Tag Archives: nursery

Some things I learned about “real” life, work and childcare…

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image from http://www.boloji.com/women/0103.htm, please do read the excellent article there

I’ve met so many lovely, intelligent women this week.  We’ve been talking about working and childcare.  (This is probably because the common theme to the various groups I’ve been meeting is children rather than because it’s a particular preoccupation…)

It’s been a real eye opener.

In my working life, I am surounded by highly educated, ambitious people.
Most of them live in London. Many don’t have kids.
They pretty much reflected my real life when I was newly married and lived 20 minutes from the office and everyone I knew was terribly high powered and some were (self?) important and the office would not be able to do without them.
The other people I met then were living in a tower block with 5 children with at least one called Kayden or Precious.  But I never really knew them, I just got chatting to them at the Health Visitors’ clinics as we waited to have our babies weighed.

That’s no longer real life.  I mean that in the sense of, if I woke up one morning and the office wasn’t there any more, I wouldn’t be walking past the site of it each day.
Real life for me is in my hometown.
And that means that real life people are the ones I now meet.
The musings below are widescale generalisations.  There’s no stats included because I’ve been chatting with new friends, not interviewing research interviewees.  Becuase of the way things have worked out socially, I’ve not really met single parents so that side of things doesn’t feature.  And I guess it is right to focus on those in most need.
But I wonder if it’s given me access to a group of women who don’t often get heard about and so their norms get overlooked?

The women I meet here that don’t work seem to have three or more children.
And there’s a lot with three children.  I’m beginning to wonder if the logistics of three are actually slightly simpler than two, because the stats show that once you pass three, one parent is then pretty much forced to take on the role of the stay at home car driving, child-oriented parent while the other brings in the money…

So most women here work.
But I’m not meeting high powered business women – presumably I need to do that by talking to them either at their workplace or on the train to London when I commute rather than behind a pushchair in the town centre?
No, most of us here seem to work part time for someone else.
Some are, say, working a few hours in the evening when their partners can do the childcare.  Or working the lunch shifts in town to fit in with the school run.  Or volunteering. Or supply teaching.  Another has a husband in the sort of job where she’s expected to take on the pastoral side.
I’ve met so many teachers too, often married to other teachers, fed up with the 9-3 jokes and wondering how to fit their own kids in.
So many have stepped down, either in terms of their actual jobs or their ambitions.  Local jobs count.
Most think I’m insane to have a roundtrip commute of over 100 miles.

Most of the women I meet work part-time. We know there are disadvantages to this in terms of lifelong earnings, pension, and career prospects.
So why not do more hours?
The response is who’d look after the kids?
The primary concern is not the long term but the day to day logisitics.

But surely the answer here is childcare?
Well, when we talk childcare, the response is that, even with the staff pretty much on minimum wage, the cost is too high.  We’re talking nurseries really.  Talk about nannies and you’ll hear what a guffaw sounds like.

I tested the idea that seems popular in feminist circles that actually even if the cost is the same as or slightly more than what one working parent can bring in, the parents should take the hit now, so to speak, for the sake of the future earnings potential and pension provisions.
This was greeted universally with horror.
The issue might make sense to economists, who apparently were touting the same approach to saving for pensions on the radio this morning, but the main question from the real people I know is what on earth do the people who suggest this think we live on that we can “take a hit” in the short term?
I’ve heard stories of taking in lodgers, the ruination that going a few pence overdrawn the day before being paid and losing your whole next day’s pay to the bankcharge. I’ve even heard about not being able to afford to pay into the state pension, let alone a private one.  And yes, that’s even with tax credits in play.  But what can you do if the available jobs don’t meet the cost of living – a living wage if you like?

There is also an issue of childcare availability.
It’s not really a question of provision for 3 and 4 year olds, although the thing that upsets parents is not getting the place they want for their child when parental choice is the most touted concept in education.
I know some mums taking their children to two different schools each day because they’ve not got places for both at the same one.  Not only is that disruptive for a family, but it has an impact on whether parents can work. Logisitics matter.  Not to mention the carbon footprint issues of this sort of thing!

