Rational Moms » Daycare

Religious Pre-school: Decisions, decisions

aerin — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 17:00:57 +0000

Hi, I’m aerin and I was invited to share a post here! I have five year old twins. My husband was a SAHD and now works outside the home.

“I miss pre-school” my son said the other night.

I understand his sentiment. He (and his twin sister) are currently enrolled in a summer day camp. It’s an okay place, and they swim every day. But their pre-school was a pretty remarkable place. There was a good sized room filled with exploring stations. They made art every day. It was play based, not memorization based. The teachers brought in train set because they realized how much my son loves trains. They raised butterflies and released them at the end of the year. We had parent conferences where we talked with the teachers about our children and their progress; we talked about social, physical coordination and developmental goals and milestones.

When my twins were around 18 months old, we enrolled them in a local pre-school after examining various options. There were lots of factors that went into the decision. In the end, just as most parents do, we had to weigh the pros and cons of each program. A parent might want diversity, but there might not be a school or pre-school close enough to one’s home to be ethnically or culturally diverse. A parent might want an inexpensive option, but an inexpensive option may also not be completely safe.

Or, a parent might want a preschool that is free from religion or religious influences. In the end, the preschool program we chose was a Christian based program.

My husband and I are not actively religious. I was raised LDS and my husband was raised Presbyterian.

The pre-school program was up front about the religious messages from the beginning. “Children’s Ministries” is in their name. When you walk into the hallway, they have posters with religious messages/values on them. The posters do say things like “kindness” and “love”. Frankly, I am someone who believes in values like kindness, and have no problem with my child being taught about respect or love.

At the age of three, they began meeting with the pastor once a month for a short time (around 15 minutes in the sanctuary). Typically these messages would be about things like kindness or some basic bible stories. At the same time, once a month, they would participate in a “mission” activity. Families were asked to bring mittens, socks or canned food for those less fortunate. Through the process, the kids would become acquainted with the idea that there are many people who don’t have all the things that they have. The classes also prayed before every meal.

So my husband and I had to weigh this decision. Because the program was associated to a church, it was significantly less expensive than other programs. It was also NAEYC accredited (National Association for the Education of Young Children) . The teachers were experienced and had years of teaching pre-school either at the school or at other locations. Some teachers/staff were religious, but some of them attended other churches than the one associated with the pre-school (i.e., Roman Catholic). No one seemed to care which church anyone else was affiliated with. We were invited as a family to attend church at the church, but our kids didn’t seem to be disadvantaged in any way because we weren’t members. In fact, most of the students at the pre-school were not members of that congregation.

Other than the overt religious part of the pre-school, it was the right fit for our family. The first year we went one day a week, the next few years we went up to three days per week. There was a good five and a half hour chunk where my husband (a SAHD) was able to have time to himself.

In our discussions about the pre-school, my husband and I decided that we felt our kids would be exposed (eventually) to the dominant religious culture in the U.S. I didn’t want them to be scared of churches or people with beliefs different from their parents. Both sets of their grandparents are religious and attend services regularly.

It has been a great opportunity to discuss religious differences with our kids. We don’t talk a great deal about religion, but I’ve been known to answer questions like “Some people believe…” in God or Jesus. I don’t want to force them to believe what I believe but I don’t want to lie to them either.

As an example of what kinds of things we discussed, one day my son was singing “the b-i-b-l-e, that’s the book for me”. My husband said to him, “so you like the bible?”. My son asked “what’s the bible?”

Time will tell how wise this decision was. For us, it was the right decision for our family. I respect that people disagree and have made other choices for themselves or their own families. It would have been nice to have a pre-school that reflected the beliefs that I have, and have all the other stuff too. It would have been nice to find a reputable inexpensive program that wasn’t religious. But as it was, I don’t regret our decision at all. And I understand why my son misses his old pre-school. I think they miss him too.

Tax Relief for Daycare

Julie — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 22:32:05 +0000

A while back I got wind of this fun video from MomsRising.org. You punch in the name of a mom you love, and you will see a little fake news piece about how she’s Mother of the Year. Cute.

I must have signed up for emails somehow, because I’m getting them. And while I usually unsubscribe as quickly as possible from stuff like that, these emails from MomsRising have been fairly informative. Today I got one about the Family Tax Relief Act of 2009, and instead of doing a quick delete, I actually clicked the link and sent a letter to my Senators asking them to sponsor it.

