First things first: Read How to Avoid the Mommy Trap, by Julie Shields. Ideally do this before you get pregnant, and even before you have sex, or at least the kind of sex that can get you pregnant. That book isn't just for women, or straight people, either.
Finding child care for your baby, other than you, has several components to it. If you are a single parent, I am in awe of you, and absolutely support whatever you have to do to make this work. If you aren't a single parent, and there is a seriously inequitable division of child care responsibilities (not just unequal in time, which may be inevitable, but unfairly so), it's crucial for your sanity, the child's welfare, and your adult relationshipo that you find some way to start to address those inequities. Making specific requests is a good starting point. Shields has suggestions.
It may be the case that you don't ever need to hire child care for your baby. But if you can't find additional volunteers to cover when you need to be away from your baby, there are a number of people and businesses who will care for your baby in exchange for money. There are also people who will care for your baby, if you are willing to care for their baby part of the time. My sister, whose baby is a few months older than mine, has hired her baby's daddy's niece to live with her and care for her baby during the summer (high school student). When that ended, she found, through craigslist, a young woman with a toddler to live with her in exchange for providing childcare. When that young woman moved out of state, she found a young woman with a cat (that's just starting, so we'll see how that works). I asked my post-partum doula for a recommendation, and heard about a nice young man who took care of a slightly older baby for about 20 hours a week. That's worked well for us, but now he's going to college, so we're hiring a friend of his. I draw from our experiences the moral that turnover is inevitable. My sister-in-law says that when children are very young, continuity of care is not absolutely crucial; babies need love, but can accept it from a variety of people. Older children need an ongoing relationship more. This is a perspective that you might find comforting when dealing with turnover.
The offices of health care providers that provide care for babies often have newsletters and magazines covering your local area. They may include ads for nanny services and other companies that help you find child care, either temporarily or permanently, part or full-time. Calling these companies can give you a good idea of what the average hourly wage is for child care. Many of these companies do some amount of background checking on the people they send out, which you may also find comforting.
Whoever you find to do child care, you will need to communicate with in order to arrange hours, compensation, location and other details of care. Think about this in some detail. After talking to the nanny brokers, I was very reluctant to use them, because it was clear to me that while they would send me safe people who were capable of caring for my baby, their perspective, politics and ideas about good child care were almost inevitably going to differ from mine, quite dramatically. Perhaps I was overly cynical. I do know that by working through more personal contacts, it was easy to find many people whose style of caring for children is quite similar to mine.
Shields makes similar points in choosing a partner to have children with. The point can also be made regarding using one's extended family to provide care. If you have significant differences of opinion about childcare with the grandparent, aunt, cousin, or nephew who is going to be caring for your baby, conflict is likely if not inevitable.
Child care is very important, and (if you've already had your baby in your life for a little while, as you've surely noticed) takes a lot of time, attention and energy. That is, in part, why you are looking for help. Expecting someone to care for a baby and clean the house, cook dinner, do laundry, etc., is inherently unreasonable. People do it all the time, and that's why children spend a lot of time in cribs and playpens. This is not to say you can't cook dinner and care for a baby. Some days that'll work out just fine. But some of the time it won't. When you hire someone to care for your child, make sure you know and they know what their priorities are. It's best not to ask them to do work around the house. If they volunteer to do things, don't expect it, and don't exploit them. Your child may suffer.
If you are breastfeeding, you have some additional concerns. Milk is happening whether you are with your baby or not. Pumping and storing milk is one solution. Keeping your baby with you, at work or at home, is another solution, and not inherently incompatible with hiring child care. Feeding isn't everything. If you need to concentrate on other things, whether in or out of the home, whether paid employment or any other activity incompatible with attending moment-to-moment to a small baby, hiring child care with the understanding the baby will be brought to you (or you will go to the baby) when hungry, may make it possible to pursue on-demand breastfeeding at the breast.
When deciding how much child care to get, obviously budget is a factor. If it allows, try very hard to get more help than you need. While I realize you may have some guilt about any time you spend away from your baby, and you positively want to be with your baby as much as possible, scheduling child care is just like scheduling any other kind of labor. Labor is people. People get sick, and have things come up. They move. They have appointments. They're late. If you have more care than you need, when this inevitably happens, you have enough slack in the system that you might be able to shuffle things around without sacrifice something really, really important. More care gives you flexibility. On those rare weeks when nothing goes wrong, you can hang out with the baby and the child care, and catch up on what's been going on when you've been away, connect with this person who is so important in your baby's life and get a sense of future plans (going back to college, moving out of state -- stuff like that).
Once you have child care, recognize that even if you do have some flexibility, sometimes things happen that exceed what you can deal with. Your baby gets sick and wants to nurse nonstop. Your child care gets sick and takes a week or more to get well. Both. In sequence or simultaneously. You can try to bull through with your life and get done everything you would have done if things were going well. Or you can do some crash reprioritizing and figure out up front what you really have to get done, what can survive a delay, and what you can delegate or ditch, however much you might have wanted to get it done. It's hard to think when your child care has cancelled, but think hard anyway. Protect what's really important, whatever -- or whoever -- that might be.
Shields has some great insight and advice. Read her. Until then, here are a few key points to keep in mind:
For everyone out there trying desperately to pay the bills, unable to hire care, working opposite shifts from a spouse once-beloved, now rarely seen, I salute you. Our society has given you the business, and you are nevertheless doing the most important work of making sure there is another generation. I apologize for all the assholes that think that children are a lifestyle accoutrement, that one should not have if one cannot afford them. I apologize for the insanity that is capitalism, treating everyone as an independent individual with no needs and no one depending upon him -- because capitalism is inherently sexist, assuming a support system at home that not even the men have any more and the women never did have. I saw this very dimly before I had a child. I see it more clearly now, even though I have resources not available to the vast majority of parents in our society. Hopefully, in the years and decades to come, we can rearrange our world to better support you in your work -- not the stuff you get paid for, the real work, the hard stuff, caring for little hearts and bodies and minds, and the family that is the true unit of a healthy human world.
Copyright 2005 by Rebecca Allen
Created December 14, 2005 Updated March 8, 2006