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Originally Posted by !Aznboi128
Has anyone looked into Daycares? I know some are looking before their kid is born so I'm a bit late to the party but just curious what you guys are doing.
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Prevoiusly, at least in all the "good" daycares that my SO told me to register our kid for -- I think I ended up pre-registered at about 6 or 7 places -- getting a spot was exceedingly difficult. We started putting the baby's name down at those day care when my SO was about 6 months pregnant. Well guess what? Not a single one of those places had spots by the time our kid hit 2.5 yrs old, and then she aged out of the infant daycare group.
The 3+ yrs old daycare was much easier, and we got lucky with a new place that has just expanded into a 2nd location. As I understood it, the much greater ease was due to provincial childcare legislations that required a higher care provider to child ratio than the 3+ yrs old daycare.
A number of places that we have previously registered for started calling us back to offer us a spot after our kid turned 2.5. But by then we had already found a place.
But all of that was before COVID hit, and it is a totally different world now. Also, my above experience was also before Horgan / NDP announced their additional childcare support, and things did get at least a bit easier with the NDP expanded childcare support.
I would say that since maybe about May / June 2020, once the daycare places started figuring out what they needed to do to keep operating, it has become significantly easier to put a child into daycare, and this continues to be true right now. Another friend with an under 3 yrs old kid got an offer from one of the places that we waited (in vain) for 3+ years without getting a spot, and it pretty much only took a few days for them to confirm that they had a spot available. When we pulled our child out of daycare since March 2020, between May / June 2020 to maybe about Oct 2020, we were getting more than a few calls from the places we were previously waitlisting on to see whether we'd be interested to put our kid back into daycare with them.
With everything that is happening (and continuing to happen and change), it is probably quite difficult to predict how easy / difficult the daycare situation would become.