I was so excited to receive nominations when I first started my family day care service in 2018 back in Wagga Wagga and nominated again in both 2019 and 2020. I was even more excited in 2020 I was named the Regional Winner for the Wagga Wagga and Riverina region. After a short break while we moved interstate and settled into our new home and of course got set back up running family day care, I restarted family day care in April 2023. I was nominated again for this award and was again named Regional Winner.
I was very much underwhelmed by this award this year and felt it had no actual reflection or bearing on myself or the service that I actually run and operate. I had other educators telling me that it doesn't mean much just that you are good with your words or that you were the only one nominated in your area and lots of other negative things, So I was pretty down about, didn't really care about what the award meant or was a representation of. But it got me thinking about these awards and what they are and what they mean.
I am going to break it down.
According to Family Day Care Australia, 'As Australia’s only awards program focused solely on family day care, the Excellence in Family Day Care Awards shine a light on outstanding achievement across family day care services, coordinators and educators.'
This means that I am being judged against people all over Australia who like me want to excel in their chosen field of professional child care, Family Day Care. It means that I am not up against educators in centres who have a support network and face to face team working with them, but educators working one on one with the children in a family and education and care setting.
This made me think more about What Family Day Care is to me and why I do it. Why I wake up everyday and open my home to strangers to be welcomed into.
Today when scrolling through a little bit of Facebook I have seen a number of posts of people wanting to start family day care however when running the numbers they can't see the financial benefit. To me, family day care is a choice a career choice, a family choice and a life choice. When you want to look at the financial benefits you have to look beyond the so called hourly rate. You have to look do a cost analysis, and this will be individual to each educator.
For example, I have a 3 year old, for her to be in day care full-time for me to be able to work full time. This is a huge expense which plays a part in making a decision as by doing family day care it means I am not paying day care fees, but she also takes a place that could be filled with another child. There are lots of other financial decisions that come into whether 0r not starting a family day care service is right for you. The start up costs can be huge, things like fencing, window filming, beds/sleeping arrangements, safety gates etc all these things add up. But for our family the start up costs were nothing compared to the long term benefits of building a community, getting to watch our little girl grow into an amazing and intelligent little girl, being able to offer inedible learning opportunities to her and to the children in our service and in our community,
Our community is what makes our family day care and without their involvement and their consistent input and engagement, I wouldn't be able to offer what I do. We wouldn't be able to get involved in the community events like the Mount Gambier Christmas Parade, or go to playgroups, swimming lessons or any of the other wonderfully fun things we do.
After having to think about what this Excellence in Family Day Care Award means to me, it means that I am able to impact our community, I am able to engage and inspire other educators to further engage in their local communities. I was talking to another educator the other day and she said 'why am I spending all this money, I should do what Rachel does and ask our families and our local community to donate things to us instead' and I suggested somethings to start with. Getting this educator to critically reflect on her service and how she now wants to engage her community more and encourage the families using her service to take 'ownership' of the service, she was able to establish in what ways she would like to get the community involved, starting with asking for donations of resources for her 2024 program. This educator has decided to request things like scrap magazines and newspapers, tyres, lattice and more. I can't wait to see how she uses the amazing things she has requested so much potential.
But this is what this award means to me. Being winner of the Mount Gambier and Limestone Coast region means I can help educators think out side of the box and critically reflect on the reasons behind what they are doing rather than making changes for the sake of making changes. Thats my goal over the next 12 months, to share more about our local community and what it has to offer and why Family Day Care is an amazing opportunity to assist solving the child care crisis! But that is a post for another day.
Read the Article from SE Voice here:
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