If anyone has kids in daycare, you probably know there are some handy tax deductions that come into play. This bill improves them and aims to make daycare more affordable.

Study on Daycare Raises Parental Concerns

Kelly Gorski — Wed, 20 May 2009 19:06:34 +0000

I’m sure we’ve all seen this study or at least have heard about it by now. It seems to me that all moms are talking about this in some form, and it’s scaring several moms I know.

A recent study showed that children who spend more time in daycare than their non-daycare-attending counterparts tended to act out more by the time they reached kindergarten. (The newscast below says, “went to school,” so I’m assuming that’s kindergarten, but I suppose it could be pre-school.) And apparently, researchers found that the quality of the facility and those who supervise doesn’t matter—it’s the length of time kids spend in daycare that may affect behavior.

What do you think, readers? Have you seen any difference in children you know? Would you attribute the length of time these children spend in a daycare facility or at home to be the primary reason for any major behavioral differences?

Watch CBS Videos Online

By the way, if you can find the text of the study itself, let me know. I did a quick search and came up empty-handed.

Fact or Fiction? “Building” Your Child’s Immunity Through Illness

jennie m — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 19:07:43 +0000

When my daughter caught her first cold in the daycare at the YMCA, people told me that it was, in the long run, a good thing. Getting sick now, they said, would build her immune system and make her stronger. If it didn’t happen in daycare, then it’d happen in preschool. No matter how much I wanted to protect her, she would eventually have to go through a period of illness. Getting sick was a right of passage into the world of immunity. Was this an old wives’ tale, I wondered, or was there any truth to it?

In order to answer this question, I did some research on how the immune system works, and this is what I found. The immune system is divided into two main functions: innate and adaptive immunity. Innate immunity includes the white blood cells designed to attack all foreign pathogens. Adaptive immunity uses the white blood system to remember the pathogens the body has encountered and use that memory to create antibodies that fight the pathogen more effectively the next time it is encountered. Adaptive immunological memory is the principal behind vaccinations.

Babies are born without any immunological memory, though some antibodies do cross the mother’s placenta and help protect the child. Breastfeeding helps solidify this protection by passing the mother’s white blood cells – and their specific, adaptive immunity – to the child. Through breast milk, babies can gain some protection from the mother’s experience with a variety of pathogens. There is an excellent review of the medical literature here.

Children do have to be exposed to viruses and bacteria in order to develop specific immunity. In this way, sicknesses do help build a child’s immunity. But let’s think about the pathogens that a child is likely to encounter.

First and foremost, there are those diseases for which we have developed vaccines. These are some of the most dangerous viruses and bacteria on the planet. With vaccines, we can bypass the illness and move directly into learned immunological response by building antibodies to dead or attenuated pathogens. Then there are specific childhood diseases, to which kids can become immune to through illness. Chicken pox is one example. The pathogens that cause these illnesses are relatively stable, unlike the viruses that produce the common cold. The constellation of common cold viruses is incredibly diverse, which is why a vaccine for this illness does not exist. In addition, the cold virus mutates quickly, making it nearly impossible to develop a specific, adaptive response to it. Mutations are also common to the virus that causes influenza, though a vaccination is possible. But that vaccination has to be given each year, because the rapid mutations make the previous year’s vaccine null and void by the next flu season. The CDC attempts to predict which mutations will occur, but they are not always right, as anyone who has gotten both the flu vaccine and the flu can attest.

Most of us have had a cold before, and most of us will get another one again. While our bodies have learned to respond to one virus mutation, it has to learn again as soon as another mutation comes along. In other words, even if your infant beats the cold she picked up in daycare, she will not be immune from the common cold. She will have to beat it again and again. Illness, in this case, does build her immunological memory, but it won’t prevent her from getting the sniffles.

There is, however, some possibility of cross-reactivity in your child’s immunological response. While cold viruses mutate, the viruses do share common attributes. As such, the immunological system can learn to recognize the common factors and respond appropriately. In terms of experience, this means that the first time your child gets a cold, it will generally be more severe and last longer than the second, third, or fourth time. Your child’s system will be better equipped to respond to a virus it partly recognizes.

The answer, then, is that illness does build your child’s immune system. Exposing your child to chicken pox will help protect her from later bouts with this particular illness. But getting a cold in daycare probably won’t prevent your child from getting another cold in preschool or kindergarten. And your own experience with the common cold isn’t likely to prevent you from catching whatever she brings home from daycare, either!