Tips for Getting Childcare | How To Choose The Best Child Care For Your Baby - How To Survive?

Hi, welcome back to my channel. My name is Jess Hover. It's so good to have you here. If you're new, welcome. I make content for growing families and I just got out of the ER. I have a UTI or bladder infection or whatever you wanna call that. So last night was rough and this morning I was at the hospital, but here I am now to be able to talk to you guys about leaving your baby or small child or child in general with a caretaker. So maybe you are gonna have a babysitter or you're gonna put your kid in daycare. Maybe you're gonna have a nanny finally and you haven't had one or you're jumping back into having someone else care for your kid after COVID has maybe kept them home with you. I don't know your specific situation. I just know that leaving your baby or young child with a caretaker can bring out all kinds of crazy inside of us and we just start texting them weird stuff like please don't feed my baby anything spicy as if the person you just hired is really trying to do that. What I wanna do today is go through some pointers that will help relieve stress when it comes to putting your kid in the hands of somebody that you trust. If you have not already done so, please don't forget to subscribe to the channel, like the video, leave in the comments if you have tips or resources for other families that are gonna be choosing childcare, whatever kind of childcare that might look like and thank you for shopping Very Good Mother's Club if you haven't already. Oh, this is our new crew neck. It is really cozy. If you haven't already shopped, verygoodmothersclub.com and that is our small business and I'm so grateful to all of you who have been shopping from there and now we'll jump into, oh, and if you are a parent looking for more support in your parenting journey, maybe you're coming up on questions that you wish you had somebody to ask, we have a group on Facebook called Jess Hover and Friends. They're really great people in there. You can ask your questions, you can get advice from other parents, even just like post cute, fun things about your family and they're really engaging. So if you wanna be in that group, request to be in there and answer the questions so we know you are real and not someone really strange. So now you need help. You know that you need help outside of your home, somebody to watch your kid. So you either are going to ask loved ones and friends in your area, do you have a good daycare around? Do you know of a babysitter that you trust? Maybe you reach out to a friend's babysitter and say, do you have someone in your life that you would recommend to be a good babysitter or nanny to us? Asking people that you know and trust is a really good place to start when it comes to finding where you should be putting your child. So if you want to bring somebody into your house to help you in that way or send the little ones out of your house, you wanna be finding a place that you trust and that's really important because once you hand the child to them, you gotta like rein in all your crazy so that you can live well and they can live well and all things can flow properly. Say you're gonna hire a babysitter or a nanny. Before you have them come for their first job, you could have them come over almost like for an interview process where you invite them there, you guys get to know each other a little bit, your baby or your children get to interact with them and at that point, you're communicating your expectations for this role. So is it strictly childcare? Will they also be tidying up your home? Will they also be doing some dishes or doing some meal prep? All of this stuff you want to clearly communicate, especially if they're gonna be watching your baby during nap time or after the baby goes to bed because there might be a part of you that's like, well, I'm paying this person this much per hour to sit on the couch and watch TV and maybe that's perfect. Maybe what you're paying them actually, that's what they should be doing is they're just being present at your house in case the baby wakes up but for some of you, it might be worth it to say, I'm gonna pay you this much and will you please make sure the house is somewhat put together before I get home? That stuff needs to be spoken out, probably written out at some point so that you can know exactly what it is you're paying for. During that time, you probably give an overview of what it would look like to watch your children. So if it's a daytime nanny or it's an evening babysitting situation, you're just giving them like a general idea of what it's gonna look like. Are they gonna be feeding them? Are they gonna be bathing them? Do they get to leave the house with your little one or do you prefer that they stay inside with them? All of this matters. What I will say in my experience, it's been really great to have some people that I trust so much that I can have them actually leave the house with my kids. They can take them for a walk in the stroller or even some of them can drive my kids. Not everybody who watches my kids, I feel comfortable driving them places but some of them I do and I think that that's