Funny, I've been reading the linked blog for a couple of years since the first time I saw Thorn link to it, but I didn't pick up $30/day for babysitting. That really is weird -- there's a fairly long-term relationship with the babysitter, so maybe there's something that explains it there.
$30/day! God I want some of that sweet sweet exploitation.
Because then I would be all like, kid, I'm upgrading you to an American Girls doll and daddy's upgrading to a new 650 hp station wagon.
kid, I'm upgrading you to an American Girls doll
Those American Girls dolls are pretty sweet, but I'd keep the actual kid. They're more expensive to feed, but also more useful doing things around the house.
Foster parents can change their minds. I've seen it.
That was too negative. (Although my experience of that was negative.)
But it is more contingent. Often by design. I think that must be very hard for people who foster. For kids who are past infancy it can be hard too.
But I have no better solution.
Not the saintly ones.
Sure. Damned few of them are. I believe Thorn when she says she isn't a saint. Most people who foster are generically good-people. They're not saints. Sometimes they blow it, most of the time they don't.
9 is very hard-boiled, detective.
It's all about my managing my expectations. Even my retrospective expectations.
I believe Thorn when she says she isn't a saint.
I don't. A saint doesn't have to perfect in every way every minute of every day. Giving of themselves way beyond the call of duty in answer to a higher purpose is *enough* (though obviously a damn lot).
(I know, I shouldn't have taken that bait, which is a threadjack to the real subject here. I'll pretend to be sorry so long as no one argues with me.)
Online babysitting will cut costs even further. All you need is for the babysitter to pay for their own webcams and screens.
Someone please explain this; her handwriting is awful.
Sorry. I didn't mean to threadjack this thread. Bye.
Oh jeez, do I have to go clean all that up?
Maybe those comment are on topic. Have you read them?
No, md 20/400, you're not threadjacking at all. I definitely agree that foster families do (and sometimes should) ask to have children moved. Both Mara and Nia came to us because their prior families were overwhelmed to the point where they decided they needed to stop fostering, and I think both families made the right decision. We have friends who chose not to adopt a little child who'd been in their home a year and then more recently we met that child's new family, who are a fantastic fit and wonderful advocates for that little one, who's thriving as an only child.
In considering adding children to the family, we're trying hard to choose someone who's relatively unlikely to molest or physically abuse Nia or Mara, but in the event that we choose wrong, I can definitely imagine us getting to the point where we have to ask to have that child moved to a family with no girls or whatever the trigger seems to be if we can't manage the level of supervision necessary to keep all the kids safe. One of the things I find most stressful about fostering is the idea that you CAN ask to have the child moved and so I constantly seem to be thinking about whether we SHOULD do that if it seems like we're not meeting the levels of quality the child might have hoped for.
I've had a day to prepare my anti-saint arguments and I think they're more along the lines Sharon was going for, that people who say, "Oh, you must be a saint!" are letting themselves off the hook by implying that only special people with magical powers can be foster parents. There are a lot of different kinds of foster parents, good and bad. I think I'm on the better side of that spectrum, but that's a combination of preparation, luck, and personal qualities that have made parenting easier on me than I'd expected. But if by "saint" you just mean someone who's chosen self-sacrifice, that seems like a pretty low bar, but on the other hand at least I'm not starving myself or wearing sackcloth (though I haven't met my goal of dressing and looking better) or wearing a crown of thorns.
Also, I haven't yet found anywhere we can board our dog for less than the stipend amount we get, and our state has an unusually generous stipend. I do generally lose money on fostering, but that's because of how I choose to parent and it's not so bad after the first month or so when there are constant new expenses.
To LB's point about how Asia and Rebecca must have some history, I'm pretty sure they don't, or it's not that they were friends before Asia started babysitting. If anyone's better at searching tumblrs than I am, Rebecca called her "Teasha" before using her real name, but she's just a young woman Rebecca found and hired to babysit, though she and her mom are discussing getting licensed to do foster care themselves.
(Possibly I am weirded out by it because I of all people shouldn't have been viscerally shocked by how many white kids with darker caregivers I saw on our visit to NYC, but it's also just that $30 gets us about 4 hours of babysitting by someone the girls like and trust and that seems like a great deal.)
I wonder at how many terribly good things are made possible only by the irrevocability of the decision to do them.
22: The toddler interrogation thread is one down.
Which is the thread for the disingenuous people who nonetheless manage to be wrong almost all the time?
$30 gets us about 4 hours of babysitting by someone the girls like and trust and that seems like a great deal
I agree with your assessment: that is a great deal.
We generally pay $10/hour, so I agree with everyone else here.
Maybe $30 is for a short day somehow? The babysitter's covering a couple of hour gap? This is really kind of bothering me -- $30 for a full day doesn't just seem weirdly cheap, it seems wrong. No one should be working for $4/hr.
So we're 27 comments in and no one has clicked through and noticed that the first link is a dud?
She also says that she'll pay Asia $240/month to sleep over two nights a week. So $30/night. FWIW.