Actually, work-wise, the availability of wrap-around care is the most difficult – a limited number of nurseries are available for children 6 months plus and fewer still offer the full wrap-around hours, and even fewer of them are conveniently located for commuters.
I’ve only had one actively recommended to me by the parents who send their kids there – and that’s the most expensive, naturally.
And the school-level wrap-around care provision appears not to be at every school but for some it is at a centrally-designated school a good drive away!

But finding a childminder to wrap around other nurseries or schools is also a nightmare – finding someone you are happy to leave your kids with, who has space for children of the right age, and who takes and collects from the right schools is not simple, even with the information available from Kent children and families information service…

Family matters
Because leaving your child with someone is not just a matter of that person having a paper qualification.
You have to be happy that your child is looked after as you would wish, and often even the best is a compromise at heart because it’s just not you doing it.  Is it any wonder so many of the parents I’m meeting seem to seek to avoid doing this?
And while mostly we all seem to be begging time from the grandparents, we shouldn’t be counting on it as who knows when it might suddenly not be available?
And there’s the big unspoken secret too – parents actually want to spend time with their children, see them grow up, see the firsts, help them learn and develop.  However much childcare is available, ultimately many parents are going to want to raise their own children directly if they can.

So what are people doing about all this?
The majority of people I’ve met are married or in marriage-like long term relationships.  That affects the approach that’s taken.
Basically, those that can, seem to think as a couple – whose job or career takes precedence, how to handle the logistics, even to the extent of working out how to live with each other’s pension provisions.
For the majority of people I’ve talked to about this, they recognise that this isn’t ideal for them as individuals but they see it as part of the reality of being a family and having children.
While with one eye on the divorce stats this may not seem wise for individuals. Just as pre-nups are not popular or common in the UK, I think there is still an innate social (small “c”) conservatism and a dash of romance in the country overall.  We don’t want to think about marriages failing.  And we don’t want to plan on the basis that ours would be one of them.
So families balance the childcare between them, prioritising local over high paid, working out sometimes complicated logistics, choosing between them who gets the career rather than both trying to in order that they get to see their children rather than have someone else raise them.

But that raises a small question for me.  If families are doing all this, then how will the need for better childcare provision that would allow them to do otherwise be identified?  And which companies are going to do that research with parents in order to see if there’s a viable business?

Unwrapping this one is going to be a bit more complicated than even I’d thought…

The modern world is bad for children

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Ok that’s it.  What, exactly, are we meant to do, to be doing the right thing?

         

As you can tell by my ever so slightly fed up tone, today there’s yet another report that say that something that parents do all the time is Bad For The Children. Today it’s television that’s in the firing line.

The article I’ve hyperlinked is fairly self-explanatory.  Children getting fat, eating junk food, have worse IQs in the longer run, etc. etc.  All of these things are apparently the long term impacts of toddler-age television viewing.
The professor in charge of the research says:

“Common sense would suggest that television exposure replaces time that could be spent engaging in other developmentally enriching activities and tasks that foster cognitive, behavioural and motor development.”

Ok.  No normal parent wants their child to miss out on important cognitive, behavioural and motor development skills.  So toddler TV’s got to be eliminated, right?  There must be something wrong with it – it’s illegal in France after all.
 
