Parent like a Caper
New book offering 1,000 parenting tips includes 30 Cape Breton mothers
SYDNEY — If you are looking for parenting advice, 100 moms are ready to help, with many of their tips having a Cape Breton touch. Doreen Coady, formerly of Sydney and now of Elmsdale, Nova Scotia, has published her first book”100 moms, 1,0000 tips, a million reasons.”
The book is available on Amazon and will be in Chapters/Indigo outlets in March.
“Some people say it takes a village to raise a child but not everyone has that,” she said. “I wanted to give people that village through access to other moms.”
Coady said her book includes every stage of parenting,
“I like to say it’s prenatal to empty nest,” she said. “They cover that whole range.”
Coady was born and raised in Sydney, lived in Calgary for a few years before moving back to North Sydney in the early 2000s when her husband, Mike Coady, went back to school. On Feb. 16, 2008 ,her son Michael was in a snowboarding accident.
“He was 16 and able-bodied and then all of a sudden he was a quadriplegic and couldn’t move from the neck down.”
After the accident she said Michael continued to do really well.
“He was super-ambitious. He was volunteering, he was working and making straight A’s in school.”
In bigger cities, paying a daily rate of between $75 and $80 per child is not unheard of, which can be difficult on families. Although centres can average out the situation through their pre-primary programs (which require one staff for every eight children), the addition of pre-primary programs in the schools meant some centres in Nova Scotia found themselves with a large gap in their economic model.
“It wasn’t quite as drastic for the YMCA of Cape Breton because there are only a couple of preprimary programs in this region — it hasn’t fully rolled out yet but the province did make some money available for centres to apply to, to convert under-utilized spaces for other purposes.”
The new infant care centre at the Y has been operational since November and is at capacity with two more children expected to join the centre over the next few weeks. The new centre will be capable of hosting 16 infants while the overall child care facility can look after 18 children in the 18-month to threeyear range and 24 children in the three- to five-year range.
All YMCA child-care staff are level two childhood educators with YMCA child protection training which includes first aid, child CPR training and ongoing professional development. And there’s good reason for that, says Gallant.
“If parents are going to leave their most precious children with us they need to leave trusting that we’re going to look after them.”