childcare

9 Tips for Mastering Pokémon Go

Ashley Feinberg · 07/08/16 05:20PM

1. Keep an open mind! You never know where a rare Pokémon might be hiding. Don’t be afraid to explore new areas of your town—adventure is what it’s all about!

Nannying Now the New Fallback Career for Educated White Women

Lacey Donohue · 09/11/13 07:46PM

Elizabeth Chuck at NBC News reports today on the “Modern-day Mary Poppins,” which is really just a cute way of referring to young women who graduate from college and can’t get jobs doing anything but nannying. This shift in the market—moving away from uneducated and / or international nannies—has turned out to be especially beneficial for really rich families who a) want their kids to get “an edge” in the increasingly competitive world for babies and b) feel more comfortable with “a peer” watching their children (aka a white person).

Obese Babysitter Dies, Smothering Infant

Max Read · 09/03/11 01:40PM

Long Island babysitter Teresa Coffey collapsed and died while taking care of month-old infant—the son of local TV host Michael Baldwin—falling on the child and, apparently, smothering it to death.

Googlers' kids are more special than yours

Paul Boutin · 07/07/08 02:20PM

Now that it seems likely a large number of Google employee/parents will have to pull their kids out of the company's daycare program, it's a good time to revisit this video set to a tune by children's songwriter Laurie Berkner. Mock this clip if you must - I know I did - but Google is a very big deal to youngsters. Try to grasp the traumatic experience pending for preschoolers about to be cut off from their daily dose of Googlyoogly goodness because Mom and Dad are $12,000 a year short. It's just not right.

Solving Google's childcare crisis, the Microsoft way

Owen Thomas · 07/07/08 11:40AM

Google cofounder Sergey Brin has explained his company's childcare fiasco thusly: It's an experiment in economics. And yet there's very little that's scientific about Google's approach to childcare, which has been to hand Susan Wojcicki, Brin's sister-in-law, a blank check, and then accuse parents of feeling entitled when the result comes in with sky-high costs. Raising the price well above market rates was the only way, Brin argued in meeting with parents, to reduce a long waitlist. Gosh, how can a large software company fairly handle childcare benefits? If Google weren't so determined to do things differently — wild ono and adzuki beans for lunch! Stanford grads with 3.5 GPAs as instructors! — it might look to Microsoft's example. The software giant offers employees 20 percent discounts on childcare from a number of providers — and its executives are smart enough to realize that they know how to write code, not take care of infants.

Who needs Catholic guilt when you can have Google guilt?

Paul Boutin · 07/07/08 11:00AM

The Reggio Emilia approach to preschool education is one of the major drivers behind Google's pending 70 percent hike in the company's daycare prices for its employees. What's Reggio Emilia? Wikipedia for once has a darned good writeup: "Teachers in Reggio Emilia assert the importance of being confused as a contributor to learning; thus a major teaching strategy is purposely to allow mistakes to happen, or to begin a project with no clear sense of where it might end. Another characteristic that is counter to the beliefs of many Western educators is the importance of the child's ability to negotiate in the peer group." I know, it sounds like a commie plot to keep the kids from doing any math. But Reggio Emilia methods are proudly used at Christ the King Early Childhood Learning Center, a Catholic operation in Missouri. It's always fun to watch Valley elites sputter their defenses when accused of having anything in common with red-state Christians. But they do: Daycare costs real money in the Show Me state, too.

Kinderplex crisis reveals Google founder's fumbling and fibbing

Owen Thomas · 07/05/08 01:20PM

Joe Nocera of the New York Times has taken note of Google's childcare crisis. A brief recap: After taking its childcare programs in-house, at the behest of Google executive Susan Wojcicki, the sister-in-law of founder Sergey Brin, Google hiked its rates 70 percent. Parents were infuriated not just at the price hike but, accustomed to Google's culture of analysis-driven consensus, at the imperious way the decision was handed down. Nocera's reporting reveals more numbers showing just how incompetent Google is at daycare — and how comfortable Brin's PR handlers are at lying on his behalf. How, in other words, Google has become just like any other company in corporate America.

Tibetan Nannies Still New York's Most Popular Brand Of Ethnic Servant

abalk · 07/18/07 09:20AM

Today's Observer takes a look at the Tibetan nanny craze and finds that all is not well amongst New York parents searching for enlightened caretakers who will watch little Dillinger and Gingerly while Mommy goes to the gym and Daddy fiddles distractedly with his iPhone while pretending that he's "working." While Tibetan nannies are still a high-demand product, the whole transaction raises a difficult issue: It's kinda racist.