But let’s just think this through for a minute.
I’ve never seen my child watch TV for longer than about 10 minutes at any one time. 
Much as he loves Cbeebies, the TV’s just not that entertaining for that long when there’s building to be done, beds to bounce on, toy cars to drive up walls making vroom noises rather than just the lovely plastic garage, wax crayons and paper and all the card from the recycling bin to build with… and of course mummy to cuddle, to jump on, to play with, to help sort washing, to help find all the red buttons, to chase the frog across the lawn…

As you can gather, it’s not that my toddler lacks interest in the world around him.  That’s just a small sample of what he gets up to when we spend time at home (as opposed to the time in town, time at playgroup etc. etc.)
Nor does he lack the ability to concentrate, in fact he loves reading and often wants to look through books uninterrupted by me,  telling himself stories about the pictures, for a long time.
But even on what are laughably called my non-working days (unpaid work days more like, unless you count the non-means tested child allowance as payment?), I cannot spend 100% of my time as his playmate.  Nor should I – he also needs to play with other children his own age (hence playgroup to make friends), and to learn to entertain himself.
And sometimes, when I really, really need it, TV can be an electronic babysitter (not for long – my toddler has a kitchen stall designed to help him reach the worksurface safely so he tends to try to join in). 
But mostly we watch it together.
Timmy Time and the Tweenies are great for showing hm that it’s not just him that goes to nursery while his parents work, and the Tweenies teaches stories, nursery rhymes and social interaction, while 3rd and Bird stresses the value of a strong community.  Alphablocks and Numberjacks are so good that primary school teachers often use them in their literacy and numeracy lessons. I’ve never been a fan of In the Night Garden, and Waybuloo is a bit hippy trippy for me, but I like the sign language and normalised treatment of children with special educational needs and physical disabilities in Something Special.  Given the reaction of some parents to Ceri‘s employment, this sort of show is very much needed. 
And we don’t just sit and watch TV -we talk about what’s happening, when something similar happened to us…
 
But this is yet another report that tells us that we’re doing long term damage to our kids.
And while frankly I’d vote for the party that can actually bring the recommendations of “Toxic Childhood” into policy (NB it would involve cost, social change, standing up to the Daily Mail and the older feminists for whom equality is about the workplace), the central theme of that book is implying that parents are not up to the job.

There’s a terrible irony that we are so child centred these days, but that it is in a sort of “quality time“, taxi driving to activities way.  Being with the children takes time - for example, when I ask other parents how they handle the change to available nursery hours when their child turns three, they say I don’t know, I had a second one so I’m at home and able to do the school run, or that they are lucky to have grandparents near by etc.  otherwise they couldn’t work. 

But the child-centred approach that parents have is being squeezed. 
For example, some people I know have had their ability to work and raise their family affected by local authorities that can’t allocate the school places in a way that avoids someone having to drive miles between a school drop off and a nursery drop off. 
For others, it’s been that in order to “get on” – i.e. to be in the running for promotion etc., work has to be full-time – and that means 4 or 5 full days a week at nusery for the bambino, something we’re also told by the childhood experts is not good for children (note how short the school day looks to a parent and you’ll see that has been accepted fact for some time).
 
Long parental working hours are not good for anyone – tired workers are less productive, tired parents that don’t see each other suffer strained relationships not least because being a parent is really very hard work, parents working hours don’t get to see their kids and are not on good form when they do.  The right to request flexible working is genuinely a good thing (supported by all 3 main political parties in the UK) and being allowed to work from home sometimes cuts travel time and therefore means that more time can be spent with a child before and after childcare, and reduced hours means sometimes actually being able to do one leg of a school run rather than trying to get one of the rare paid childminders willing to do both before and after school and who ends up seeing more of the child than the parents do.
But many parents seem to fear that flexble working will impact negatively on their careers, so one parent doesn’t do it and the whole set up just gets even more complicated. 
Some compensate by treating the children as princes and princesses – in other words little monsters that are so used to being indulged that they don’t know what no means, and have been treated that way not necessarily becausse parents mistakenly think that this is what being child centred is, but because they are so damn tired all the time! 

France might think it has it right by banning toddler TV, but few women breastfeed there for fear of ruining their figure and if you are a career woman, your contemporaries expect you to return to work after 12 weeks otherwise you are letting down the sisterhood.
But even in the UK where we value choice, we don’t really value mothers that choose to stay at home to raise the kids in the way the childhood experts recommend for the first two years. 
Or if we do, we make it a choice only available to the middle classes who can just about afford to exist on one income, and the very poor who don’t work at all.
And those that work part-time are at risk of everything crashing if they are not circus-quality jugglers.
And those that work full-time are effectively letting someone else bring up their child.
And the tired, stressed out parents probably let the kids watch TV so that they can relax a bit.
Oh. 

