f you’re anything like me then you are a father that has to work hard for a living. Yes, I understand that every year more and more fathers are choosing to be, or are being forced to be the stay at home parent. But I think it’s safe to say that we are still a long way from this trend becoming the status quo. Again, if you’re anything like me, then it’s not even really an option for you or your co-parent to stay home. With interest rates on the rise, the cost of living skyrocketing, and childcare costs in the stratosphere, most of us parents are in no position to forgo a two salary household for the luxury of having one parent being home until the kids are of school age. Instead we are left sitting in our offices, standing on a scaffold, or delivering packages, all while constantly feeling guilty because our kids are in daycare, with a nanny, or some other caregiver nine or 10 hours a day, five days a week. If you do the math that means that during our children’s early developmental years, about up to age five, our kids spend more awake time with the people we pay to care for them than they do with us.
If I am sounding a little bothered it’s because I am. What I am finding is that things that I think of as basic like oatmeal and cereal are for breakfast, or no soda with sugar and caffeine, are not what my son’s caregivers think of as basic. Not too long ago one of the ladies that works at my son’s daycare told me that he didn’t want oatmeal for breakfast, so she gave him soup instead. Another caregiver excitedly told me that my son just loves orange soda. Each time I found myself knocked off balance in disbelief by the fact that in both cases the caregivers thought that what they were telling me was ok. There have also been instances where movies that I found inappropriate for my little boy were being viewed casually; as if a three year old should be watching Peter Jackson’s King Kong (a movie that I own by the way but never once thought I should watch with my kid).
The obvious problem with everything I just said, beyond the possibilit