ILX Parenting 5: I'm a big kid now

you guys need an army of those teddy bear camera things

carl what kind of fees are they talking about?

Like how much does it cost? The most expensive one was about $2,500/ month (not actually more than I make but enough to make not working a serious alternative). Cheapest runs ~ $850/month. They all require a bus or train or walking > half mile but what can you do. The home daycare a couple blocks away hasn't returned any of my messages, which I'm taking as a sign.

Yeah I think we were looking at $1000-1500/month for the nearest daycares (the cheapest of which would be a huge pain since it would mean driving in the other direction before taking a train to work). At that point it made just as much sense to have a 3x week nanny, and since K is a little physically behind kids her age, we didn't think she'd do so great in daycare yet.

we pay $180 a week but it's half as expensive as every other day care in our neighborhood

That's infant pricing, too. It will get cheaper at 15 months, I think.

n/a I wish your daycare took infants and also that our city hadn't torpedoed the Lincoln bus. Evie could have a tiny buddy in daycare with her.

The prices I quoted are considered cheap for NYC (it's Queens) -- in Manhattan you could easily pay $2000/month or more.

If $850 is the cheap end, how do low income families cope?? I don't know what prices are like where we live but $850 would mean I'd def have to quit work.

I honestly have no fucking idea. H and I have what I think by most standards would be considered good jobs, and it's still a strain. I guess some people rely on grandparents and such, but if you can't do that it's pretty hard.

i think everyone posting prices is in big cities, so i'm sure it's cheaper in the burbs or rural areas. but yeah it's a problem. there are cheaper options but i think a lot of people rely on family or rearranging schedules to make things work. people say having a kid is expensive but in our experience the cost wasn't so much having to spend money on evie but in losing income while my wife stayed home for two+ years. i'm glad she did it but our budget was very tight during that time, we basically had no disposable income.

$850 is a price for the Lakeview neighborhood. I'm sure it's cheaper in other neighborhoods in Chicago, probably considerably. We just aren't convenient them them. We're surrounded by well off white people, so those are the prices we have to pay.

Maybe in the poorer neighborhoods you're more likely to have family living close by (total guess, no stats to back this up), so daycare has to be more competitively priced. Where I live your most likely to have moved here from another state or your family lives in the burbs.

No, man, $850/month is the price west on Diversey in Logan Square. Lakeview is low to mid $1000s.

j, there are places that offer subsidized pricing and or are specifically for low-income families. It's still too expensive for a lot of incomes, though. I have a friend who takes her kids to an unlicensed home daycare that her neighbor runs (unlicensed = cheap), and some people make do with an ultimately unreliable amalgam of neighbors, family, and friends. It's not a good situation.

Oh hey what n/a said.

yeah we live in an expensive area and we don't have any family here, no close friends who could provide day care. i earn so little and hate my job so much that if we were to have kids i'd probably be caring for them full time till they went to school. which sounds terrifying tbh.

I would be into not working for six months or maybe a year, but after that I'd lose my mind.

I had no idea day care cost that much, that's a mortgage note! Do any of you guys let your children watch television or movies/cartoons? If so how much? We've been letting August watch this channel called Baby's First. Only a little in the morning while T. cooks breakfast and I sit with her and we sing along and dance. She'll sometimes watch our shows with us, but it doesn't hold her attention much. Sometimes when she's sleepy but refuses to lay down, we'll watch a cartoon with her, like Finding Nemo or Toy Story and she'll allow herself to be sleepy and falls asleep. But, I keep reading in books that any television is bad for babies. I recently read that it alters their brain development that leads to a lack of attention when they are older.

We watch TV every day. Mostly it's just when winding down for the night or when taking a break after playing hard outside. A lot of other parents think we're basically the devil though. : D

I dunno, I'm frequently astonished at how successfully the best telly or e.g. Pixar captures kids' attention completely. I can't believe it's bad if they're getting that much out of it. Plus they learn loads from something like octonauts. But it's not like we let them watch twelve hours a day anyway, I doubt these scare studies are aimed at us.

We let K watch approximately 20-30 minutes of Baby Einstein videos on the computer every day -- usually in the morning when one of us is gone and the other one needs to shower, or sometimes in the evening if one of us is doing cooking that requires attention and the other isn't home. Yes, we're using it as a babysitter, no doubt, and it's an invaluable one. The Baby Einstein videos, for all the knocking they've taken, are very slow and calm don't have the kinds of fast cuts/edits that one would imagine messing with a baby's attention span. And she's actually learned a lot of words from them.

I don't even watch TV every day myself, but my hope is just to raise K with a healthy, moderated attitude about it and other forms of entertainment, rather than treating it like some kind of demon.

Yeah that's what I was thinking. I've also had to scale back watching movies with violence, blood or lots of profanity, basically horror movies. We wait until she falls asleep to watch adult movies, which a lot of time, means we wait and wait and all of us end up falling asleep.

Just when I think Beeps is melting her mind with too much television, she'll do something like pause the show she's watching, run to the dining room table, draw a complete recreation of what's paused on the screen in full-color, push play again and continue watching the program.

That's awesome!

