ONTARIO — Finding suitable child care is a common challenge for working parents.
That challenge gets even greater for parents whose work schedules don’t conform to the conventional nine-to-five, Monday-through-Friday model.
Count Jami Kinton-Sluss and her husband Grant among them.
An award-winning former journalist, Kinton-Sluss now juggles multiple jobs.
She’s the marketing director of Ontario-headquartered Sluss Realty Co., a business she and Grant co-own. For the past 14 years, she’s served as an in-game host for the Cleveland Guardians. For the past 11 years, she’s worked for Fusion Marketing Group, a family entertainment company.
“Then I still do a ton of modeling and acting and production work,” Kinton-Sluss said recently before boarding a flight to Los Angeles to work the Daytime Emmy Awards. “I’m never off the clock.”
When Jami and Grant decided to start a family, they knew things might get hectic. They welcomed their daughter in February of 2022 and are expecting their second child in December.
“I wanted to have children really badly, but I was extremely worried,” Kinton-Sluss said. “My life has always been go-go-go.
“When we were looking for child care, we knew we had to find a facility that would be willing to be flexible.”
The Slusses found a child care facility that met their needs after a lengthy search, but as is so often the case for working parents, it required flexibility on their part, too. Both parents adjusted their work schedules to make it work.
“I think if I could be two different people, I would be a stay-at-home mom and a full-time worker,” Jami said. “I always feel torn.”
What is Nonstandard-Hours Employment?
To get a feel for the challenges parents who work nonstandard hours face in finding child care, it’s necessary to understand what nonstandard work looks like.
Second-shift and third-shift employees come immediately to mind. First responders, hospital employees, retail workers and factory employees commonly work outside of regular business hours.
But they comprise only a portion of the nonstandard-hours workforce. In an economy that is increasingly open for business at all hours of the day, more and more people take their work home with them. Working on weekends and remotely after hours fall under the nonstandard-hours umbrella, as do on-call employees and employees who are asked to work split shifts or rotating shifts.
“I don’t know if there is a traditional work week any longer. Everything really shifted with COVID,” said Barbie Lange, chairperson of the board of trustees of Foundations Community Childcare in Ashland.
“There has always been a need for the off-shifts to have child care, especially if both parents are working separate of one another. It’s a real issue.”
About 16 percent of the labor force works nonstandard-hours jobs, according to figures provided by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. But a 2019 survey by Child Care Aware of America found that only eight percent of center-based child care facilities offered child care during nonstandard hours.
A search on the Ohio Department of Children and Youth Services website found only a fraction of child care facilities in Richland, Ashland and Knox counties offer overnight or weekend care.
“It’s almost impossible to find affordable child care if you work anything other than first shift,” said Hayesville resident Felicia Conrad, a mother of five.
A Licensed Practical Nurse (LPN), Conrad works 12-hour weekend shifts at a skilled nursing and rehabilitation center. She and her husband, Tucker, have cobbled together a patchwork of child care that includes help from extended family to meet their needs.
“Finding child care is hard enough if you work a traditional schedule,” said Tucker, who works a 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. shift, not including the hour-long drive to and from work sights. “I walk out the door at six o’clock in the morning and get home at four or five in the afternoon.
“I get it. We built this life, but it’s hard.”
It’s a familiar refrain for nonstandard-hours employees.
“(It’s) impossible to find third-shift child care,” one Knox County mother said in a Source Media Properties survey of more than 1,000 parents, grandparents and care providers across north central Ohio.
“It’s not worth working and having child care if all of your money goes to child care and now you can’t afford bills or food.”
Addressing the Problem
Facilities like Foundations Community Childcare are trying to solve for the nonstandard hours child care dilemma. The center opened in June 2024.
“Right now we open at 6 a.m. and close at 6 p.m. We’re getting everything squared away with standard hours before we look into expanding those hours of operation,” Lange said.
“It’s not as simple as adding a few hours at the beginning or end of the day,” she added. “Increasing the hours means we have different rules and regulations we have to abide by.”
Finding child care employees willing to work nonstandard hours is another challenge.
“It’s hard enough to find first-shift workers,” Lange said. “We’re no different than any other business that is trying to hire. We have the same challenges as other employers — that’s finding qualified employees.”
Lange hopes Foundations Community Childcare can expand its services as it becomes more established. Planning for the future while managing the present can be a tough needle to thread.
“Our hope is one day to meet the needs of our community,” Lange said. “But we have to take it slowly so that we can keep our doors open.”
Editor’s Note: Tucker and Felicia Conrad are related to the author of this story.