The subject of how to integrate your own children into your child care comes up many times a year on our daycare.com board. It’s one of those really important conversations we have about our OWN children and how to balance their home life while they are a part of our work life.

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Athomemommy asked “What about your own kids? How did they adjust to the new setting? New Routines? Kids in their house all day everyday? My 3 year old likes it but doesn’t care for the new rules and routines. Thinks he should be able to do what he use to. He’s the hardest part to my routines. Please help!!!!!

My son was born many years after I started the day care so I was pretty established with a routine and ways of doing things. I fit him into my work by making adjustments to his schedule  so that he was sleeping when the kids were up and up while the kids were sleeping.

Instead of having an afternoon break during nap time I kept him up and did our one to one time during nap. In his ten years of life he has never eaten a single meal with the daycare children. He eats privately with me.

We moved into our home when he was 13 months old and I had it physically set up so he could safely free range the first level of the house. I put in half walls and half doors to the three entrances to the kitchen, put hooks and eyes on my bedroom and the bathroom. I also put fencing around the electronic equipment in the living room. This gave him the ability to cruise about 1000 square foot of space without me being in the room with him.

He pretty much bopped around the house during play time once he got old enough to just take one nap. He would take his pm nap from 11 p.m. to 1 p.m. and I would put the daycare children down at 12:45 p.m.. We would have until 3:15 alone together. My part time staff assistant would come in and take over for a couple of hours with the daycare kids and he would go in and out of the playroom or hang with me wherever I was in the house.

I never offered him as a playmate to the daycare kids. He played with some of them now and then but it wasn’t expected of him nor did the kids expect him to play with them.   I didn’t discuss his involvement with the daycare when interviewing families.  I didn’t want a prospective client to choose me for having an agemate for their child.

He has his own room on the first level with all of his toys. He was not allowed to take his toys to the playroom unless he was willing to leave them for the rest of the entire day. He also had many toys I didn’t want in the playroom because they were very expensive or noise toys.
It worked beautifully. He never showed signs of jealousy or difficulty with the kids as a youngster. I was very careful to make sure he had all the benefits I could offer as a stay at home Mom
with little to no consequence of having daycare kids in the house. I never even attempted to make things “fair” because they were not.

My State requires the adult to physically be in the same room with the daycare children at all times when they are awake. This one policy alone prohibits us from allowing the kids to free range the house. My son was never under this regulation so he was able to go unsupervised from safe room to safe room. This difference made it an “unfair” situation from the go. I accepted that and was not going to limit my son because the Daycare Standards limited the daycare kids.

If the State would allow the daycare kids to free range a safe set up without an adult being physically in the room with them, I think it might have been more difficult to mesh my son into the group.  It may have changed the way I did things with him giving him more time to interact with the other kids.

Meals were and are a very important thing to me. I made a decision when he was born that we would eat every single meal together. It meant eating on a weird schedule some time but I have stuck to it pretty much without exception. I fed my son completely different than the daycare children and allowed him to have snacks at will. He never ate snacks in front of the daycare children nor did they ever have knowledge of him snacking.

I guess the moral of the story is that there is a way to do this… and you have to find your way… to have your child enjoy the benefits of having the other kids there but not suffer the down side to it. I managed it by doing opposite schedules. It meant 3.5 years of NO break all day long but looking back on it I think it was the right thing to do.

I’m not a believer that things have to be fair. I didn’t worry about that in any way. I followed the standards on the daycare children and gave them a wonderful experience but I did not worry about whether what I did with my son was EQUAL to what I was doing with them. I would never give up my afternoon break every day to provide services to a child who didn’t need an afternoon nap but did it willingly for my son. I would never allow a daycare child to have the freedom my son had at a very young age. My responsibility to them is so different than to my own child.  I would have been too scared to allow them the freedom I willingly and comfortably allowed him.

It’s not written in the heavens that you have to keep things equal. Your child is your baby in your house and you do with them as you wish. If it meshes into what the kids are doing and they enjoy the company of the kids then great. If it doesn’t, and they want their own time with you and their own space in your home, then do what your child needs.