So basically, with an economic set up that expects both parents to work, and a soul-selling attitude to work that – no matter what the lovely words in the HR guidance say – sends a mesage that flexible and part-time models are for slackers that don’t want to get on in their careers, and every moment that the child is with the parent needs to be a learning activity but that learning activities include pairing socks as well as structured play… argh! 
Basically the modern world is bad for children. 
I just don’t know what to do, except hope that trying to bring my son up to be happy, secure, friendly, outgoing etc. etc. in the best way I can is enough.  And try not to add yet another thing to the list of things to be tired over and stressed about…

And this?  My toddler took an unexpected nap and I was quick typing it…

Open letter to Ashford Future from some new residents

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Fantastic image of Ashford from North Street, copyright Iain Crump but licensed for further reuse, available at http://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/1142576

Dear Ashford Future

We really appreciate the role that you are playing in developing our new home town to accommodate 29,000 new households in the next 20 years.  This is a massive undertaking and we’ve now seen the overview plans that you have put forward to develop the town.  It’s good to know that there is an overall vision as so any towns see not to have one. 

We’ve not yet had a chance to read in detail the town centre plans that have apparently just been approved, but suspect that they are linked closely to the overall plan we’ve seen and on which these comments were drafted.
We don’t know whether you intend to keep consulting on individual aspects of those plans or whether you intend to give residents a chance to comment on the overall shape of the plans. 
Either way, as recently arrived resident who intend Ashford to be our home for the foreseeable future, we’d like a chance to share our views with you on some of the key elements.

Transport Links
Highspeed train – this is a fundamental in us being able to live here – commuting for even longer every day would make it almost impossible for both of us to work in London and also handle the childcare arrangements. 
Please do keep on at southeastern trains about train timings – every half hour is pretty good (a six coacher every 15 mins would be even better!), but the preview services were standing room only at some times of day and with new arrivals like us using the service daily, and at over £5000 a year, that’s a lot of money to stand at 140 mph…  Timing of the trains getting back in the evenings is frustrating too – there’s just not quite enough time to get to the nursery without being at risk of a fine. Is there any consultation or consideration of these things when timing the trains? 

We’ve read your car parking strategy.  Yep, sometimes even the X Factor or Dancing on Ice doesn’t give a thrilling enough Saturday night.  We noted that you pretty much intend to phase out town centre carparking and have Park and Rides.  Having lived in towns like that before, we’ve bought a house within walking distance to the station. Just one light against you, or traffic jam, and you’ve lost the time advantage you might’ve hoped to gain.
We noted too the comment that the station car parking needs consideration.  We’ve considered it – and again that’s why we’re moving to the town centre and not the prettier villages – the chances of parking near the station in 5 years time are looking remote.  Commuters are likely to want to live not just at Cheeseman’s Green and the like but in existing villages too – so what do you have planned for them?

We’re in favour of SmartLink.  Shiny blue buses do not of themselves a mass transit system make - and the website publicity focuses on the wrong things: the ability to buy tickets from a machine before boarding and nicely landscaped routes are not really the point when assessing whether the scheme is fit for purpose. 
As far as I can see the main questions are actually whether the tickets will be affordable (no more than a pound anywhere and with timed tickets rather than just single or return journeys), available as a season pass, on a smartcard which should be interoperable with Oyster and the rail system, the frequency, how and where exactly the dedicated bus lanes will be established, plus why, if you are intending to phase out the town centre carparks, you’ve not considered a Kennington route for SmartLink.  On this last point,  when I asked I was told that was because there was high car ownership in Kennington but as SmartLink is designed as a mass transit system and as part of the greening of Ashford, that’s a bit illogical.   

