Mother's Day is approaching and it gives pause to think about the true value of a mother. Research tells us that parents are the child's first teacher and as an early childhood professional I fully believe this to be a true statement. I also found it interesting that Huffington Post posted a story in the political section about whether or not our nations policies are truly valuing families. With this time of poltical advertising about who has the "best" family values it should be that we have policies that are showing we value families, but in fact our policies do not give mothers and fathers that work outside the home the support that they need.
This article provides some insight on the policies about family medical leave and child care. Both of these policies directly impact our work as early childhood professionals. Either because we have parents taht are wanting to enroll children in our programs before 6 weeks of age or we know far to well how difficult it is for many families to pay the extremely high cost of child care especially the cost of infant care. Additionally, many programs also know the reality of even finding an opening for an infant because of the extremely long waiting lists.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/hannah-matthews/paid-family-leave_b_1510525.html
I applaud your efforts to impact change in public policy relating to early childhood education. I found the article you posted to be incredibly informative and was very relevant to my situation. I had a baby 9 months ago. Although I was able to stay home with her for 10 weeks and was paid, I often wish that I there were better policies in place that would have allowed me to stay with her for a longer period of time. It was very difficult to bring her to daycare at such an early age. Things did work out well for my family, however I know that isn’t the case for everyone.
ReplyDelete