27: I'm pretty sure Rebecca works full-time, so Asia is taking the subway over to Rebecca's place (or not, after overnights) and then watching Sandy or now Clementine all day from before Rebecca leaves for work until after she returns home, plus schlepping her to family visits at the foster agency in either case, plus sometimes doing laundry or grocery runs. And if Asia were the foster parent, that's exactly what she'd be expected to do (minus the commute to the baby) for the same amount of money, and yet it seems deeply off to me to have a babysitter doing it and problematically low for NYC but just the way of the world to expect it of a foster parent. (The babies also have Medicaid and WIC. On the rare occasions children in care don't qualify for Medicaid, their foster parents are still not responsible for copays and so forth.)
Just because Asia is literally cheaper than a crack whore why should we think anything untoward is going on?
Well, if you want the best whores in the business, they cost a pretty penny.
25: I suspect she gave us a better rate because we're fostering, though it may just be that she thinks two kids so close in age are not twice as hard as one. But she genuinely enjoys the girls and we try to make sure she's not having to cook and that she gets plenty of time to herself once they're in bed that pays the same as the pre-bedtime part so I don't totally feel like we're taking advantage of her and then we also tip well. She's training to teach kids their age and knowing them has helped her think about what she wants to do professionally, and she's applied to grad schools that will let her focus on kids from poorer backgrounds.
Let me be the first to point out that I am unashamedly stealing Helpy-chalk's crack whore joke there.
I hired a student to babysit (who brought her fiance) and afterwards they said "We weren't sure if we were getting paid for this or not, so we decided if we did, we'd do something fun with the money!" (Of course you're getting paid. What on earth.)
They also texted me to say they'd gotten home safely. (Uh, thanks, although I'm not your mom.) And then texted me when they were out at a nice dinner, doing something fun with the money. (Sure, okay.)
28: If people do click through, my favorite comment is the woman reassuring the very Jewish author that being a thoughtful foster parent makes her the hands and feet of Jesus. Come Shabbat, she'll have plenty of time to sit around and laugh about that.
If she can't pay her babysitter minimum wage, she shouldn't have a babysitter.
"And of course, Asia cuts down the cost of Asia."
Some kind of something is going on there, I guess, but otherwise Blandings is right.
I suppose so, but I also feel bad for the blogger, who would presumably otherwise be up shit creek.
As heebie suggests, part of the problem is lack of sensible parental leave policies. Rebecca posted about what she sees as her options for FMLA and why they're not financially feasible here: http://fosterhood.tumblr.com/post/41941798589/lack-of-maternity-leave That's one reason a lot of states won't place a newborn too young for childcare in a home without a stay-at-home parent.
I am very lucky to work in a job where I can take parental leave up to once a year for a foster placement regardless of whether it's leading to adoption and regardless of which of us is the one the state considers the legal foster parent. As long as I'm the primary parent, I'm entitled to my eight weeks, though I've only used them with Mara. Taking on new foster placements has significantly curtailed my hours at work, which is a pain since I'm paid hourly and my base hours for each year are based on what I'd managed the previous one, but I'm okay with the choices I've made.
Online babysitting will cut costs even further.
This explains Asia. She's on the other side of the Pacific Ocean.
$30 gets us about 4 three hours of babysitting by someone the girls like and trust and that seems like a great deal a teenager too young to be interested in stealing our booze.
Now I feel bad that everyone's assuming the worst of Rebecca, so I went and looked for links. Asia is in her early 20s and is/was studying to be a midwife. http://fosterhood.tumblr.com/post/135033547/i-cant-decide-on-a-nanny At that point, she was paying $60/day, so presumably $30 out-of-pocket, so I'm guessing that "Asia lowering the cost of Asia" means at some point Asia suggested Rebecca just give her the stipend money. http://fosterhood.tumblr.com/post/286204349/only-2-options-a-nanny-or-b-nusery-in-the-projects and the "nursery in the projects" wasn't what she considered feasible for her former foster daughter either. http://fosterhood.tumblr.com/post/296851605/first-days-of-daycare
Here, I think the subsidized daycare rate is somewhat higher than the foster care subsidy, but children in care whose foster parents work are eligible for both, which is what's happening now for Rebecca's baby Sandy. In our state, these funds were just frozen and there will be no new applications for subsidized childcare for a year or two, which is going to absolutely devastate low-income working families, but I've heard that funds will still be available for foster families, which I guess is good since that's where too many of those kids will end up if their parents can't work and their relatives can't take kinship custody because those funds have also been slashed.
$60 for a full day is still weirdly cheap, but in the sort of believable range rather than absolutely bizarre. I wonder if Asia's thinking of the job, particularly at the lower rate, as semi-volunteering? She's studying to be a midwife, so interested in a caring profession, and I could see thinking of herself as pitching in to help a couple of kids in foster care.
I still sort of disapprove, if I understand what's going on, but it's not crazy.
This is fourth-hand gossip, so of no reliability at all. But this morning, a guy who works in our building showed my husband what purported to be pictures of his gay Argentinian nephew on vacation with the new pope a couple of years ago.
Can the pope be forced to resign?
If anyone's interested and free, apparently Talk of the Nation on NPR is live right now talking about Sharon's first linked post, though I assume if she'd been asked to speak I would have heard this from her rather than someone in the group of writers who happened to have her radio on.