The new plans for M20 Junction 10A seem pretty good (do we really think though that it’ll allieviate traffic at Junction 10 by convincing traffic from Park Farm to join the motorway one junction further from their intended direction of travel? That’s not in line with human nature…). But the proposed lorry park, to be sited between Evegate and the substation at Sellindge really concerns us. 
Which road are you intending they use to get there?  The A20 between proposed juntion 10A and Evegate cannot cope with a lot of extra lorry traffic without disturbing the main route out of the surrounding villages, negating any time benefit that they might derive from the building of 10A. Plus the projected traffic flows for the area suggest that space for 3000 lorries would not actually allieviate Operation Stack in any case!   
And why build it there at all?  Surely the solution is to increase the size of the existing lorry parks at Ashford and at Folkestone which are surrounded by wasteland.  And if it’s cost as well as lack of space that’s the reason so many lorries end up parked around the market at Ashford, then lower the cost of using the lorry park and clamp down on the illegals – I think I recall that fines can be pursued cross-border these days?
 
New Housing
If you are going to build 29,000 new homes, there’s a serious case for making these eco-friendly.  Park Farm may be built to high eco standards and as we’ve a new build ourselves we know that the insultation etc. needs to be second to none.  We were pleased too to hear about high quality builds in Victoria Way. 

But what an opportunity this town expansion presents! 
We feel you should only be granting builders permission to build these new homes if they are truly sustainable – are you going to be requiring greywater or rainwater harvesting systems for saving water (this must surely be a priority in this drought-prone area of the world)?  What about solar panels on the houses, or possibly wind turbines? 
If you’re concerned that this would be difficult to achieve for lots of new homes individually, what about a communal requirement for each new estate or block of flats? 
Unless these things are required, we risk saddling ourselves with a huge housing stock requiring individuals to invest in a way that is difficult in a recession, but is much easier if the cost has been absorbed into the price that you can get a mortgage on.
We’re also a bit concerned at what seems to be a focus on building flats.  Who is it that Ashford is intending to attract?  What’s the future profile that is in mind here?  If we’re looking at young people that work locally, then my own family provides a good example.  My cousin and her boyfriend were school leavers with jobs locally – but they were not after a flat in the town centre when for only a little bit more they could get a house on one of the new estates, with a garden. 
Ashford has not to date been the sort of place you aspire to live in the centre of.  What is intended to attract people to live in town centre flats?  There’s precious little outdoor space, nor nice places to go out to in terms of chic little restaurants and wine bars to support this city centre approach to living. And are the flats to have parking?  If not, then there’s even or reason to require things to do in the town centre.

Update: my husband reminded me that I also meant to make a point about the need for commuter-friendly housing near the station.  If Ashford is looking to attract incomers from London, again they are unlikely to be looking for 2-bed flats. 

Charter House
Charter House is frankly an eyesore.  We’ve seen that the plans are to fill it with a mixture of residential and retail and offices.  The point is that Charter House looms in central Ashford and we’re not clear what could be done to make it look better.  Tall buildings are not a problem per se, but Charter House is surely beyond redemption.  Why not find someone to flatten it and build something inspiring, glass and steel?

