The Care Conundrum

The way our society now cares for children and the elderly needs to be reexamined. Even in families where people want to be full-time care givers, there is such a focus on money that even when we are living well, we are trained to believe that we are not earning/having/doing enough.
I'll take my family situation for example. In an ideal world I would be a full-time home caregiver. I'd still be a foster/ adoptive/bio parent, but I'd probably also have my grandma come live with us and someday my parents as well. However, at this stage in the game, that is just not possible. We can get by without me working outside the home while I am in school thanks to scholarships and tax credits, but we don't have money for big vacations or other large purchases and we don't have money to buy a larger house. I feel very frustrated about the fact that my grandma can spend literally thousands of dollars per month living at a nursing home, we can spend hundreds of dollars on childcare, but if I took on the job of full time care giver I wouldn't get to have any of that money. (As a foster parent you are paid a set stipend, you don't get extra for providing "childcare" even though care will be paid for to other licensed providers if the foster parents work or attend school) It is a frustrating system and I wish our society would place a greater value on the role of care giving. It is essential, it is exorbitantly expensive the way we have things set up and we could be doing this all different. I'm sure there are people more knowledgeable than myself who could present a workable plan for providing monetary compensation to people who take care of their family members in a way that would be both efficient and fair.

New Books!

Just received a package containing several new books that I recently ordered. I'm so excited! They are: "If You Had to Choose, What Would You Do?", 10-minute Life Lessons for Kids, What Do You Stand For (for kids), and Philosophy for Kids.

I'm really excited about having them, and yes, I'm realizing that I may have gone overboard, BUT they all look awesome and I'll space out their use with the kids.

The topic of values and ethics is something that just doesn't come up in everyday conversations, so its cool to find cool tools like these great books to help open conversations. I think this summer we'll look at the "What Do You Stand For" book, and I'm going to start the "What Would You Do?" book right away... it has short stories that describe a situation followed by questions about how you would react in you were in their shoes. Anyways, it looks very approachable and fun!

On a side note, I also ordered a book for F and her bio mom called "Just Mom and Me" (an American Girl product), it looks super fun too and I'm hoping that they enjoy the discussion and activity ideas that it includes.