Child Care Educational Equivalencies Chart: Fill & Download for Free

Let us consider the cynical approach to answering this question:Below is a chart of the welfare cliff. This is a localized guide that applies to the city of Chicago, and it only applies to a sample family consisting of a single parent and two kids.The lowest blue line that goes from lower left to upper right lists possible hourly wages. The lines above that blue line indicate the financial equivalent of entitlements that one is eligible to get from the welfare system at that given wage, including child care, housing, cash, refundable tax credits and so on.The single parent making $12/hour qualifies for benefits that max out at over $63,000, according to the Foundation for Economic Education:At your present $12 an hour you are eligible for refundable tax credits, food assistance, housing assistance, child care assistance, and medical assistance worth $41,465 combined. Together with your earned income after taxes of $22,121, you are now bringing home to your kids about $63,586 a year.It’s safe to describe the city government in Chicago as being firmly democratic, and to vote Republican in that city might very well mean voting to cut your own entitlements.(The focus of the FEE article is how accepting an increase in an hourly wage—i.e., the “Fight For $15” movement—will make many families ineligible for benefits. It does not discuss voting patterns per se.)

This is a fascinating question for me. Firstly, I consider my own mother to have been a terrible parent, so I did my very best to do everything that she didn’t do when it became my turn to be a parent. I still don’t think that I achieved the title ‘good parent’. Secondly, as a teacher, I see many parents, and I am not always impressed by the parenting ‘skills’ of some of my students’ parents. Some parents, on the other hand, astonish me. They seem to be naturally gifted at parenting.Let me list the needs of a child and the conclusions that I have drawn about meeting those needs. Some of my thoughts are still being processed, so I will describe them in as much as I am able.Nurture: The rudimentary needs of any child are fluids, food, clothing, and shelter. If you have provided these, and if your children are clean, hydrated, toilet-trained and well-fed, then you get a C for doing all that you should have done anyway. No extra marks for providing the necessities. If you make an extra effort to provide a healthy diet, clothes that don’t invite school-ground bullying, and a safe, hygienic environment then give yourself a B or an A according to the extra effort you make. Nurture also involves emotional safety. As well as providing the rudimentary needs, a good parent should provide support, understanding, love, and acceptance. No child wants to come home from school after a rough day in the classroom and in the school-yard to be told that he or she has a truckload of chores to do, a baby-sister to mind, or to be at the receiving end of your verbal abuse because you’ve had a hard day. Please remember that a day at school is the equivalent to a day at work. If you come home tired, then your child comes home tired. Tell your child that you appreciate and love him/her, allow your child some space to process his or her thoughts, and don’t hover if your children are playing with their friends. Trust them to tell you if anything is wrong, and make every effort to find out the truth and then protect them if they are being bullied. Be aware that little Mary may exaggerate what the other girls said about her new dress is she’s feeling a bit miserable and needy, and that she may not like the new teacher because she isn’t the centre of that teacher’s world. A good parent doesn’t go in with all guns blazing only to have a red face when they find out that they only knew a half of the story.Education: Education begins at an early age. Talk, read, and sing to your child from birth. As soon as you see your child trying to identify objects, tell your child the name of the object and also start identifying colours and quantities (numbers). Teachers have standards that they expect your child to be reaching at various ages, but I am noticing more and more parents (in Australia anyway), who are not aware of such developmental standards. If you have made no effort to toilet train your child by the time that he or she is five years old and ready to start school, then dare I suggest that you are not a good parent. It is shaming for the child and awkward for the school if you send a child to school in nappies. If your child is delayed, then this does not apply. There was once a time when maybe one or two children started school in nappies because of some intellectual or physical impairment. Nowadays, five or six incontinent children are enrolling in each school across the state, and they are not delayed - they just have lazy parents. If your three year old child screams and refuses to give up his or her nappies, don’t smile and think how cute your little one is and put the nappy back on. Grow a pair and insist. You are the adult and you have an obligation to raise a socially acceptable child. If you can’t successfully potty train by three and a half years, then see a doctor. Another recurring problem I see with young Australian parents is the notion that their child is gifted. If