TKW Consulting

Long Days, Challenging Clients, Potty-Training Experience Useful
By SANA SIWOLOP
Published: September 24, 2006

Like the character played by Eddie Murphy in “Daddy Day Care,” Todd Cole needed the push of a layoff to join the small number of men who work as child care providers.

Mr. Cole, of Cortlandt Manor, N.Y., lost his job at a small medical equipment company in February 2005. Almost immediately, he and his wife, Jennifer, a special-education teacher, pulled their two young daughters out of a local day care center, and Mr. Cole began caring for them himself. By late August, he was still scrambling to find a job, so he followed the suggestions of friends who had told him he was particularly good at working with children. The result? Daddy’s Daycare, a business that Mr. Cole, 41, runs in the basement of his split-level home.

Mr. Cole became a registered family day care provider in February, and the state of New York now allows him to watch six children over the age of 2, as well as two school-age children. In addition to his own daughters, Sophie, 2, and Kayla, 5, Mr. Cole watches three 2-year-old boys, generally from 7 a.m. till 6 p.m., and in early September he began providing after-school care for a 5-year-old boy and an 8-year-old girl.

He has had to make adjustments. Mr. Cole had to undergo a rigorous background check, take a health and safety class, buy extra fire extinguishers and smoke detectors, and draw up a floor plan of his house to show fire exits. He is also required to conduct daily health checks on the children, and every six months he receives an unannounced visit from a local child care authority.

By local standards, Mr. Cole’s fees are relatively modest: either $50 a day or $225 for the week. But his family’s grocery bills have doubled to more than $300 a week, and now the family is footing another large bill as well: a contractor is installing a second bathroom to accommodate the four children who are about to begin potty training.

Long days are the norm. Before starting his child care duties one morning recently, Mr. Cole first put in an hour mopping the kitchen floor, vacuuming, and sweeping the driveway and front sidewalk. When the 2-year-old twins, Marcus and Marquis, arrived, he fed them, along with his own two children, then spent three hours watching six children either play or work with educational toys like flash cards and puzzles.

Shortly before lunch (grilled cheese sandwiches, cucumber slices and cut-up cantaloupe), Mr. Cole took all six children out to his driveway. There he used chalk to draw a hopscotch pattern for 9-year-old Amy, then pumped up a bicycle tire for Kayla. When Marcus tried to maneuver his tricycle onto a nearby sidewalk, he admonished him gently. “Marcus, please turn around,” he said. “Thank you, buddy.”

Despite the challenges, Mr. Cole is pleased with his work. For one, he no longer has to fill the family minivan with gas once or twice a week just to get to his job. He also loves being able to watch his children grow up. “Now I walk down the stairs and I’m at work,” he said. “I’m as happy doing this as when I started.”

Men make up only about 4 percent of those who provide either care or early childhood education to children 5 and younger, and that number has stayed about the same since the 1980’s, said Bryan G. Nelson, founder of MenTeach, a Minneapolis nonprofit group that supports men who teach. Mr. Nelson said that he had noticed a slight uptick in the number of men entering the field, but that a combination of factors kept the overall number low.

“The first barrier is the stereotype that this is woman’s work, and the second is the fear of being accused of abuse,” he said. “But the third barrier is economics. If we started paying child care salaries of $100,000 a year, both men and women would go into the field.” In May 2005, the Bureau of Labor Statistics estimated that child care workers in the state of New York had an annual average wage of $21,850.

In Bedford, N.Y., Larry Aguzzi is happy with the child care business he runs with his wife, Ester.In 1996, Mr. Aguzzi was working as a remodeling contractor when he took on a project for a woman who was running a day care business out of her home, and whose husband was about to close his own business so he could join her.

During the project, Mr. Aguzzi decided it might be fun to work with children instead of dealing with the many downsides of the remodeling business — like subcontractors not showing up on time — and soon he and his wife began looking into running their own day care business.

When the woman who had inspired him called unexpectedly to say that her husband had
died of a heart attack and that she was shutting her business and needed to place two of the children, the couple was ready.

Between them, they now care for 18 children, and say they have a waiting list for an additional half a dozen.

Like Mr. Cole, Mr. Aguzzi now puts in an entirely different kind of day. Because he likes to cook, he often cooks with the children, sometimes baking bread, or even preparing roast chicken and gravy. But now he or his wife also spend at least an hour a day on the paperwork that state and county authorities require. Because they are part of a federal food program that partly reimburses them for the costs of feeding the children healthy meals, they also keep a daily log on what they ate and when. The couple’s lives are
hectic for another reason: They have four children of their own, aged 7 to 20.

“I get a joy out of this, but I don’t know any men who have even tried to get into this field,” Mr. Aguzzi said recently.

But attitudes may be changing. During a recent Yankees game that Mr. Cole attended with three other men, he said he was peppered with questions but was also shown “lots of support.”

Three of the 60 teachers at TimberRidge Family Center, a day care center and preschool, in Armonk, N.Y., are men, and the director, Elizabeth Anderson, said that parents generally supported the idea of men being involved in day care. “In any group that has a male teacher, I usually have a couple of parents that ask questions, but in time they come to adore the male presence in their child’s room,” she said.

One is 37-year-old Michael Magrone. After graduating from college in 1991, Mr. Magrone spent eight years working with 3- and 4-year-olds at the child care center that preceded TimberRidge before deciding to become a public-school teacher. As he saw it, his salary might double almost immediately, and would probably triple within 10 years.

Mr. Magrone did teach at a public school, but came back to TimberRidge in 2005. “The elementary and middle-school kids weren’t as much fun as the preschoolers, and they were also more easily distracted and less motivated to learn,” he said.

In early September, Mr. Magrone became a head teacher at TimberRidge. Along with an assistant teacher, he is now working with 12 children. “I absolutely love it,” he said. “I’ll probably never own a big house or afford a lot of other things, but I love to go to work every day.”