Category: General

Did you know that childcare is really expensive? Some of you don’t have kids, and some of you plan to never have kids, in which case, you’ll never know this personally. And this post may not be for you.

Still here? Yeah, so child care is really expensive. As of a 2008 study [1] it was the largest expense on average for middle class families, eclipsing both food and housing. As of a 2013 study [2], it often exceeds the cost of tuition at a state school. As you’ll read later, I had reason to gather facts and figures on this.

In Massachusetts, the average cost of childcare is $16,000 a year. That makes us if not the most expensive state, the second most expensive. Depends on the source and timing of the data. That’s the average cost. Quality care at an accredited center, will, of course, cost more. And centers in the more affluent and higher cost of living eastern part of the state will skew above average as well.

But we are lucky. I work at a college that has a very high quality, fully accredited program that has been established for 30 years and gives about a 33% staff discount. Meaning we have been able to enroll our toddler in a top tier program for a little less than it would have cost at the not-nationally-accredited KinderCare facility that he was in when he was too young to be enrolled at Regis. (Both are still above that average figure cited above but not by much. Those geographical factors.) And obviously it is convenient, because what could be more convenient than driving where you are going anyhow? And there is a safe and spacious campus around it, so the children can go on long(er) walks to the athletic fields or the gym, or to the science department to do exploratory and educational play, etc. His previous KinderCare we referred to as day care, and the Regis center we refer to as school. That kind of difference.

That whole paragraph will soon need to be rewritten to be past tense. At the end of April we received a letter informing us that because the center has had declining enrollments and has been running at increasing deficits, the program is being terminated at the end of June and will not reopen. This was a complete shock to us and the other parents. Many of us had already signed contracts for next year. And many of the almost comparable nearby facilities have already filled up for the next year. And it was a bombshell to the teachers at the center, who will also have a hard time getting new jobs because the nearby centers have already planned out their staffing for the next year.

We’re ‘lucky’. His previous facility has openings, so we have someplace for the Jägermonster. And as good as the people there are, and as clean and pleasant as the facility is, it is very hard to return to average when you’ve had excellent and were expecting excellent as an option. But the other excellent options either don’t have full day options, are way out of our price range, don’t have openings, or some combination of the three.

The parents of the children did rally and have a meeting with the President and CFO, but I don’t know as anything will come of it.

So this is one more thing that has been adding to our mental and financial stress.

[1] http://www.pewstates.org/uploadedFiles/PCS_Assets/2008/PEW_PkN_pre-kpinch_Nov2008_report.pdf

[2] http://usa.childcareaware.org/sites/default/files/Cost%20of%20Care%202013%20110613.pdf

Some of you will have already seen this. Amanda posted on Monday night a very important piece about the state of the Amanda. In short, it hasn’t been good, but it is getting better. But to get better, we have to walk through fire. It’s an f-locked post, so if you can’t see it, ask one of us and we’ll share the details and/or add you to the f-list.

And as the bottom of her post says, “Thank you all for reading and caring. We really need it right now. Another post will be coming soon, for as they say, it does not rain but it pours and there is more, but it needs it’s own write up.”

So, forgive me if this is a dumb question, but where did everyone go?

A forced change to livejournal (friend’s page no longer accepts custom styles) has pushed me to go to each of the friends that I follow and resubscribe to their individual pages.

And I keep seeing a wasteland. So many last updates that say things like ‘2010’, ‘2009’, ‘2007’. Where did everyone go? I see posts from the same dozen people on a regular basis, but there used to be a lot more people out there.

So where did everyone go?

I know about Twitter. I’m there, but the posts are short and stream by. Don’t get me started about Facebook. The drek drowns out the good stuff all too often. And too much is stuffed onto one page. Tumblr? Pinterest? Pretty, but mostly empty from what I’ve seen.

Where do people go to actually…. write? Journal to their social network? Connect?

And I know, for the longest time I’ve written on my own wordpress blog and crossposted to LJ (and now… FB too. Not that I go there myself). So I’m one of those people who is ‘not there’ in some sense.

I accept that my social life isn’t what it was. But looking at the data while redoing the LJ connections… man, it really isn’t what it used to be. And a lot of it used to be keeping connected to people on LJ in a way that I just don’t feel connected on other network sites. And these days I’m not feeling connected to many people at all. So here I send out a post into what seems to be an ever fading arena, knowing that the dozens of people who haven’t updated in five years aren’t going to see it, just as I don’t see anything from them.

Part of me wonders when a social network connection is so underutilized that it should be pruned entirely. I’ve readded these dead connections. IT doesn’t cost me much at all. No posts means nothing shows up in my feeds. No words require me to triage their value and exert neurons to process them. And if someone does come back, the connection is still there. But perhaps there is an unseen, unknown weight and drag from these old connections.

I feel like I’ve missed some secret. That all these connections have been moved somewhere else, and I’m the one who wasn’t told about it, or doesn’t know how to get to them. Is there some way to make Facebook functional? Or have people given up on the concept of social networks entirely? Did people move to some site that died or never thrived (xanga, myspace, Google+) and then never have the heart to try again? I know, again, I’m asking this of the wrong audience, because the only audience that will see it is almost definitionally the wrong one. Am I echolocating across a featureless plain? Only getting back what I already know to be there?

No heat. Service person has been called, but won’t be here for another hour. Not sure when it cut out but when I checked the temp when I got home from work it was in the mid 50s. Yes, the timing sucks, but these things usually happen when they’re stressed, so of course this will happen in the winter time.