Parental Thread

[badgerx3]

Congrats 6793026. 44 hours in the hospital sounds miserable especially for wifey. I hope everyone is atleast settled in at home now and enjoying (or surviving) new born life.

To share some personal experiences, I agree with other users that the insistence on breast milk is somewhat overboard. Similarly, my wife had issues with producing milk in the start. Amongst other things, post-partum, it spiralled her mental health, especially being a new parent.

We looked into the tongue tie thing as well, but eventually our little guy figured it out before we pursued anything further. However, the above experience, atleast in my opinion, could've been avoided if they weren't so pushy on the whole breast milk ideology.

As a result of all of this, my wife pumped like crazy over the first 6-8 months after birth, thinking our little guy would starve. My little guy stopped taking to the bottle after the 3rd month, so here we are with a stockpile of frozen milk that probably is no longer usable lol.

I know it's easy for us guys (aka the husband) to say don't worry about it, but I can only imagine the mental anguish a mother goes thru when something so essential and primitive to human life, she cannot do.

[Traum]

Originally Posted by 6793026

i do have the luxury of working from home so hoping I can still ttake care of the child and skip daycare.

Don't forget that daycare is also essential to the child's development because they need to learn socialization with their peers. Even if one of the parents is a stay-at-home parent, I'd say insist on sending the child to daycare.

If I have 2 kids, I'd still send both to daycare.

If I have 3, then it gets too expensive, and I'd say one of the parents should just become a full time stay-at-home parent to look after the kids. Plus at that point with 3, there are enough of them to learn socialization together.

[westopher]

If you want to take care of the kid and work from home, expect to get approximately 1 hour of work per 8 hour day, MAX.

[EvoFire]

Originally Posted by 6793026

Babies don't NEED much, it's the parents. I like what EvoFire said - use the money from private school for trips. That's a great rebuttal and true. I rather take my kid to go to HK with that money saved. I came from public school and I turned out fine. Wife is private and went to become top student all of Ontario (no joke) and a health care professional. SO it's a tough balance on what's good and bad.

i do have the luxury of working from home so hoping I can still ttake care of the child and skip daycare.

Go sign up for daycare. Unless you don't want to get any work done during the day and work after the kid goes to bed every night. Depending on the kid, you don't get any reprieve until they are 3, but realistically closer to 5.

My son is turning 6 in Sept. He's in his last day of kindy today. He only can self entertain for 70% of the day until recently. Before that he'll be constantly needing attention. I still had to tell him to go away cause I was trying to solve a technical problem and he kept babbling in my office

My daughter is 2.5y old. She is roughly 40% independent in that she can focus and play for pretty good stretches which is a lot better than my son (girl boy differences). But then she's also stopped napping at home and 1-2pm when the nap bug hits is very taxing for us.

So it's great to be able to spend time with them, send them to daycare unless you don't have work.

Originally Posted by Traum

Don't forget that daycare is also essential to the child's development because they need to learn socialization with their peers. Even if one of the parents is a stay-at-home parent, I'd say insist on sending the child to daycare.

If I have 2 kids, I'd still send both to daycare.

If I have 3, then it gets too expensive, and I'd say one of the parents should just become a full time stay-at-home parent to look after the kids. Plus at that point with 3, there are enough of them to learn socialization together.

I would only partially agree with this. I had that thought as well for a long time, but we are seeing friend's who have kept their kids at home and they are socializing fine. But they do have larger families and they see people outside of their nuclear family regularly

Originally Posted by westopher

If you want to take care of the kid and work from home, expect to get approximately 1 hour of work per 8 hour day, MAX.

Maybe not that extreme, maybe 2.5h/8

[badgerx3]

When wifey and I learned we were expecting, I was WFH full-time at that point in time. Wifey initially thought it would be OK if I didn't take any parental leave since I was able to WFH and my job was pretty flexible.

It was only my manager who insisted I take time off that made me decide to take the first 6 months off. In hindsight, I sure am glad I took that advice. We were living in a 1BR apartment so when I eventually returned back to work, it was manageble at first but when they start becoming mobile it was quite the task to balance working but also keeping my little guy entertained, regardless of the size of the space.

