‘Most stressful part of becoming a new mom’: Child care forum has parents and industry calling for solutions

It takes a village and parents, educators, employers and all levels of government need to step up and advocate for accessible childcare.

That was a resounding theme as dozens of people attended a community information and consultation session on childcare. Parents, early childhood educators, and local politicians provided input on solutions to address the critical childcare shortage in Vernon.

Standing in the back of the room, rocking her son back and forth in his stroller, Amanda Argan, a mother to four-month-old Kai, knows all to well the struggle of finding childcare in Vernon.

She began looking for childcare when she was just five weeks pregnant with her son .

“I got him on nine different waitlists, and the same story has come up from every single waitlist I put him on, not until April 2021, so that’s a year and nine months after he would have been born.”

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Now, with her maternity leave expiring at the end of August, time is ticking and Argan is scrambling.

“Finding childcare has been the most stressful part of becoming a new mom and it started stressing me out when I was only two months pregnant. So that was a year now that I have been stressing about what childcare is going to look like for my child and I still don’t have any answers,” she said.

Argan said the stress of finding childcare even has her rethinking plans to have a second child.

Wendy Mackenzie, owner and manager of Kids Corner Daycare, says she fields many calls from Vernon parents desperately in need of childcare. Her facility currently has a two year waitlist

” It breaks my heart.”

She says that while the government recently announced money for childcare spaces, what’s missing is incentives to recruit and retain more qualified early childhood educators in B.C.

“I know in Vancouver [the government has] made a few announcements about new centres but what ends up happening is they are taking staff from other centres to man these centres and then those centres are closing, so it’s really not any new spaces, it’s just a shifting of spaces,” she said.

Mackenzie, who has owned Kids Corner Daycare for 17 years, argues that part of the problem is that early childhood educators need to be valued and paid better in the province.

“The wages do not reflect the training and the long hours. We work ten-hour days four days a week. We get sometimes a half hour paid break if all the children are sleeping,”

She adds the pay needs to reflect the level of training achieved to encourage more people to get fully certified. She also says more incentives are needed to encourage educators to stay in the field long-term to increase the quality of care.

“The government gave money for more ECE programs which is great but someone who just graduates from a program can’t run a program by themselves. They don’t have the skills and the knowledge and the ability, so we need to get those mature ECE’s who have worked in the field and who have left for financial reasons, time reasons or just exhaustion, back into the field with better wages so that they can come back and they can run the centre,” she said.

According to data from the Union of B.C. Municipalities, there are currently 1411 licenced childcare spaces in Vernon and 256 spaces in Coldstream.

In the fall, the City of Vernon conducted a survey examining the need for childcare spaces. In total, 453 people took part and 221 people said they were on waitlists. The majority of people who responded, 299, said they are in need of full-time care. Availability, cost, and hours of care were listed as the top barriers towards finding childcare.

The city says data from the survey and input gathered at the community input sessions will be used to help formulate a community child care space action plan which the city will use as a guide for policies that support the expansion of child care services in the city.