Green Spaces
The thing is, we’ve lived in flats.  It’s normal in towns in the rest of Europe and it’s normal in London.  Our last flat had a roof terrace, and quite a big one, not just a balcony.  And it isn’t enough – you still feel boxed in and end up hanging your socks on a rack over the bath to dry.
The thing that flat builders elsewhere in Europe get right is the common green spaces.  If you’re building flats, you need to give people a decent amount of common outdoor space nearby.  There’s a human need to get your shoes off and feel the grass under your feet, to sunbathe, to picnic, to have a kickaround with your toddler or go for a bike ride. 
Funnily enough, that’s something that the Victorians in London actually got right – the parks and commons really are the lungs of the city.  At the moment, other than the tiny memorial garden or Victoria Park which really isn’t up to much, Ashford does not have much in the way of common land in the town centre area.  At the moment, it’s easy to say that the countryside is not far off and it’s easy to reach green spaces.  But, if you are expanding the town, that green space gets further away.  And sympathetic landscaping is just not the same thing as a bit of wild yet safe land.
Surely either Dover Place or Vicarage Lane car parks could – instead of both being handed over for retail – be given over to a beautiful green space?
And don’t get me started on the river.  The nice leaflet identifying a kind of chain-like link of grassy areas along the river doesn’t really hold up in reality (I guess that’s the proposed Stour nature park?). 
But where are the riverside restaurants around the Stour?  There’s a stonking great Hitachi rail depot on one side, and the Stour Centre carpark on the other… come on. Natural assets like a river frontage should be positively exploited rather than act as if we have our backs to a rather damp inconvenience.

Retail, Food and Drink
Practically every new development says that there will be retail, offices and housing.  That’s great.
But you’ll have all these new houses, and all these park and ride schemes and very little for these new people to be doing in Ashford.
The designer centre is a great place to start, but there’s a few stores that would really be welcome there which you can find at other outlet centres: Monsoon, Banana Republic (in Gap) and Charles Tyrwhitt.  But now that Waitrosehas arrived (albeit in the wrong place if that survey in town the other day is anytihng to go by), and Debenhams has made such a difference to the town centre, can a John Lewis be that far behind, especially with plans for County Square expansion? And what’s going to be done to attract something other than poundshops to Park Mall?    

Ashford’s food and drink is somewhat underwhelming.  I know we’re starting from having come from the gastronome’s delight of Northcote Road but a choice of four MacDonalds is not my idea of diversity.
So please, in the new places being built at the station let’s have a Pain Quotidien, or a Paul (it is Ashford International, after all).  And an M&S food – they seem to be compulsory at London stations these days, and putting one in at Ashford International would really help commuters who’ve dashed past all the fabulous shops at St Pancras or Stratford to bag one of the few empty seats on the high speed train home and forgotten the milk they promised to pick up.  
What about a Giraffe child-friendly but nice cafe in the town centre?  We’d love that – or Carluccio’s?  How about a Jamie’s Italian? What about Strada? Or a Nando’s? I’m not asking for Michelin three stars, but I can’t help thinking that it’s all very well these companies eyeing up the likes of Canterbury, but it’s Ashford that’s got the population to support them. I know a lot of the decent shops and restaurants have gone to slightly-posher looking Tenterden, but that’s o reason for Ashford town centre to miss out. 

Schools and childcare - what are the plans for new primary schools and secondary schools?  With so many new households, the schools are going to come under serious pressure.  It’s already hard to find the right sort of childcare to handle the commuting lifestyle. 
That said, resist the pressures and keep the grammar schools.  They’re a  major selling point for us people moving into Ashford from elsewhere (because of course we all believe our child will pass the 11-plus with flying colours) but they’re also good for social mobility and they give a chance to people who might not have had one otherwise in a segregated-by-address schooling system.

Europe’s best placed?
We are also particularly interested in what plans you have for the European side of Ashford – attracting business to the town from Paris, Lille and Brussels, and beyond.  We’ve already seen one attempt at sidelining Ashford for that build-it-and-they-will-come upstart Ebbsfleet (surely only there for the convenience of Bluewater?) by Eurostar, so how are you going to attract visitors and investment?  The town and wider region would suffer greatly fro loss of that link, so creative ideas (like the Calais metro train proposed for 2012) need to be brainstormed as well as the more serious planning. 

I’m not going to go on about recycling here, as you can read it in a separate post on this blog,  but surfice to say this really needs sorting if Ashford is to be carbon neutral and all the other things we can surely aspire to if we have a regeneration/ development agency with the word “Future” in the title…  

As you can tell, we’re genuinely interested in the future of our new hometown, and would love to work with you on making it happen.  Do get in touch and let us know what you’ve got planned next…