Long story short, similarly to you, I thought by being able to WFH we could save some money on child care and such. Now that I am in the thick of it, I do not believe that is possible, even if both parents are WFH. Fortunately, right now, wifey is staying at home to be able to provide child care. But even then, there are times where it becomes too much for her and she needs a break, even if she doesn't say she does.

[RabidRat]

Originally Posted by Traum

Don't forget that daycare is also essential to the child's development because they need to learn socialization with their peers. Even if one of the parents is a stay-at-home parent, I'd say insist on sending the child to daycare.

Originally Posted by EvoFire

I would only partially agree with this. I had that thought as well for a long time, but we are seeing friend's who have kept their kids at home and they are socializing fine. But they do have larger families and they see people outside of their nuclear family regularly

I read that til something like 2.5 ish years old, kids don't really socialize with other kids: til then, they're picking that up via interaction with adults.

So the advantage of daycare really picks up after that point. Before then, there's a lot of positive effect from focused & undivided interaction w/ adults.

That's not necessarily realistic though. I thought about taking off work til both kids hit 2.5 years old but damn, that's a serious sacrifice.

[Traum]

Most daycares -- at least here in Vancouver -- don't take children younger than 2.5 yrs old though. And I agree that when the child is too young -- let's just use 3 yrs old as tthe watershed age, even though we all know it isn't black and white, the socialization benefits from daycare isn't really there.

[RabidRat]

Wow. So then who takes care of the kids?!

Parental leave maxes out at 1.5 years here in Canada (and even then, with the last 6 months unpaid), I thought?

[westopher]

My kid was in daycare at 10 months.

[supafamous]

I think it's more like some don't take kids below 3y and not that most don't - it's to do with staffing levels that are required I think so some opt not to do it. When I was shopping around we applied at 3 daycares and all of them took them in but we were specifically looking for those of course but just walking around my neighbourhood I see home daycares that don't do it.

[westopher]

Yeah I think in earlier ages you need to have either 3 or 4 kids to teacher ratio and once they hit 2.5/3 it’s 6 kids to teacher.

[supafamous]

Any of you in a parents group chat with your kids classmates? I find it fascinating that despite the dad's being reasonably present with stuff like drop off, pick-ups, and field trips that the group chat is pretty much 98% the mom's talking. My wife has become friendly with a number of mom's and this seems true for most of the mom's but the dads are all arms length - most of us barely know the names of each other. I found the same with our daycare parents chat - not a peep from the dads in that group.

I suppose this is stereotypical of the personality of men and women and also the default roles of parents - the mom's are just parent #1 especially when the kids are young.

[Traum]

Yeah, the provincial rules for looking after children under 3 is a ratio of 1 adult staff to 4 children, whereas the rules for those from 2.5 yrs old and up is 1:8. The qualifications of the childcare provider (staff) is also higher for someone looking after children under 3 yrs old.

https://www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/f...sed-child-care

Back when I was looking for daycare (about 6 months into the pregency), I think only 1 out of all the places I called was willing to take a child under 3 years old, with another one willing to take children at 2.5+ yrs old. Mind you, I wasn't specifically looking for places that take children under 3 -- I was just calling all the licensed non-home based places that I found. And at the time (before COVID), none of the places where I was put on the waitlist had space available before my kid turned 3.

Potentially because the overwhelming percentage of places that I called only took 3+ yrs old kids in, most of these places also required the child to be potty-trained. I think only 1 or 2 places were OK with taking in non-potty trained children. Of course every single one of them was OK in dealing with "accidents".

[underscore]

What is there to talk about in a group chat with my kids classmates parents? My kids teacher gives us a list of phone numbers at the start of the year (opt-in obviously) so people can call or text for birthdays or play dates but that's it afaik.

[EvoFire]

There's actually plenty places that take under 3, but for us it was the trouble of segregating the age groups. A 18m old plays very differently from a 4 year old. A lot of places mix the classes and we didn't want that.

There are also municipal rules regarding daycares. Burnaby has more defined rules so there's less mix age operations.

The daycare situation is Vancouver proper is terrible. Burnaby and Richmond has a lot more options.