Flywheel Mama

In my last post, I laid out the most common childcare options in the SF Bay Area, and in this post, I’ll dive into which childcare options I ended up choosing and why they worked best for our family.

Similar to many women, I am a fairly career-driven individual. But at the same time, I did not want the care and wellbeing of my kids to take a hit just because I wanted to stay in the workforce and grow my career. I truly believe women can have their cake and eat it too—a win-win where neither career nor kids take the backseat. Of course, this comes with intentional planning and a lot of ongoing discussions with my husband.

Research and Search Early on for Bay Area Daycare

Many acquaintances told me early in my pregnancy that couples in the Bay Area register their unborn child to good or elite daycares because waitlists can be years long. However, registering means shelling out between $75 to $200 per registration. We put off the search due to holidays, vacations, and new jobs, and it wasn’t until I was close to 34 weeks pregnant that I started booking daycare tours.

I asked around coworkers, scoured Yelp, and did good ol’ Google searches. I began with daycares closest to home and started calling them. Many daycares were full and told me to call back in a month. By 37 weeks pregnant, I settled on a daycare center that promised a spot for my son in the month he was due to start. We toured, registered, and that was one big item I could check off before giving birth.

My strongest advice: don’t delay your Bay Area daycare research. Start early.

Grandma and Grandpa Were Not an Option

Although we considered grandparents as backup childcare, neither set lived locally. Even if they had, we didn’t feel comfortable making them our primary caregivers. Taking care of children is hard work and many grandparents deserve to enjoy their golden years.

Nanny and Nanny Share Was Too Complicated

At the time, we thought hiring a nanny or doing a nanny share was too complicated. We asked friends who have hired a nanny for advice. They said that nannies are a hit or miss because I’d essentially be hiring them as my employee and they’d have to hit it off with us really well.

I started looking for nannies on Facebook groups and nanny hiring agencies but was quickly discouraged. It’s a really involved process and even if you hire a nanny, they may not be the right one for your family in the long-term. So you’d be back to square one.

I had spoken to a couple of families that went through the long and painful process of interviewing nannies, trying them out, and going through the paperwork for hiring, to only have the nannies quit after a few weeks. They eventually gave up and moved their kids to daycare.

I had also asked a few families that had the luck of finding long-term nannies and said that I had to be flexible and create a list of must-haves, nice-to-haves, deal-breakers, and ok to slide because no nanny is 100% perfect. One family, in particular, said the most important thing they were looking for in a nanny is they have to give and love their children.

I would have loved to try out nanny share as a cost-effective childcare option as that would have been a great way to expose my son to other kids and share the nanny costs with other families. However, I didn’t have the time or energy to seek nannies or families that would be open to sharing a nanny with us.

In-Home Daycares Were Opaque Boxes

We toured a couple of in-home daycares in the Bay Area and quickly crossed them off of our list. The reason that kept creeping up was our kid will be behind doors of a stranger’s house. Once we did the drop off, our kid would be at the mercy of the licensed in-home daycare provider.

We knew that in-home daycares followed the same stringent rules and state licensing requirements as daycare centers. But at the end of the day, we wouldn’t know who would be living or visiting the house. We also wouldn’t know what is taught or exposed to our kid.

We toured an in-home daycare facility where everything checked out, but we were told that if we became members of a certain church, we’d jump ahead of the waitlist. I was flattered that we’d become VIPs but also alarmed about how we or our son would be treated if we didn’t follow certain rules or engaged in certain events.

We visited a new Bay Area in-home daycare and left within 10 minutes. The daycare owner told us that she wasn’t comfortable taking care of infants, but she would try to accommodate our son since she needed to grow her business.

We visited a third in-home daycare provider. While we really enjoyed chatting with the daycare owner and were impressed with her experience, we found one main red flag that ultimately pushed us to cross in-home daycares off our list: the garage would stay open (but gated) through the day for kids to play and roam around. While the neighbor is very safe and family-friendly, we weren’t comfortable having our son roam in the garage.

Don’t get me wrong, not all in-home daycares are like the ones we toured. It could have been that we hit the jackpot with all three or because all the ‘great’ in-home daycares in the Bay Area were so full they didn’t accept new kids.

I have friends who take their children to in-home daycares because they are more cost-effective childcare options, they are flexible, and they are close to home. For example, a friend found an in-home daycare about a mile away from their house and kept their child there for 3 years before they had to move the child to a preschool.

Why We Chose a Daycare Learning Center

My husband and I were more fond of daycare learning centers in the Bay Area because:

1/ they were structured and curriculum-based,
2/ there seemed more accountability and oversight if something went wrong,
3/ the compliance and regulations were more stringent and followed,
4/ my kid would have been safer in a regulated daycare environment,
5/ there are more teachers to care for my kid.

Even though it wasn’t us who picked the daycare center, it worked out in our favor. We lived about a mile away from the daycare center and my son was born an extrovert so he made friends with his classmates and teachers quite easily. He’d know teachers from other classrooms and other teachers would recognize him. It just felt like a village.

We would also keep track of all the updates via an app, including sleep, eating, bathroom breaks, and photos of our son in the class.

Considering Montessori? Not for Us—Yet

We considered Montessori-type preschools for our son but later decided not to because we believed that our son needed to grow within a structured classroom environment.

Though our son’s daycare teacher who has taught him for 2+ years would pull me aside to say our son is very intelligent every chance she got. I was flattered by it but wasn’t sure what to do with the information. After a couple of times, we wondered if he would learn more at his own pace, outside the constructs of a traditional classroom.

We had the option of signing our son up for a Montessori preschool program when we moved to another city in the Bay Area, but decided not to after all. It wasn’t so much the teaching methodology at this point but the Montessori we wanted didn’t have spots for full-time, full-week students (again, research early when choosing preschools!).

Would we want to sign our son up for a Montessori? Potentially. But he is almost 4 years old. Moving him to a new school to attend a year of preschool may be more detrimental to his development than good.

Childcare for Baby #2: A Different Approach

After learning the ins and outs of childcare with our first born, and also thanks to the Covid-19 pandemic, we made changes to how we want our second born to be taken care of.

We put off signing our daughter up for any Bay Area daycares until she turned at least 18 months old. Instead, we hired a nanny for in-home childcare who would take care of my daughter and do light household chores like making easy meals, doing the kids’ laundry, and light cleaning while I worked from home. She’d also help take care of my son after preschool if I was tied up in late-night meetings.

Though this is a very expensive option, we knew it was going to be short-term as we agreed with our nanny.

Having my daughter at home helped me get closer to her. I am able to provide direct guidance to my wonderful and flexible nanny on specific activities that I’d like my daughter to learn. I am able to experience a lot of things that I couldn’t with my son, like getting to know her personality much better, interacting with her throughout the day, and witnessing many more milestones. In addition, I had an extra person to help me around the house, which reduced a lot of the stress and pressure to be 100% at home and at work.

We could have saved on preschool tuition by keeping our son at home under the care of the nanny. However, pulling him out of preschool wouldn’t be a wise choice since he was already accustomed to a structured classroom setting with teachers and friends.

Keep the momentum going,
Flywheel Mama