Women who seek assistance at pregnancy centers often already have children, and thus centers frequently have children come through their doors for whom childcare is needed while their moms receive services.
But sometimes, the difficulty in bringing other children may preclude a mother from even coming to the center. And if she does make it, how do staff entertain the kids while giving mom adequate care? Pregnancy help organizations often don’t have a perfect solution to this.
At a Cedar Valley, Iowa, pregnancy help organization focused on women’s health, the solution is a reliable child watch-specific room and service available for women when they visit their center for an appointment.
Child watch is a dedicated child space where a trained worker cares for children while the parents have business in the building. This is a temporary drop-in service offered at times by establishments like health clubs, but this concept is new for life-affirming pregnancy and women’s health centers. Unlike traditional daycare, the child watch workers don’t change diapers and there’s typically a time limit (such as 90 minutes). Still, this break for moms can be the difference between getting the services they need and never coming in.
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Guiding Star Cedar Valley’s Executive Director Amy Dall is motivated to serve other women in life-affirming ministry by her own abortion experience at age 19.
Dall values the center’s approach to the moms’ holistic needs, including childcare when they are there to get other needs met.
With Guiding Star Cedar Valley’s emphasis on women’s health and education, the organization refers to a partner pregnancy center nearby for material resources, focusing in-house on classes and support groups. These include miscarriage and infant loss support, a breastfeeding mom’s group, and community classes covering topics like CPR and pelvic floor physical therapy. They also offer individual appointments for fertility education, navigating pregnancy, grieving pregnancy loss, learning breastfeeding, or postpartum struggles. Whether a mom is coming for appointments, classes, or support groups, she can take advantage of child watch in all these circumstances.
And the child watch service isn’t only available for Guiding Star Cedar Valley clients; they’ve opened it up to their in-building partners.
Their office is co-located with Fiat Family Medicine family medical practice, which provides a convenient client referral option for medical fertility and prenatal care. Many clients of Guiding Star end up at Fiat and vice versa. Guiding Star also partners with a mental health counselor, chiropractor, and a doula.
The schedule can be involved with numerous partners and child watch available at select times, but Dall explained that everyone is working together for the program to serve clients’ needs and be a success.
“[We tell them that] we’re going to have child watch these days [and] these hours,” she said.
Dall explained that it has been helpful for everyone to know the child watch schedule and schedule their patients around its availability.
“The combination of all three of us [- Guiding Star, Fiat Family Medicine, and the professional counselor] - that's where those numbers (parents utilizing child watch) have really grown,” she said. “[And also, because] we're able to provide and pay for someone to be in that space instead of relying on volunteers.”
Fiat Family Medicine now advertises child watch on its website too.
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Guiding Star was able to fund its child watch worker because of Iowa’s Alternatives to Abortion family support funding program, which Dall credits with the child watch program’s success. The funding also helps pay for doula services for clients and also paid for a woman to be trained as a Certified Lactation Consultant. When a mom comes to meet with that doula or lactation consultant, child watch is there for her.
The Alternatives to Abortion grant specifically mentions childcare funding to cover funding of daycares, but when she proposed a child watch worker for Guiding Star, the proposal was accepted.
“The reason why we've been able to be so successful with [child watch] is because the MOM’'s bill is funding the labor dollars for that,” Dall said.
Dall also received permission to use grant money to purchase furnishings and toys for the child watch room.
While child watch is not intended to completely solve the crisis of childcare access, it is certainly a key part of the solution - to provide a safe place for children when mom comes to the building to access the services she needs. Whether that’s just someone to talk to or her healthcare appointment, a mom is a lot more likely to get the care she needs when she knows her children are cared for.
