Child care workers share their experience

Cindy Bushby and toddlers exploring with bugs in the garden at Collingwood.VANCOUVER—Child care is in crisis in Canada. Children and their families need affordable, accessible, and reliable child care. We visited workers at three locations of Collingwood Neighbourhood House (Collingwood, Norquay, and Graham Bruce) to learn firsthand about the important work they do.

“When I saw the caring environment staff provided during our visit to the child care centres at Collingwood Neighbourhood House, I was moved,” says Sheryl Burns, vice president of CUPE Local 1936. “These programs provide nurturing, high quality care in a public service setting, despite increasingly limited resources and a profound lack of appreciation by the federal and provincial governments for the hard work that they do.”

CUPE members at Collingwood Neighbourhood House organizations serve the Vancouver area. They provide child care to over 400 children ranging in age from three months to 12 years old, at seven locations in Vancouver. Sharon Gregson is the director of Collingwood Neighbourhood House. She says that they are always striving for more quality spaces, lower parent fees, and higher staff wages.

Sharon explains, "I am constantly impressed with the quality of commitment and the level of expertise that the women and men in this field demonstrate. When you look at the amount of education that staff are required to have to hold a license to practice in B.C., their remuneration does not match either their education or the amount of responsibility that they bear."

Collingwood Neighbourhood House Infant and Toddler Program

Staff are fully occupied the entire day - whether it's comforting a crying child, cuddling a child, giving a child a drink, or potty training - there's always something to do.Collingwood Neighbourhood House offers care to infants and toddlers at their location on Joyce Street. Andrea Holden works in the infant room, caring for children anywhere from three months to 18 months. Sometimes children stay in that program up to two years old, because of the lack of child care availability in the toddler age group.

The ratio of staff to infants is one adult to every four children for children under three years of age. When they move into the three-to-five program the ratio is one to eight.

“Our focus here is the children,” adds Andrea. She is an advocate for child care and sees the benefits. “The benefits are learning to share, getting to do things that the parent may not have time for, like giving them paint and letting them make a mess.”

Andrea adds, “Children are learning how to form relationships with people that are outside of their family. They’re learning to communicate, to speak, and they learn words from other languages.”

Andrea has her Early Childhood Education, which is the licence for ages three to five. She studied at Vancouver Community College at night for two years. After that she took another year of evening studies to get her Infant-Toddler certificate and she has a Special Needs Certificate as well (from Langara). Everyone working in Collingwood’s infant and toddler program has their ECE and their Infant-Toddler.

Andrea loves her job. “I’m happy to come to work. One or two of the children will be all excited to see me and come running across the room to give me a big hug. This is how I want to start my day. Every day is different. Every day is a new experience. Even just putting out markers – some children have never seen them before. When they feed themselves…when they clap their hands – all these things make my day.”

Andrea would like people to understand that she is not a babysitter. She explains, “I’m a teacher in the same sense as a teacher in the school system, only I’m working with younger children. It may look different. I’m teaching them through play, through exploration in their environment as opposed to in a school setting. But it doesn’t mean I’m not teaching them. And the pay is barely enough to support myself. If I had children or anything beyond, it would be difficult.”

Shop steward Cindy Bushby works with toddlers and agrees that the job is sometimes misunderstood and unappreciated. She says, “I really think this field needs to be acknowledged more. There’s a difference between babysitting and a licensed, qualified day care.”

Cindy explains, “When I say I work with toddlers people think we just watch them play and change diapers and feed babies all day. No. We do music, literature, science, math – all of these. We do it in the form of play because that’s how children learn. They don’t learn by sitting down with a textbook and pointing out all the colours. When I take some of the children on a walk, we look at leaves and I talk about the leaves on the tree being green and how leaves change colour and they fall. And then we’re looking for colours, and we’re gathering red leaves and yellow leaves. I tell them, ‘this leaf is bigger than that leaf.’ So they’re learning math through that. They’re playing and having fun. That’s how children learn.”

Cindy has worked in child care for over 20 years and has seen a lot of changes. “Now there’s so much more education and we bring a different knowledge into the program.” Cindy explains, “It’s not just a matter of parents dropping the children off and picking them up. We interact with the parents as well and share our knowledge with them, and support them. When it’s their first child, it’s all new to them, and parents ask our advice on a lot of things. There are different stages when children do things and we’re able to help the parents through that.”

Cindy says that the child care field is a lot different than any other field. “When you are away from work it’s not like your desk sits empty and you catch up on the work the next day. There has to be someone to replace you to maintain the ratio. Even though your collective agreement says we can leave, we can’t endanger children by leaving the remaining staff out of ratio. Ethically and morally we couldn’t do that.”

According to Cindy, a huge challenge for childcare providers is the low level of pay. “I’ve got two teenage kids and I should be totally independent at this point, but this field just doesn’t allow for that. My parents have helped me out a lot because of that. I’ve had people suggest that I train for something else and work somewhere else where I could earn more money.”

