Childcare

No parent likes to imagine the specter of disposable diapers piling up in the landfills when she chucks another used one into the Diaper Champ, but the eco-friendly options are so unappealing. Washing cloth diapers at home necessitates the touching of lots of nasty things (and probably a malodorous diaper pail in the bathroom); gDiapers aren’t as flushable in antique Bay Area plumbing as they could be; diaper-free can be a full-time job.

Sunnyvale’s Earth-Baby is a nice halfway alternative for the parent who wants to lower her carbon footprint without stress. For $29.99 a month the company delivers compostable disposables, and picks them up weekly when they’re um, full. You still have to pay for the corn-based diapers (about $12 for a pack of 22-44, depending on size) and wipes, but it still works out to be a bit cheaper than cloth diaper services. And everything you hand back to the company is either composted, recycled, or reused.

Earth-Baby serves San Francisco and South Bay/Peninsula cities as far down as Santa Cruz. Call 650-641-0975 or visit earth-baby.com.

Ask most parents their biggest hope for their kids and they’ll give the same answer: “I just want them to be happy.” But no one seems to know exactly how that’s done. Does it involve parents always being around or letting kids develop their independence? Is it all about limits and discipline, or should you merely ignore bad behavior and praise the good? If you give your kids dessert every night, are you teaching them to enjoy sweets in moderation or getting them addicted to sugar?

Well, Christine Carter’s Half Full blog probably won’t weigh in on that last one, but the first two questions are eminently fair game as this UC Berkeley PhD, whose specialty is the study of happiness in children, synthesizes social science research to provide sensible advice to parents. Popular past topics include “How Not to Raise an Ungrateful Brat” and “The Right Way to Praise Kids” (hint: praise effort, not innate qualities). Hey, now you have the science to back up your opinions. Nice!

Economic hard times have an unexpected beneficiary: kids, who suddenly get to spend more time with out-of-work Daddy. Eighty percent of recent recession layoffs have been male; that leaves an awful lot of fathers “getting thrown into roles at home,” says Jeremy Adam Smith, San Francisco author of new book The Daddy Shift: How Stay-at-Home Dads, Breadwinning Moms, and Shared Parenting Are Transforming the American Family.

But the new crop of homebound Daddies is just a continuation of several-decades-long trend in America, Smith told the New York Times‘ blog Motherlode: “Today, 80 percent of mothers work and a third of wives make more money than their husbands. In response, men have evolved, though many people fail to see it. Since 1965 the number of hours that men spend on childcare has tripled. Since 1995 it has nearly doubled. Fathers now spend more time with their children than at any time since researchers started collecting longitudinally comparable data.”

As Smith’s argues, never have American couples had more of a need for flexibility, with each pitching in on home, work, and childcare duties as needed. In response, dads are throwing themselves into the stay-at-home-dad job; and finding it as exhausting, exhilarating and demanding as their wives.

In a story that should (and will) chill parents who use Craigslist to find babysitters, news broke last week that a Minnesota man who answered a Craigslist ad seeking babysitters made a pornographic video of the two-year-old girl left in his care. Aaron Jay Lemon, 23, pled guilty to charges that may land him in prison for up to 30 years.

So maybe hiring a stranger from the Internet to watch your child isn’t the greatest idea. But what can families who have no close relatives find a trustworthy sitter? Some safety tips:

• Use referrals, not online ads: The people you know are your best source of sitters. Ask friends with kids if they’ll share contact information for favorite sitters. Ask people at work with older kids if these teens or tweens are interested in babysitting. Know a babysitter who’s too busy to take you on? She probably knows other good sitters, ask her for recommendations. Consider young people or adults you know through church or community organizations; ask them for recommendations. Know any teachers? They are a fertile source of young sitters.
• Consider sit-swapping with other parents. You could, say, watch a friend’s kids every alternate Friday night, if you get every other Sunday afternoon off. Kids love what’s essentially a playdate, and you get a break.
• Utilize “Parents Night Out” programs, which occur every weekend night in most cities and are like a drop-off kids’ party. Local YMCAs or YWCAs often have such nights, as do other child-oriented businesses. Ask around or Google “parents night out” and your city to find them.
• If you can’t find a sitter through recommendations, consider an online service like sittercity.com or 4sitters.com or a local agency like the Marin Child Care Council, Oakland’s BANANAS or Town & Country Resources, with several branches in the Bay Area. These services sometimes require you to join to use their network, but they do background checks on potential sitters, and offer references to parents.
• Speaking of references, always check them. When you interview a sitter, call her references as soon as she leaves. Ask about any problems parents had with this sitter, or about her style of interacting with the kids.
• Always interview prospects in person before they come over to watch your children. This is the best way to get a sense of the sitter: is she trustworthy? Fun? Kind? Is she straightforward and honest, or does she give you the creeps in any way? Trust your instincts; if something seems wrong, lose the sitter’s number no matter how desperate you are.
• Have a trial run. Have the sitter care for your baby while you are at home. You can interact with them, and gradually drift into your room to read a book, listening for any trouble.

One of the things that most freaks out parents whose children are cared for by nannies or daycare workers is the thought that someone else is teaching–or even worse, not teaching–their child etiquette. How can you be sure that Nanny frowns on talking with your mouth full, or that Eli will be corrected if he calls Noah a big, fat, stupid dingleberry on the playground?

Nannies and caregivers can learn the basics of teaching kids how to be polite and kindly at “Let’s Talk About Etiquette,” a 1.5 hour seminar presented by local etiquette academy It’s a Piece of Cake. This class is not intended to delve into the mysteries of oyster forks and finger bowls; instead, it’s a crash course on teaching manners to young ones: when to let someone else have the swing, how to behave on a playdate. Parents can tag along for instruction, but this class is intended for professional caregivers of children preschool age or younger.

Pre-registration is required; to sign yourself or your child’s caregiver up call 415-987-1946 or visit itsapieceofcake.net. The class is from 6:30 to 8pm tonight, 12/3, costs $35, and is held at 350 Townsend Street, Suite 316 (between 4th and 5th Streets) in San Francisco. Other sessions will take place in the spring if you miss tonight’s session.

Working at home during naps sounds so easy–until you actually try it. Yes, I too thought my newborn baby might sleep in a basket under my desk, waking up for storytime and hugs before drifting peacefully back to sleep again when I needed to meet a deadline.

Ha, ha, and also, ha. Nothing is as tough on a work schedule as a small child, who, awake or asleep, has you hopping, and it’s tough to get work done when you’re fetching milk, Play-Doh, and the remote control so an episode of Dragon Tales will give you some sweet, sweet relief.

Down in Menlo Park, however, at least one group of enterprising parents has found a solution: Cubes&Crayons brings together rent-able shared office spaces with onsite childcare. Opened in January of 2008, Cubes&Crayons offers a variety of care packages: You can rent a space by the month or by the year, full-time or a specified number of hours a week, bringing infants or children all or part of the time you’re there. You can buy drop-in day passes or half-day passes, with or without childcare; with childcare and a shared office, rates run about $20 an hour, just $5 more than the Bay Area’s going nanny hourly rate. Working 10 hours a week with childcare will run you about $600 a month.

Cubes&Crayons has proved so popular in the South Bay that they’re headed north. The San Francisco office is in its planning stages right now and seeking investors and early adopters. Got a question? Contact Felicity at felicity@cubesand crayons.com.

The Menlo Park location of Cubes&Crayons is located at 1122 Crane Street (at Santa Cruz Avenue), Menlo Park, 650-323-2551, cubesandcrayons.com. The Menlo Park mothership also has a nice blog, with profiles of members and information on other activities going on at the branch, like yoga classes and date nights.

If you’re in the nauseous trimester of pregnancy, you may want to stay far away from last weekend’s San Francisco Chronicle story, European nations offer incentives to have kids. Because as you’re looking down the barrel of a two-week maternity leave, followed by multiple years of ceding most of your salary to keep your kid in a crappy daycare, you’re definitely going to puke.

