Fetuses Get Waitlisted

Call us neurotic, obsessed, and on the brink of irreparably screwing up our children. But with mere weeks to go before yea and nay letters are sent out, I, like many other nerve-wracked New York City parents, am captive to the craziness of contemporary preschool admissions. No matter how much you bemoan the system -- which requires "interviews" with two-year-olds, has involved a scandal over stock ratings in exchange for a coveted spot, and demands hours during out of the workday for open houses, tours, parents interviews, and the like -- any parent with a prayer of educating children in the city is forced to play.

Now comes the disheartening news via Sue Shellenbarger of The Wall Street Journal that pregnant mothers around the country are putting their fetuses on waitlists: for daycare and pre-preschools, so few are the spots in quality programs. This isn't just a New York City phenomenon. Shellenbarger quotes moms like Kim Angelini of Exton, Pennsylvania who got waitlisted for infant care when she was so neglectful as to wait for her maternity leave before applying. What used to be something wacky Londoners did, has apparently reached our shores. Given the paucity of decent childcare in this country, you can only wonder what took so long.

Part of the problem is a glut of children under five. We're in the midst of a baby boomlet. According to the Census Bureau, in 2006, more babies were born in the U.S. than in any year since 1961, the height of the big Baby Boom. In New York City, not only are more babies being born, but those babies are no longer swiftly car-seated out to the suburbs the way they once were. With the city richer, safer, and more kid-centric than ever, parents here are sticking around. The under-five population in Manhattan rose an astonishing 26% between 2000 and 2004, even though the borough's population rose only 1.5% overall. Trouble is, there aren't enough preschool spots available for them. At one Manhattan nursery school open house I attended (for the kind of low-key church-basement type school that would have blended in easily in a middling 1970s suburb), more than 600 parents showed up. The number of available spots for three-year-olds? Fourteen.

Adding insult and anxiety to neurosis are the tuition fees for these preschools and the costs of childcare. According to the government, even the nation's wealthiest parents, those with an average household income of $108,700, spend a mere $2,690 on childcare and education during the first two years of a baby's life. Um, gosh, where? The reality, per the National Association of Child Care Resource and Referral Agencies, a network of more than 805 child care resources and referral centers, is that the average cost of childcare for an infant ranges from $3,803 to $13,480 a year. And that's not even reality in New York City: According to a story in this week's New York Observer, nannies in New York cost between $40,000 and $62,000 a year. Sensible folks outside of Manhattan tells us nutty New Yorkers to just send our kids to day care instead. But then, some of us forgot to put our fetuses on the waitlist.

Comments

[fisharefreinds]

And you wrote this article because you believe it absurd? Because what is happening in NYC and the competitive nature of "right school," "right college," right pre-school" is malarky and creates an elitest society? What is it we are to derive from this?

[Pandu]

I have an idea.

How about husbands take care of their wives, and mothers take care of their kids?

[OneWoman]

We tried that already; and too many of the husbands, having direct access to the financial resources, abused their power (e.g. domestic abuse, adultry, etc.). Women, as a group, learned not to put themselves in such a situation.

Hey, I was a stay-at-home mom for a while; it's a great set-up as long as his income is sufficient and he doesnt abuse his power.

[Sandnsea]

Infant care is actually not profitable, as a whole. Most of the centers that do offer infant care do it as a service for the families with older children. For infant care, adult:child ratios set by state licensing usually run 1:3 or 4, you can't have a classroom with 1 teacher and 15 children.

The lack of decent infant care in many communities is a serious problem for families but our society still has the attitude that moms belong at home with babies, even though that isn't an economically viable option for many families anymore.

Because our government is putting our resources elsewhere, families are forced to act in their baby's best interest - which means doing their homework and getting on waiting lists before baby is born.

[AllenKonigsberg]

Why don't people just create new schools? It seems as though there is a new bank branch on every street corner. Can each new one actually have as much expected profitability as a school? What do these places cost, anyway. I think I've read stories that say $20,000 or $30,000 for a child for a year. Figure 15 kids in a class for total revenue of, say $375,000 for the class. A teacher gets what, $75,000 including benefits? That leaves $300,000 per class for space, insurance, marketing, and administrative overhead. With kindergarten through sixth grade, two classes per grade, you've got $4.2 million to play with.

What am I missing here?

[klmebane]

starting up child care institutions is an arduous, difficult task full of lots of red tape. its also a very expensive proposition. do you have the time and money needed to do it?

[BilCon]

You Ain't Kiddin'

I have been planning an orphanage for the past 2 years.

[AllenKonigsberg]

The up-front expense shouldn't be an issue -- if the proposition is sufficiently profitable, it wouldn't be hard to finance it. The red tape, on the other hand, is a possible culprit. Is the red tape worse in New York than elsewhere? Also possible. Why aren't parents up in arms, demanding that the process of starting a new school be streamlined?

I suspect an additional explanation -- that the problem is not lack of spots, per se, but a lack of spots at the few schools that these people want to send their kids to. That's a much more complicated problem and I can't imagine what the policy solution would be.