Cindy concludes, “But I love what I do, and it’s an important job. If I walk away from it, it’s not going to help fix the problem. But if I help fight for better wages and better recognition for this field, that will correct the problem. The provincial and federal government must step up to support families and child care workers in order to build a stronger infrastructure.”

Norquay School Age Program

Children at Norquay After School Program enjoy indoor playtime.At Norquay Elementary CUPE members care for children ages 5 – 12 after school and during summer break. Heather Chard has been working with school age children for twelve years. Even though this age group requires a lot of energy, Heather enjoys that they can be treated a little more maturely.

Heather explains, “I love the fact that I can have fun with the kids. You can make fun out of nothing with kids. I love all the activities I do with the kids. I love the energy level, the level of happiness that you feel and they feel. When you see an end result where kids want to come back and they love it – love the daycare they’re in – that’s a pretty good feeling.”

Heather says that engaging this age group takes planning and experience. There are different ways to present things and it’s also about getting to know the kids that you’re with as well.

“If you make it seem fun and you’re excited about it, they’re going to want to participate. If you say, ‘Okay, so we’re going to play tag,’ and you don’t really put a lot of oomph into it, they’re not going to have any interest,” adds Heather.

Heather feels fortunate that all of the women in her family work in child care. “It’s definitely great to have my sisters to call at the end of the day and say, ‘What a crazy day! We were doing all these activities, and…’ – it’s really great.”

Graham Bruce School Age Program

Children at Graham Bruce enjoy the multi-cultural programs.Collingwood Neighbourhood House also runs a school age program at Graham Bruce School for children in kindergarten to grade six. Childcare is provided before school from 7:30 to 9:00 a.m., after school from 3:00 to 6:00 p.m., and all day during summer holidays. Staff comes in at 2:00 p.m. to set up, discuss things, and tidy up so that they’re ready when kids come in at 3:00 p.m.

Marina Kazulin has worked at all Collingwood locations. She works full-time during the summer and part-time during the school year as she is studying to be a nurse. We caught up with her at Graham Bruce.

Marina enjoys that when you work with kids, the job always changes, “Kids are kids and you never know what to expect.” She pays attention to how children integrate pop culture because it’s not always positive. “Sometimes they use slang that has a bad meaning. Kids hear it from a song and think it’s cool. I ask them ‘Where did you hear that?’ And I let them know it’s not okay to say some things.”

Marina advises people who are considering a career as a child care provider to “always have a smile on your face.” She explains, “Kids can be rough sometimes. They’re very truthful beings. If you look good, they’ll say you look good. If you look bad, they’ll tell you. Be energetic and be patient. Even if you have to tell a kid the same thing 10 times, eventually they’ll learn it. And when they do, you’ll feel so great for having been able to teach them. And it’s awesome! You’ll always feel young.”

Tao Huang is a casual worker at Graham Bruce who has a lot of experience working with children in China, Finland, and Canada. Tao gets called to work fairly regularly and works with all age groups. When asked which age group she prefers working with, Tao says, “I can’t say I prefer one to another. Each group has their own character and each group has something really nice. I enjoy working with all the programs.”

Tao enjoys being a child care worker. “I love to work with kids. They are so pure and so much fun. They make me feel happy.”

She adds, “There’s a lot of responsibility and this isn’t an easy job. It’s not dealing with a product. We’re working with children. Children are little humans that require more attention and care. I think wages could be higher, especially for casual workers.”

Collingwood provides a varied and integrated program for children. When we visited Graham Bruce, children were learning how to do origami. They had also visited the Japanese Cultural Centre to learn how origami fit into that culture. Children got to see firsthand the people who brought origami to Canada and children of Japanese heritage in the program were proud to share their culture.

Mary Basic currently manages the program at Graham Bruce and tells us that they consider all age groups, what the kids are interested in, and what they can learn from the activity. Children who participate in the program also make suggestions about what they would like to do. When planning, staff considers if there is a holiday or event in the calendar month that is being celebrated and do things related to that special day. “For example, for Valentine’s Day we’ll do Valentine’s cards and children will help with decorating the centre. We’ll do crossword puzzles and colouring activities that relate to Valentine’s Day.”

But they are flexible with plans. “If we have something planned and it’s a nice day, we don’t necessarily do what we had planned. We’ll take them outside and take advantage of bright, sunny days.”

Mary would definitely recommend childcare as a career. One of the things she enjoys most about her job is “giving children recognition and developing their interests and their individuality, opening their eyes to new things – culturally or different ideas.” Mary explains that a lot of children come from non-traditional family backgrounds and it’s important that all children get acknowledged. “It’s important for their self esteem and growth. Making sure they feel good about themselves – not only giving them positive feedback. It’s really important that children get a sense of their value and worth.”

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