet you’d be terrific at it.
[update] I called the school district central office to talk to whoever coordinates the before/after school daycare program. There is no such person. Each school works it solo, if they work it at all. Aha. No info in the “For Parents!!!!!” section on the district site either wrt childcare. I hear someone will be getting back to me.
Childcare that actually helps families: Imagine that….. When I write that “I’m worrying about afterschool care for Charlie” it’s of course a “we” talking (Jim having long ago given up a tenured position so we could move to the East Coast in the first place). I’ve taught middle and secondary school: Good experience, most likely not what I’m best at.
Yikes.
Well, I did get a call back from the district, and the nice lady tried to scrape me off the phone as fast as she could. I am invited to write to the superintendant and hope he brings it up at an administrative meeting. So I’ll do that and have a chat with the recent school board president about the best way of making a persistant nuisance of myself until the district gets shoved along towards recognizing the problem. And talk to the state-funded county childcare-coordination lady to find out how impossible it’d be to try to shift the burden of transportation to the daycares for that many children.
I am quite sure the district does not want to find itself responsible for children from 7:30 am till 5:30 pm, and that it hasn’t got funding for it. But in this district these may be solvable problems. I guess the first thing to do is to find out how many single-parent households there are in the district, and as I recall, the census collects that info.
The issue, as always, is transportation. But the rhetoric for this could be nice — little children abandoned at school, single mothers torn between picking up the children and keeping their jobs. “We expect parents to give up a lot for their children’s education. We expect them to give time, help, encouragement. Make costumes and build playgrounds, buy classroom supplies and come along on fieldtrips. But we don’t expect them to give up their livelihoods. We don’t want parents to risk their ability to support their children.” Etc. Coalition of private donors might help. Oh crap, the…ahaha. I have a grant proposal.
Small towns are good.
@amy: Working the school system is tough, that’s for sure. I actually took a job in our school system (a bit of a downgrade) so I can have the insider influence on my son’s education and placement and I am really glad I did. I hate to say it, but it makes a huge difference.
I’ve noticed that in general, the more face time you can give to the school, the better they remember you. Of course, that’s part of your dilemma…
Kristina, I didn’t mean to intimate that Jim’s not interested or involved. Just that I notice that you seem to be the one who has to manage, arrange, and do the after-school care, which is tricky when you’re working. You’re the one with rice on your files to be copied. So I’m not trying to foment marital disharmony, or play Arlie, but I wonder where Jim is in the daily work-Charlie balance picture.
@skov, I think it always makes a big difference. Luckily, I’ve been volunteering in women’s & human services here for years, worked for the city, too — it’s just the kind of place where eventually you know everybody. And it really is a small town, as far as the group that runs it goes. People here are very good about taking an extra step to do something socially worthwhile, and I think that if this isn’t set up as a school-district problem but an “our kids” issue, we can cobble something together. I suspect 3/4 of it is about airing the issue, communication, and giving people easy ways to help out. The rest is costs and keeping it safe. It’d be a lot tougher, probably not possible, if I were aiming to get the district into the full-day daycare business, or demanding they take on daycare busing. They really are not my enemy, and they’ve got a tough job. The combination of large recent immigration from urban housing projects & NCLB is comprehensively kicking their middle-class college-town butts.
That lack of open talk was a problem I ran into when my daughter was an infant — it’s insanely cold here in the winter, you can’t go outside with a baby, and there’s not a lot of baby/toddler-friendly places to go. You end up at the mall a lot. But this is also a highly transient-population town, with a lot of the young families are students and visiting faculty. So they don’t start up programs or have good networks; they just suck it up and are lonely, mostly, then move on. I was able to get the city to start an indoor baby-toddler playtime in a city rec building with a gym in it. So the parents can come, socialize, and, if they want, leave their babies with the other parents for a little bit and take turns ducking down to the gym or pool. Or just walk with the babies in a nice big hall that isn’t the living room or a mall full of Christmas shoppers. Also got a community parents’ group started that was really about the parents, not about the kids — and we had free childcare during the meetings. (There’s also a longrunning co-op playgroup which is fantastic — 2.5h every morning, all the parents become licensed childcare and CPR providers, the space is good, and you work 1 morning a week for 4 mornings’ care. The families become very close.)
It’s a lucky place to be.
Wow! Indeed a very big deal! Fantastic!
Suggestion/thought: is there a local Y or community center in the area? The one near here is very special-needs friendly, and the director has started a number of programs for kids w/special needs, many of which meet after school.
It’s our local YMCA that we swim at! They have programs for special needs kids, one of which is at a different pool; another program is on Saturday.
Your post reminded me of how recently Brendan couldn’t be on a different floor of the house than Charlie or I were on… and how it felt like my kid was tethered to me by an invisible string! Growing up does happen, doesn’t it? (Even though it feels as though it’s not gonna happen…) I hope both you & Charlie enjoy your shared freedom!
We only have one floor at the moment……
Excuse me: I’m not trying to foment blog disharmony, or play Emily Post, but I wonder where amy’s manners are sometimes on certain threads.
It is a good day when one doesn’t have to be joined at the hip, for safety or other. I don’t regret at all the intensive work in the front end that we did on “okay and safe”, “not okay and not safe”. We live in a split level and I remember taking a deep breath and sprinting between floors with one ear cocked to sounds of trouble.
Our girl’s tendency to go and play with the computer when at loose ends helps.
The afterschool thing is tough. We negotiated with our university’s afterschool program to have Eleanor attend with a shadow, but in general around here there are few programs like that after 5th grade (some of the afterschool need driven by the state law on age of unsupervised minors). It was a long work in progress to get that program started even for the NT kids, and lots of negotiation and fundraising for a special bus to pick up the kids at their school sites. So it was doable, but not quick or easy. The justifications had to do with productivity for staff and faculty with children, etc.
As a model of a beyond elementary age, I might suggest taking a look at FEAT of Washington’s website. I believe that that is a relatively new program. I’m on the west coast, but not in Seattle, so I don’t know how that is working out in real-life.
As for the childcare dilemma, we’ve had luck using some online nanny-placement websites (for a FT babysitter). Some of the sites allow you to focus your search on babysitters/nannies with experience with “special needs” children. While most applicants are looking for FT work, there are some looking for PT work with whom you could arrange afterschool care. (Many are college/grad students and can schedule classes around their PT job. Expect to pay $10/hr minimum, tho.)
We’ve luckily found a young woman in our price range, with great references, who has experience watching a child with unspecified developmental delays, whose mother is a special-ed aide who works with autistic kids, and who seems sweet and even-keeled. We are keeping our fingers crossed that things will work out. Unfortunately, not working is no longer an option for me – those pesky student loans insist on being paid!
snd: Amy has no manners. She is a professional savage. Rates available upon inquiry.
On a frankly cheerful note, we’re glad to have the “problem” of finding afterschool care for Charlie. When he was really struggling a few years ago, I just assumed that this would never be possible—that I’d have to do everything, always have him under my supervision. And that’s not, as I’m grateful to see, the case.
Does Charlie still get speech therapy in the home? Is this thru school district or insurance or just private pay?
I hope the new Middle school has a speech therapist assigned to it. Will know in Aug and if not than state complaint will be filed.
He does speech one time/week privately and we pay—the therapist is a long-time friend (originally, too, Charlie’s babysitter, school aide, ABA therapist). Happily, he’ll have the same speech therapist at middle school and she sees him 4-5 days/week.