K also interacts pretty heavily with her videos and talks to me about them while she's watching

The one thing that creeps me out though is that she gets REALLY angry if I turn a video off before it's over

And ohmygod, that's when my 20th Century upbringing comes into play. "BACk in MY day, you couldn't PAUSE the program. You couldn't watch it ANY TIME YOU WANTED TO. No, if you weren't in front of the TV at 7 pm Friday nights, you MISSED the Dukes of Hazzard. Why, I was practically into puberty when we finally got a PAUSE BUTTON."

we mainly let evie watch tv on the weekends, most often to allow us to get more rest when she wakes up early. usually just an episode or two of something. these days she's really into super why, which is good bc it's fairly educational. we've been talking about having a family movie night soon but haven't thought of a good kids movie that doesn't have scary/traumatic stuff in it. we watched pee wee's big adventure a few weeks ago but fast-forwarded over chunks of it (large marge, etc.).

we let s watch a little TV, maybe 3-4 shows a week or something. it doesn't seem like a big deal, though yeah, she was sort of obsessed with it for a little while in the beginning. now she doesn't seem to think about it too much. and yeah, hurting 2, for a little while, she would get extremely emotional if we turned it off. but that's passed too.

i'm not opposed to tv but i feel like i get so little time with her on weekdays that i don't usually want to spend 30 minutes of it with her staring catatonically at the tv.

I tell ya, there's nothing like a 3-year-old pointing out to you possible combos you've missed in a Candy Crush screen.

I don't watch TV at all when my kids are awake. I'll let them watch a few episodes of kiddie stuff sometimes in the afternoons. The lil' one (2 y.o.) loses interest after about 20 mins; the 4 y.o. could watch all day.

The one thing that creeps me out though is that she gets REALLY angry if I turn a video off before it's over

The 4 y.o. will often get REALLY ANGRY when I turn it off, period. And I'm like, why should I let you watch TV if it leads to this?

One really shitty thing about living in 2013 is that in the "old days" Sesame Street was either on or it wasn't. It was such an EASY OUT. "Sorry, that's not on, now! It's over!" But now EVERYTHING is available WHENEVER YOU WANT so it puts everything back on you as the parent.

(I do watch with them sometimes, which I think is loads better than just parking them there while I get on with other stuff cause it leads to interactions and questions and just more general engagement)

The times when Netflix isn't working, we hear

"Turn on Netflix!"
"It's not on. What about 'real' TV?"
"Can we watch Magic Schoolbus?"
"Well, I don't know if it's on On Demand or not."
"Turn Netflix back on!"

i watch sports sometimes while evie's awake bc she will usually just ignore it but that's about it

this whole daycare thing ($110 a week, but that's for just 2 days out of the 5) wouldn't be hitting me with the same level of stress if i wasnt already trying to figure out how to magically pull $5500 out of mid air to pay for childbirth at the moment.

yea we just don't watch enough TV at all for this to be an issue right now. also J is still so little and so restless, crawling and cruising and climbing everywhere, that i don't think he'd even care about it enough to sit down and watch it. we're aware that it may be a helpful thing when he's older and we have a second child - like, who's gonna watch J while a new baby is being nursed or napped and one of us is the only adult home?

on the other hand so much kids TV is absolute garbage that contributes utterly nothing of worth to them, and i think commercials during kids shows are basically fucking evil. i see one of my nephews watching so much TV, literally i'd guess 8 hours a day, during meals, car trips, hanging around the house, all the fucking time, and it's so depressing. even the pixar stuff just gets obnoxious when he's watching cars 2 for the 3rd time that day.

thats with what most would consider pretty good insurance fyi. fuck this country. xpost

xp yeah we find we have to kind of stick to rules and specific times/places with video, since she can otherwise hypothetically watch whatever, whenever. E.g. we decided against ever having video during a meal, or really at any time other than the morning routine or cooking, and as a result, she almost never asks for it during any other time. That may change as she gets older.

the studies around tv watching are definite scary, but i could understand how they could seem abstract if you're taking a really moderate, controlled approach to tv and other media.

on the other hand, though, do you guys notice any immediate behavioral effects from TV watching? a lot of you have mentioned anger when it's turned off. my wife's siblings mentioned a huge increase in brattiness when they let their kids watch saturday morning cartoons compared to when they skip them.

we have sports on the tv a lot of the time, and the kids watch as much of that as they want (which isn't THAT much it turns out). they love the ads.

lately if i'm watching baseball or football, evie will start whining "i wanna watch a commercial" until they go to commercial

i mean yeah she complains if we turn off the tv without warning, but she would also complain if she were painting and i just suddenly took all the paints away. part of it is kids don't like to be interrupted and want to feel like they have some control.

ha my post about commercials was actually an xpost with euler

usually as long as we make the boundaries clear ('we're only going to watch one episode, then we're turning it off'), she's not too grouchy about it.

yeah setting a routine seems to be the most helpful. we let Veronica watch an hour or so in the mornings on Saturday/Sunday (lately it's been all Octonauts), or sometimes we'll rent something specifically for her to watch instead. but no TV during the week. if something happens and the routine gets messed up she can get sort of pissy about it, but it's not a big deal.

I can't wait to watch Star Trek with my kid. Then maybe the shield.

I've still never seen a Lord of the Rings movie. At this point, I'll wait until Beeps is 11 or something and we can watch it together, laugh at the awful CGI.

lol Jeff

I mean I know how cranky I feel when I watch TV or play video games for too long -- something about the combination of stimulation and inactivity. So I can see it having that effect on toddlers.

yea that's true, same here