really helpful because it's really engaging for the kids and stimulating and fun and then it is also something nice for the babysitter or nanny to do to keep everybody active and doing something cool. But you wanna make sure you really feel comfortable with that. If it seems like they're really gonna take on the job, then you start getting into the details that they are gonna need to pay attention to. So like allergies or is there something you really absolutely do not want your kids to have that maybe this person wouldn't know about? For example, my friend nannied for a family recently and offered the toddler some french fries not knowing that the family definitely doesn't do french fries. So that was an important detail that should be communicated because maybe the person wouldn't guess that. Ideally, you are hiring someone who is like one step ahead of you. They understand that if they're taking your child to the park midday, the child might need sunscreen or a hat or water to drink. That's ideal. But what you can do to help in the process is when your caretaker comes to the house, you could have a bag ready for them and in that bag it has whatever your child needs. So it could be sunscreen, could be a hat, could be water or milk or snacks, whatever it is depending on the age of your child, you have that all set up the first time in a bag. Now by doing that, your kid and the caretaker are prepared but also now your caretaker understands what the child needs whenever they do whatever it is that they're gonna do. There are apps that can help you with nap time. This is something that was new for me but if you have a baby that needs a nap but you know that maybe like every single day the baby doesn't nap at exactly the same time, there's an app called the Huckleberry app. I believe you have to pay for it if you want the feature where it shows like the estimated next nap time. I think that app is awesome. They're not sponsoring this video. They don't even know I exist. But I had a person who watched my third baby Jules and both the nanny babysitter friend and I had the app on our phones so that way we could both be tracking when Jules was gonna need her nap. So all you do is put in like the baby woke up at this time and then it will tell you the estimated time when the baby should go to sleep. So say you're gonna put your child in a daycare. Some questions you're gonna wanna ask, how do they handle it if your baby is crying? What do they do for naps? Do they do for feedings? You also wanna know like how many adults are there per kids? Does that make sense? How many kids per adult? Yeah, so like is it one adult with like six babies? That's a lot of babies. But maybe it's less than that. Maybe there's more adults and less kids. I don't know. You wanna find those things out so you can understand what is the actual day-to-day dynamic in this place. I wanna tell you kids are incredibly resilient, dynamic, adaptable. My sister put her baby in this daycare and she was so nervous because for like a week it seemed like he was not napping. He just wouldn't. The nap environment at this place was really different than his nap environment at home. So naturally he would get into his crib at the daycare and just sort of like freak out and cry and not sleep. But what my sister needed to remind herself of as she was going a little bit crazy herself and being like what do we do? My baby needs to sleep. Is this ever gonna work? She needed to remind herself that it is in the best interest of the daycare and the people working there that this baby sleeps. And so everybody there is gonna work towards seeing the baby sleep regularly and as long as the baby needs. So what ended up happening after a week was the baby adapted to the new place and now is taking amazing naps at the daycare center. But it was stressful for my sister and she was calling them like is there something we should do? Should we change it? Should he not go anymore? Did I make a mistake? Because she was starting work and she was feeling pretty overwhelmed by the whole thing. But then now he's good and he seems to like going and he's very well cared for. So the person comes to your house and they're gonna be watching your children. What you wanna do is go over everything they need to know with them. So verbally communicate what exactly needs to happen between the time that you leave and the time the people get back. You're the people. What exactly needs to take place between the time you leave and the time you get back? I would say communicate that and then also have it written down somewhere. Whether it's through a text or like literally on paper right there in front of them so that once you leave they can just refresh their memory and they don't need to ask you. When it comes to leaving the house, if the child is still awake, I would say don't rush it and don't sneak out. The sneaking out thing, I think, is just generally not a good idea for the kid. Maybe it feels fine because there's no crying as you're leaving. But then eventually there's a very real sense of loss when the child realizes that you're not there and that can be confusing. So my family used to live in Spain with my daughter who was, we lived there