Concerned about declining birth rates, countries such as Sweden and France offer up lengthy maternity leaves, government-subsidized daycare, cheap health care, tax breaks and other sweetmeats to couples who breed.

In France:

Mothers with three children can take a year off of work - and receive a monthly paycheck of up to $1,180 from the government to stay home. Families get subsidized public transportation and rail travel and holiday vouchers.

and in Sweden:

Fathers and mothers are entitled to 18 months paid leave from the government. There is also subsidized child care and flexible work hours to accommodate working families.

and in Great Britain:

In 2007, the government extended paid maternity leave from 26 to 39 weeks. The measure also allows fathers up to 26 weeks of unpaid paternity leave.

Contrast that with the United States, one of only two industrialized countries where maternity leave is not guaranteed by the government. Instead, leave is left to the employer’s discretion, and they don’t have to offer squat. Subsidized daycare? It exists, but in such a substandard form that only the truly desperate would choose it. Flexible work hours and paternity leave? Don’t make me laugh.

It’s enough to make this U.S. mom want to emigrate.

It’s not hard to find a babysitter who will arrive at a scheduled time and watch your child for upwards of $15 an hour, which works fine for a dentist’s appointment or a workday shift. But what about those days when your children are driving you around the bend, when you’ve dealt out ten time-outs already and there are still hours until bedtime?

If your dark night of the soul happens to occur between 5:30 and 8:30pm on a Monday or Friday, or 9:30am-5:30pm on a Saturday, boy are you in luck. The San Francisco Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Community Center offers free drop-in childcare for kids up to age 12, diaper-wearers included. While your children are in the cheery and friendly playroom, you can attend a class, use the computer room, go to a Center event (like the monthly Monday evening Buddhist meditation group), or just go sit down at the cafe and drink a cup of tea in blessed, blessed silence. As long as you stay in the building you’re in the clear.

If your child is in diapers you must pre-register; call Emael at 415-865-5553 for registration and other questions or visit sfcenter.org.

If you have an indifferent nurser or a bad latcher, you may find yourself getting a little paranoid that your newborn isn’t getting enough milk. Is she getting anything at all? How much? Why aren’t there ounces marked on your breasts, anyway?

A call to the pediatrician will net you the following sage advice: if the baby is breastfeeding and gaining weight, he’s getting enough. But who knows if the kid’s gaining weight when she only weighs as much as a economy-size bottle of detergent? How can you tell the difference between 7 pounds and 7 pounds, 1 ounce? Are you supposed to whip out the postal scale or what?

Here’s a better option: soothing retail outlet DayOne (locations in San Francisco’s Laurel Village and Palo Alto) offers gliders and nursing pillows aside precision baby scales. You bring in your baby, strip him down and weigh him, then breastfeed and weigh again. There, you see! You’re doing just fine. Stick around DayOne to browse the parenting library, attend a support group, or just sit with other mamas nursing their babies; the store’s a vital resource for parents of infants and young kids.

A night out looks a lot pricier from this side of the baby divide. Even if you only have one sprout, most babysitter charge upwards of $15 an hour. Add that to the cost of dinner and a movie and date night starts to empty Junior’s college fund.

A better option, for those whose kids have left the pull-up stage: San Francisco Gymnastics’ Parents Night Out, a bi-monthly party for kids age 41/2 and up. Parents drop the tot at 5:30 or 6pm (depending on if it’s a Friday or Saturday) and race off to enjoy themselves, while kids are stuffing their faces with pizza, playing games, navigating obstacle courses around the gym, and watching a movie. According to one savvy mom I know, most kids bring their pajamas and a sleeping bag for the movie portion of the evening, and by the time parents return at 9:30 or 10pm the kids are exhausted, pliable, and ready to fall asleep like a lil angel in the car. The best part? Parents Night Out is just $25 for singleton kids, $20 for each sibling.

Find out more at sanfranciscogymnastics.com.