Is It Really Worth It?

I own a childcare center and give free tuition to my staff. However, most centers that are corporate run charge partial for children of staff to attend. I guess it depends on what the policy of the center you are interested in does.

Some childcare places give a discount and others don't. The amount of the discount differs from place to place. You could call some potential sites and ask. Find out how much you'll be earning and what expenses you'll have such as gas and care of your car and clothes if any. Be sure to figure out how much you'll pay in taxes.

There are web sites to help you figure out the tax part and possibly the car expense part.

As to car expenses you can figure how many miles to the gallon the car gets, multiply the number of miles to and from work by that number and you'll have an approximate cost of gas. You know how much you pay for oil changes and number of miles in between. From this you can figure how much more often you'll have to do the oil changes and all that involves.

You may already have the right clothes and enough but you will be washing them more often. That is probably a very small amount but if after doing the other figures you're close to even then I'd figure that the miscellaneous costs would eat up whatever you'd earn above the larger expenses.

It REALLY depends. Some school the tuition is totally waved, in other schools there's no discount at all. Others can run from 10%-90%. It changes per each individual school.

I DO know that (in our area) most SAHPs stay at home because they can't afford to work. Either straight (cost of daycare is more than they make every month - infant care in our area for 40hours a week is typically $1600 a month)... or after figuring out daycare costs & taxes they're breaking even or making as little as $1-$2 an hour. For most families I know an extra $100-$200 a month just doesn't cut it... and $1.42 an hour is NOT worth their time. And that's before figuring gas, work clothes, etc.

My experience has been that no --any sort of discount is very very small and tution is high and your paycheck to begin with is pretty small so it really isn't worth it, unless you just really want to get out of the house, And you might also want to consider how you and your child would deal with being in the same "school", some times it's hard to watch other people raise/discipline your children and some times its hard to get them to listen to you in a different settign like this. IF you can stay home do it, and if you can't then look into babysitting in your home or being a nanny where you can bring your baby along.

From my experience, you are more likely to get free tuition for your kids if you work for a family-owned day care. My sister runs a few, and all of their employees are allowed to bring up to 2 of their kids at no charge. The larger centers, like KinderCare or New Horizon are likely to only offer a percentage discount.

Good luck!