Being a great child care provider or preschool teacher is a tough job that doesn’t usually get the type of social respect it should. Let alone the let alone the financial reward it should!

Throw in a demanding and sometimes fussy bunch of parents (and oh yeah, their kids), and you will find classrooms led by the few, the proud, the brave, the amazing caregivers and preschool teachers!

But wait:

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Never heard of National Child Care Provider Appreciation Day? Not on our watch! It’s every year, the last Friday before Mother’s Day, so it’s coming up. Consider yourself warned. Do your homework and organize something for your child’s child care provider or preschool teacher.

There are quite a few tongue-in-cheek “appreciation days” out there. Today, for example, is Star Wars Day – May the 4^th be with you! But you really should take this Friday seriously: Besides family members, your child care provider is probably the single most important person in your child’s life.

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My daughter was only 2 days old when her father left us. I was totally alone. My entire extended family lives outside of the United States and I wasn’t sure of my options. It was quite frightening.

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So, you finally found the perfect daycare center. The teachers are great and your child wakes up every morning happy to go see them! Congratulations, you’ve come a long way!

But there’s one last big question: how much child care is OK? Is full-time daycare a good idea? Should I really be leaving him there all day?

Excellent question!

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Homework and parenting go hand-in-hand. The big question is who does it!

When your child gets a little older it is a little bit easier on you. There is a standard definition of “homework” and he or she will (or is supposed to, anyway) do most of it.

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So, you have decided to give your child the gift of languages. Congratulations, your child will thank you for it! As promised in our previous post about raising multilingual children, in this article we are going to dive deeper into language immersion preschool programs and the reasons why they are a great idea!

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If you’re like most of us, you started to appreciate your own parents a lot more when you became a parent yourself. “Jeez, Mom, was I like that? Thanks for putting up with me!”

Even if your parents were multilingual, though, they may not have seen the point of raising you to be so. Times were very different back then. If that’s the case, you probably wish they had held your nose to the language grindstone when you were younger. Today the world is a small, fast place where fortune favors the multilingual.

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Education and politics: what a great mixture for drama in the media.   President Obama’s push for universal Pre-K has given rise to all kinds of debates surrounding the issue. Is it good for kids? Do parents need it? Is it fair? Is it cost-effective? And so on.

Even otherwise peace-loving Swedes seem to be weighing in from across the Atlantic. (Hint: don’t mess with Swedes when it comes to public benefits surrounding kids. They take it very seriously.)

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Have you ever checked how many gigabytes of digital pictures and videos you have of your child? Here’s a fun thought exercise: 1 GB was worth more than a house back when you were born. At those prices you may have bought a subdivision just on the day your child was born!

Even so, there is still something special about daycare or preschool picture day. These types of pictures actually get printed out and framed! Here’s a quick checklist to stay on top of the big day.

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Do you remember the card catalogues they used to use in libraries? Now you can buy those cabinets as antiques on eBay. Most libraries switched over to computer based systems in the early 1990’s. In some ways, though, the card catalogue was more fun. You had to invest more time in finding each title and there was a certain sense of exploration involved. And preschoolers were too short to use it.

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