your child is five years old and can identify the four primary colours (red, yellow, blue and green), and count to ten, then your child is not gifted. EVERY child enrolling in Year One should be able to achieve the same, and most can do more. If your child is reading Enid Blyton chapter books and doing long division at five years, then ask the teacher to have him or her assessed for an accelerated class. If not, then don’t embarrass the teacher by asking.Discipline: Teach your children basic good manners from birth. This will make your child socially accepted and approved, which will in turn increase his or her self-esteem. No one wants other people to be looking at them in a disapproving way, and your children are not stupid - they know when other people don’t like them. If your child hits other children over the head with his or her Tonka trucks, you can be sure that many other people do not like your child (especially the parents of the children who are being assaulted). Those other parents might smile and pretend that they do like your child because we live in a culture that embraces a sociology of affirming children, but no one likes a bully, and no one likes to be at the receiving end of bullying. If your child is hitting someone else, wiping their faeces on someone else, walking into someone else’s home or bedroom uninvited, helping themselves to food from someone else’s fridge, or head-butting someone else’s aging dog or cat, then remove your child and tell him or her very firmly that their behaviour is not acceptable. Then apologise to the other people to demonstrate to your child that we must all apologise for our poor behaviour.Discipline includes being routined. Keep a healthy bedtime (little people need more time to sleep than we do, so be careful about not forgetting daytime naps or allowing children to stay up late); serve three healthy meals per day and limit junk food intake; and also limit television and computer game time. If your child is older, then watch apps such as Facebook and Instagram to be sure that your child is safe. It is your responsibility to make sure that your thirteen year old son isn’t visiting a porn site, or that your fourteen year old daughter isn’t chatting to the paedophile across town in a private chatroom.Common Sense: above all, use your common sense, and teach it to your children. Every generation seems to bring with it a new parenting ‘skill’ that lacks common sense. A popular current one is to not teach your children any ideologies such as religion, ethics, societal values or cultural assumptions, because you want your child to work it out for themselves. If you don’t teach them, then they WILL work it out for themselves - they’ll work it out through what the kids up the road tell them. You have an opportunity during their childhood to give your child a solid ethical character - do it! They’ll thank you when they grow up.It is also common sense that if your child has been invited to leave five or six schools for rudeness, inappropriateness, sexual harassment, and/or violence, there’s a good chance that your child has a problem. Most teachers don’t set out to bully children. It makes life more difficult for themselves - that’s just common sense. Don’t allow your child to blame other people for his or her bad behaviour. In some countries (such as Australia), you are legally responsible for the behaviour of your child. In those countries where you are not legally responsible, dare I suggest that you are still ethically responsible. Teach your child courtesy and common sense.Finally - discipline in its raw form. Do it! I’ve seen everything from smacking, to time out, to reward charts. They can all work. Choose the one that suits you and your child, and be consistent. Smacking is banned in some countries, but I am not totally opposed to it as I have seen it work for some very strong-willed children. Don’t forget that those wonderfully brave and honorable young men and women who died in WW1 were all smacked as babies, because it was the cultural norm at the time. Now we have a huge problem with dishonorable and cowardly young men and women because we no longer discipline. Draw your own conclusions before you throw any ideologies out. Watch a few segments of The Nanny if you want to see Time Out work successfully. Withdrawing of favourite belongings such as toys and phones can also be effective.Remember that you do not have to be parenting like the people next door to be doing it right. You child doesn’t have to live on vegetables and never taste a lolly to avoid dying of heart disease. Your child may be an average achiever all through primary school and then take the Dean’s Award at university. You child may win every award at Primary school and then want to drop-out of high school. Your child will, at some time in his or her life, lie to you, and tell you that she or he hates you. You child will date people who scare you, and plan to be a brain surgeon or an astronaut.When your child grows up, you will look back and laugh and sigh. Everything that you did will be out of fashion and new young parents will be telling you how to do it right. That’s because none of us know. We’re all parroting what we hear and hoping that it’s right.At the end of the day - trust yourself. Stay vital and informed, and never stop loving your child.