from when she was one to when she was three and a half. And when we put her in a daycare there, their system for all kids that come in was that a family member of the child, whether it's the mom or any other family member, they actually recommend that it's not the mom. They said that it was the hardest if it was the mom. But we did it with me anyway. That the family member stays in with the child for like the first few days to see what the kid's doing, to adapt together so then the child gets comfortable with everybody there and with the new caretaker. But the parent is still present so the kid feels safe. They had us do this for a week, I think. Like the first day I was there, the whole day. Then the next day I was there maybe slightly less and slightly less until it got to the point where I was there for only 10 minutes. And then it got to the point where I was like, okay, goodbye, I love you, you're gonna be great. And then I leave. I thought that system was really crazy and really un-American because I was used to kind of like the, I mean, the system that I'm dealing with right now which is like a take your temperature a quick drop off, not too much physical content and like goodbye because everyone's afraid of COVID. That's I think somehow what I imagined. But I think the system of easing the child into the goodbye was very smooth. So if you can somehow emulate that but in a much shorter version, that's pretty cool. So maybe you and the caretaker are playing with the kids together for a moment. Could be like a really brief moment. But then you stand up and make your goodbye. You wanna avoid like a rush, like, okay, you're here, good. My baby doesn't hardly know you but here's the quick handoff and I gotta go. That can make for a really stressful time. Even so, you could do all of this right and your kid could still end up crying. My advice there is just leave. Say, I love you, I will be back, I gotta go. Because what I found over and over again is that the child calms down and they end up being distracted and they end up being totally happy with the caretaker that you brought in that you trust and it goes really good. You will torture yourself if you stay there and try and soothe and try and take the child back. What some families do is the first time they bring the babysitter or nanny over, they actually stay in the house but they are away from the kid. I highly recommend if you're gonna do that, be away from the kid. Don't even make it look like you're still there because it's very confusing for the little one to know who is the authority, who is the person that they're supposed to go to in that time for kind of like the final say. But in doing that, if you're hiding but you're still present it might make you feel more secure that you understand how this person relates to your child, what they're gonna do, that kind of thing so that next time when they come, you can leave and feel really sure that it's the right person for the job. Once you are gone, you wanna trust that it's okay. You can tell them, here's my phone number, text me if you have any questions. You can even text some updates if you want to be able to say like, here's when I'll be coming home, how's everything going? You do not need to text as often as you feel like texting probably. If things pop up that you remember that you wanna tell them, feel free to text the caregiver because they'll totally understand that you're a crazy parent who misses their baby. But overall, you wanna leave and be like, okay, the child is safe, I can do what I need to do to live and be healthy and whole and come back and give my kid my whole heart again. That's that, I think. You're gonna do so great. I think that it's all gonna be wonderful. With all of this said, everything that I just told you, I have had moments where I brought in a babysitter after my kids went to bed and it was a babysitter my kids didn't know, so if they woke up in the night, they would have totally freaked out because it was not anybody they knew. But I did it because I had really short windows of something that I needed to go to and I just wanted to be sure somebody was at the house keeping my kids safe if they needed an adult. The kids didn't wake up during the times that I'm thinking of, but I'm giving you all this great advice and then just telling you that I've also done totally everything different. I've also cried upon handing my child to a caretaker because then my kid cried and then I was so stressed and then the caretaker was stressed and I had so many feelings, so then I started crying. Horrible, totally unhelpful. So you might feel like a crazy person or maybe you'll feel totally calm and confident and be like, yeah, I was made for handing off my child to someone else and I felt like that in moments too, but mostly, mostly I'm the crazy lady. Thank you so much for watching. If you have more tips, let us know. If you think that I look sick today because I look a little sick today, it's because I'm a little sick today, but I'm okay. Thank you so much for being here and I just wish you all the best. Good luck and see you soon, bye. I don't know why I said good luck. Good luck, good luck handing your child off. I don't know.