NORTHAMPTON — Prior to the state’s shutdown in mid-March, Northampton resident Robyn Nelson already kept busy with her full-time job as a charter school principal in Chicopee. With her husband also employed full time as a writer, she relied on Little Schoolhouse Family Daycare in Northampton to look after her 2-year-old son during the day, while her older son attended school.
But when all nonemergency child care centers closed under Gov. Charlie Baker’s stay-at-home guidelines and schools began conducting virtual learning, all child care shifted to Nelson and her husband, who continue to work remotely.
“It’s like having three full-time jobs,” Nelson said. “My paid job, being a parent job, and being a home-school teacher job.”
Nelson shares this struggle with many working parents of young children. But as of Monday, when Baker enacted the second phase of the state’s four-phased reopening plan, child care, recreational summer camps and youth programs can reopen if these programs follow new social distancing guidelines released by the state.
The 32-page document outlines measures such as prohibiting items that cannot easily be cleaned, creating spaces that promote physical distancing, and daily screening of all children and staff for COVID-19 symptoms. Depending on the age group being cared for, groups must be limited to nine to 12 people, with various ratios set up for how many staff members can be assigned to groups of children at a time. Staff members must wear face masks when six feet of physical distancing is not possible, and this measure also is recommended for children over the age of 2.
While life without child care services is “extremely stressful,” Nelson said that she and her husband have been able to get by with a combination of help from her mother-in-law and babysitting. Without this extra assistance, juggling all three responsibilities would be impossible, Nelson said. But even with this added help — which she noted not everyone has access to — Nelson said it feels as if she hasn’t been able to give her children or her job her full attention.
Kendra Brown, an environmental engineer who has been working remotely during the pandemic, also has needed to make adjustments to continue working while caring for her 2-year-old son, Linden, who typically spent the day at The Cottage Garden day care in Amherst, while Brown and her husband both work from home at full-time or nearly full-time hours.
Child care services are “completely necessary for us,” Brown said. With day cares closed, she and her husband have managed by taking shifts to watch their son, although not without some difficulties.
“We both are expected to be doing our full-time jobs, but of course we’re not working as much as we used to,” Brown said, “so that’s kind of stressful, having that nagging feeling that you’re supposed to be doing more, but also knowing that the situation is different and we have to take care of our son.”
Shifting from “work mode” to “parenting mode” has also been challenging, Brown said. After their son goes to bed, Brown and her husband catch up on work for another hour or two. While the situation has been manageable, it’s also been “exhausting,” she noted.
The couple considered bringing in a babysitter they trusted, Brown said, but the pandemic also complicated this possibility — while the babysitter was following social distancing guidelines, not all of her roommates were doing the same.
“It was just too much to keep track of in terms of us trying to keep tabs on who is our babysitter connected to,” Brown said, “and how are they acting?”
While some parents and providers are eager to see child care centers reopened, both have expressed some doubts about the feasibility of Baker’s guidelines.
Candice Chouinard, owner of Little Schoolhouse Family Daycare, said child care centers were not given adequate time to put the required preparations in place.
Moreover, meeting these regulations place an added financial burden these businesses, which increases costs for parents — a problem that Chouinard says arises from a system that does not value child care as essential and does not provide the service with the support it needs.
Some regulations also contradict each other, she said. Staff members may not float among groups within a day or day-to-day unless they are needed for specialized activities, for instance, but if any children needed to be isolated, a staff member would need to float to this isolation area.
While planning to meet new regulations for reopening, Chouinard also expects to lose some clients. With some parents still worried about sending their children to day care, she expects more families to rely on nannies to limit exposure to other social circles.
“There’s an uneasiness because there are parents that need care to return to work, but they don’t want to risk the well-being of their baby,” Chouinard said. “So I think that there are some parents who are not going to return, at least not until later in the summer and fall.”
Celia Riahi, who runs The Cottage Garden home day care center in Amherst with her wife, Barbara Audley, said she thinks the guidelines will make it particularly hard for parents who are new to child care centers to build needed relationships with their providers. Children who are new to day care centers often have difficulty separating from their parents, Riahi added, and screening measures at the beginning of each day can add to their anxieties.
Riahi also has concerns about the practicality of keeping children six feet apart from each other, as well as the implications that this physical distancing will have on their experience at day care.
“The whole point of child care is to help the child socialize and learn to be in the world with their friends,” Riahi said. “How are you going to do that if you’re supposed to keep six feet apart from each other? How do you keep a toddler six feet from another toddler? And how do you not pick up and hug a toddler who’s crying because they bumped themself?”
The Cottage Garden closed in mid-March and has not had any revenue coming in since this time, and given that it usually closes for the summer, Riahi said that she does not expect to reopen until the fall. She doesn’t plan to raise tuition, but may reduce the number of days that the day care is open to three.
Like Chouinard, Nelson also has some concerns about the impact that the guidelines will have on staff members. The child-to-staff ratios, which allow one to two staff members to supervise up to 10 children at a time, don’t seem to leave opportunities for staff to take breaks during the day, she noted.
While Nelson is comfortable sending her child back to day care when it reopens, she said the state needs talk to day care providers “to figure out some of those nuances.”
Brown said that she is also comfortable sending her child back to day care, in part because her family does not have any conditions that place them at high risk for severe COVID-19 infection. But they want to protect the community and their child care providers, Brown said, and would be careful to continue with their own social distancing to reduce spread of the disease.
Jenny Meyer, public health nurse for Northampton, has been able to leave her 3-year-old daughter, Wilhelmina, with emergency child care providers two to three days per week due to her job, which she said would not be possible without having this service available. The measures in place at emergency child care providers are largely similar to Baker’s new guidelines, Meyer said.
“I feel like rifts are being mitigated as well as they can be, and I think that for parents who have a choice, that they can make that choice whether or not to send their child” back to day care, Meyer said. “And parents who don’t have that choice … can feel that their children are being kept as safe as possible.”
Meyer, who normally sends her daughter to Little Schoolhouse, also said that child care providers need to be given a seat at the table when implementing the guidelines.
For Nelson, this service is essential to reopening the economy.
“I feel like child care is the number one thing people need to go back to work, besides jobs,” Nelson said. “Without child care, it’s just impossible to go back to work.”
Jacquelyn Voghel can be reached at jvoghel@gazettenet.com.