A couple of corrections to kick things off:One, the article is undated but must go back to 2011 when the change to $1.90 a day was made. It is only an inflation adjustment designed to keep the amount of income that marks poverty constant over time.Two, global poverty levels have been rapidly dropping since the start of the 1970s.My great grandfather, the first native-born Tips and my namesake, was orphaned at 6 and at 12 was given a quarter by the uncle who took over his care, told he was a man and put out on his own. A quarter in the 1870s was good for a week of room and board. He quickly had a dime-a-day job as a tinner’s apprentice putting roofs on Texas houses for ten hours a day—the equivalent of $2.25 today (over the poverty line). He could live for a nickel a day and save a nickel.Great Grandfather Charles and his Irish bride, Mary Ella, who I knew as a childBy the time he was in his early 20s, he saved enough to open his hardware store, devoting the second floor to providing an opera house for the city. He had a safe in his store, and the many Germans in the area trusted him more than they did the city’s Anglo banker, and so great-granddad was soon a banker too and before long he was a millionaire at a time when that equaled more like twenty million today.A lot of people in the world don’t use money. My friend Washington was raised tribal in Kenya, a Jaluo or man of the Luo tribe. He helped make his every house, with saplings and vines wattled and daubed together and a dirt floor. Everything they ate was fished, hunted, foraged or grown from scratch-earth farming. Water was carried from the river. Tribal medicine was used. There was no electricity and no stores anywhere, just as well because money was unknown.The first white men and the first vehicle he ever saw was when he turned 18 and two showed up to ferry him to the airport in Nairobi so that he could attend Oxford on the program for princes of the Commonwealth. He was the 19th and last child of the king, born of the fourth of his father’s four wives.When I knew Washington, he was the chief technology officer for a medical device company in Silicon Valley. He was also the only person I’ve ever met who gave me a sense of being regal, fully a prince.And there is the story of world poverty. Wealth began in the Bronze Age with mining and trade. It consisted of precious metals and gemstones from the mines, stone edifices, agricultural surpluses and not a lot more. It was enough wealth to lift two percent of the population out of poverty. It was also, unfortunately, an incentive for many populations to live by smash-and-grab raiding or by conquest. By modern times, the poverty rate had been whittled down to 96 percent.What changed the paradigm was that we had figured out productive economics—capitalism. As a result, a full 99 percent of all the wealth ever enjoyed by man has been created in the last twelve generations or so, with 99 percent of that coming since my great-grandfather’s day.The light blue area in the chart represents world population that has escaped poverty. The dark blue represents those still making less than the equivalent of $1.90 a day in 2011 valuation. You can see that things have picked up greatly since World War II… for western nations using free enterprise capitalism. You can see that around 1970, poverty starts letting up for all… as a result of capitalism being more widely adopted around the world.When I was in Korea in 1969, a college student bopping around the world by hopping freight ships, a dock worker there made the equivalent of $1.10 for a 12-hour day humping bags of rice that weighed more than he did a quarter mile down the dock then running back to get the next one.* At 19, I predicted, “This country will not be poor long. Look at how industrious everyone is.” It amuses me now each time I run into Korean college kids just bopping around the US.* Worth a whopping $6.79 in 2011 dollars.My own mother was raised a sharecropper in rural Mississippi through the Great Depression. The family of nine traded labor, starting at age 12, for land to garden on. They made sorghum molasses to trade for flour, kerosene, lye and other necessaries. The family was so poor, she never had a store-bought toy or outer clothing. She and her four brothers and two sisters turned out industrious, resilient, resourceful and all became well-educated with careers as engineers, architects, laboratory directors and educators.Back in the early 70s, the hippy days, my long-time business partner, before I knew him, homesteaded a wild banana grove in the jungles of Costa Rica. He built a shanty and spent his days deep in reading. Every several weeks, he’d hump a stalk of bananas ten miles into town to trade for flour, sugar and coffee. He spent more than a year with no money and had nothing but fond memories. Meanwhile, he was one shrewd businessman.Poverty is a blessing every bit as much as wealth is also. It keeps people from becoming the idle, effete whiners we see so much of today—aimless and adrift in a sea of choices they find themselves unable to make sense of. Poverty sharpens the wits like nothing else.Rather it is pauperism—social dependency—that is to be avoided at all costs. It robs the wits and the human spirit as well. Pauperism is not so much a loss of wealth but a loss of self-worth, of dignity. You can come out of poverty a prince, a scientist, a well-read person, a shrewd businessman. Pauperism, quite by contrast, is debilitating. People who are not treated as lesser, who feel in control of their own destiny, can survive poverty intact. People who are treated as lesser typically remain scarred. That is what we must avoid. And that has little to do with money.