Who should read this chapter? If you are paying someone to take care of your children, you should read this chapter. This includes baby sitting, day care, preschool, after school care and other child care.

Summary: In the pursuit of our careers, jobs and material wealth, all our time spent working is time taken away from our children. Highly successful, busy, working parents have often chosen to pay others to take care of their children. If given a choice of low, medium or high income, we would pick a high income. But if this choice requires that we must sacrifice time spent with our children, would we pick the same choice? Do we really want someone else raising our children so that we can work to gain career advancement and material wealth? Perhaps we should prefer a medium income with more of our time spent with our children so that we can raise them and instill them with our values.

Do you want someone else to raise your children? Consider that children are most impressionable when they are young. How they grow up and the values they acquire are most dependent upon their experiences during these young years. Unfortunately, while our children are young, parents are usually working extra hard to establish their job careers. It is important for young adults to get good jobs, work hard and maximize their chance of promotion and future career opportunities. It is also an important time for children who need time with their parents. Who should share their time to spend with these young children? As parents, should it be us, or should we get someone else to raise our children?

Examine the typical work day of a young adult and their interaction with their children:

6:00 am: Wake up time. Dress for work. There might be time for breakfast.

6:30 am: Grandma arrives to watch children in the morning.

6:40 am: Parent leaves home for work. The children are still sleeping.

7:15 am: Children awake and are fed breakfast by grandma.

7:30 am: Parent arrives at work.

7:45 am: Grandma drops children off at day care program.

8:00 am: School starts. Parents busy at work.

5:00 pm: Parents complete a 9-hour day at work. Ten and 12 hour days are not uncommon.

6:00 pm: Parent arrives at day care program to pick up children.

6:30 pm: Dinner at a fast food restaurant.

7:15 pm: Arrive home. Bath time.

8:00 pm: Time for the children to go to bed. Exhausted parent reads a book for the children.

8:30 pm: Parents unwind, bathe, watch TV for a while, pay a few bills, etc.

11:00 pm: Parents go to sleep.

How much time is spent with children on a typical day like this? Weekends can make up for this, but is this enough? Other people spent 50 hours with your children this week. You spent only 10 hours during the week plus two weekend days. Is this enough? Who is raising our children? Is it us? Or, is it someone else? Are we paying someone else to raise our children?

Hire a nanny. Hire a baby sitter. Hire a live-in child care helper. Send our children to day care. Arrange an after school program for our children. Hire a tutor for our children. What are we really doing here? Are we paying someone else to raise our children? In a given week, are our children spending more time with parents or with others? Is it a good idea to have our children raised by someone else? How will our children's values be shaped? Do we want our children to be shaped by our views or by the views of others?

I cannot emphasize this more. Young children are very impressionable. Spending one hour with a 3 year old can have a substantially greater impact on their ultimate development than spending one hour with an 18 year old. Time spent with your children when they are young is time well spent.

Which of the following is more important to a child?

1. Child supervision and nurturing by a variety of individuals coupled with material family wealth.

2. Child supervision and nurturing by a consistently available parent providing quality time.

If you picked #1 above, then you believe that both parents should work hard to develop successful careers. Material wealth follows with a comfortable home, nice cars and a more generous budget for the children's college education. If you picked #2 above, then you believe that at least one parent should be available at home most of the time. The benefit of this is obvious and the disadvantage is a lower income, less material wealth and a lower budget for a college education.

The correct choice is not exactly clear. Each choice has a substantial tradeoff that must be sacrificed. It basically boils down to sacrificing your income/career versus sacrificing time with your children (your career versus your children). This is not an easy decision to make. While your children are young, your time spent with them is critical. This is when they need you the most. It is unfortunate that during this same period, your future career is highly determined by how much promise and dedication you demonstrate at your new job. Full time workers, overtime workers and especially workers who take work home with them, are given preferential advancement/promotion opportunities over part time workers and workers who frequently attend to family matters in preference over their jobs.

This is not an easy decision to make. This chapter discusses the advantages of working less to spend more time with your children. This choice is not necessarily the RIGHT choice for you. Only you can make this decision for your family. You must weigh the pro's and con's and make a decision that you can be comfortable with.

We have all heard of horror stories in which baby sitters, nannies and preschool operators have brought harm upon a child. You can never be too careful. Child abuse by "carefully" selected individuals has occurred on many occasions. It is better and safer to take care of your own children but we all need some income to be comfortable.

What can be done about this? I have the following suggestions:

1. Make a decision on how much money you need. If one job in the household is not enough, consider 1-1/2 jobs where one parent works full-time and the other works part-time.

2. If two parents must work, stagger your work schedules so that each parent has different days off. This reduces couples' time spent together since they don't have days off together. If each parent has two days off, this results in four days off potentially full-time spent as a parent during the 7-day week.

3. Some careers offer three day work weeks such as three 12-hour shifts per week. These schedules offer four full days off during the week.

4. When child care and baby sitters are needed, use blood relatives. Grandparents are the most ideal. Hopefully, you've treated your parents well and have a good relationship with them. If you are lucky, you may have four grandparents available. Rotate the children between them on a set schedule. Aunts and uncles can be helpful. It would be advisable to trust blood relatives more than others. For example, using your sister is less risky than using your sister's boyfriend.

5. Consider night shift work. This allows you to work while your children are sleeping. You could sleep when the children are in school so that you can spend time with them when they get home.

6. Avoid multiple jobs if possible. To increase their income and material wealth, some parents will work two jobs (often two full-time jobs). While this may initially increase the family's income, in the long run, this may not be a good idea. With two full-time jobs, it is more difficult to focus on one job to promote advancement into a long-term career. The other obvious reason is that working two jobs dramatically reduces the parent's time available to be spent with their children. In addition to the hours spent at work, there is additional time commuting to both jobs. It may be less time consuming to work overtime at one job. The income may be similar with less commuting time spent on the road. Is it better for one parent to work two jobs so the other parent can manage the household or is it better for each parent to work one job? The answer to this depends on the income potential of each job, the scheduling flexibility of the jobs involved, and the individual priorities set by parents who must make the very basic decision of working or spending more time with their children.

7. Use preschool programs. It is generally beneficial for children to be exposed to a classroom setting at an early age before kindergarten. Some parents prefer private day care programs with only one to three other children over preschool or a private baby sitter or nanny in their home. Parents like these smaller programs because it gives their child more individual attention and they are less likely to be exposed to infectious diseases. I think that preschools are better because children must get accustomed to the group classroom setting where individual attention is not the main priority. In classroom settings, children must learn to share, cooperate, listen, take turns, etc. These are all values that we want them to learn. Children ideally should get most of their individual attention from parents. Because preschool programs are generally large, it is less likely to provide an environment conducive to child abuse. Smaller programs with a single care provider and only a few children (less than 5) are more difficult to assure an environment safe from child abuse. In my opinion, preschool programs are safer. Preschool kids commonly come to preschool with coughs, runny nose and chicken pox. There is now a vaccine for chicken pox which should eliminate this risk. The risk of getting colds and the flu from preschool are present, but this builds their immunity at an early age so that they are less likely to become ill frequently when they are in kindergarten and beyond. The likelihood of transmitting SERIOUS infectious disease illnesses in a preschool setting is small.

8. If you must hire someone to help with family matters, they should be preferentially hired to do tasks around the house that DO NOT involve your children. They should be hired to do house cleaning, cooking, yard work, laundry, home maintenance, car maintenance, etc. Paying others to assist with these tasks can free up time for YOU to spend with your children. This is preferable to hiring someone to take care of your children while you do the yard work and cooking. Your time spent with your children should be the priority.

The availability of grandparents is so important. It makes the task of juggling your work schedule and child care substantially easier. The only care taker coming close to a parent is a grandparent.

The availability of blood relatives (grandparents, aunts and uncles) relies on them living near us. Personally, I would find it very difficult to move to another town away from my family members. Many adults make the choice to move away from home for career opportunities. A typical example is an engineer who can make an $80,000 annual salary in a distant big city, but only $50,000 in his/her home town. While this sounds like a big difference, tax consequences may cut this true difference from $30,000 to only $15,000. Additionally, parents must now face the prospect of raising their children in a new city without the assistance of grandparents and other family members. Instead of relying on blood relatives for child care assistance, these parents must now rely on strangers in a new city to take care of their children. Paying for private child care may cost as much as $10,000 per year. Suddenly, the salary difference of $30,000 does not seem so attractive. Housing and transportation costs may be different as well.

There is no place like home. In our home towns, we know the schools, the safe spots, the dangerous spots to avoid, the politics and the community. We have close contact with family and friends who we grew up with. I someday look forward to having grandchildren and taking care of them when their parents are working. I look forward to watching them grow up and helping to shape their development just like I am doing with my own children. I would be extremely disappointed if my children were to move their families to a distant town, in which case my only contact with them would be during long distance travel on special occasions and via letters and phone calls. I would much rather have the family together.

Keeping the family together in the home town does not promote worldliness. However, how important is it to be worldly? One could become well traveled by living in different cities, traveling and vacationing in different cities, watching television programs about different cities, corresponding with pen pals in different cities or reading about different cities.

If you are fortunate enough to be a business executive or professional who has done well, you may be offered a promotion to work in another city. When you consider the promotion, consider the consequences of the move on your children, spouse and access to your family and friends.

Who will raise your children in the new city? Do YOU want to raise them or do you want to pay strangers to raise them for you so that you can pursue your career? Perhaps our society has excessively focused on career, promotion and material wealth at the expense of our children.

I was raised in a middle-class community and both my parents had good jobs. My mother would come home at 5:00 and my father would come home at 6:00. When I was young, I was very proud of the fact that both my parents had good jobs and we had a really nice car. However, I also recall being envious of my friends who had parents with lower salaried jobs because their fathers and mothers coached my baseball team and volunteered at the school. In the eyes of a youngster, providing time with them is at least as important as material wealth.