Cleo Li was born healthy. Then, one night when she was just three months old, she stopped breathing. CPR brought her back to life, but Cleo had suffered a massive brain injury due to lack of oxygen.

Just like that, the Li family had a daughter with special needs, and their world was turned upside down.

Watch this Learning for Life as the Li family gives us a look at what it's like to have a child with special needs - whether that child is born with special needs or, like Cleo, suffers a traumatic event to her body. They talk about the emotional ups and downs as well as the challenges of finding information and support and the amazing difference early intervention makes for a child and a family.

This is the third segment in a month-long series Learning for Life - and Birth to Thrive Online (Thrive's daily blog) - is doing on children with special needs. Next week, we look at Autism - what it is, how it's diagnosed and the signs parents should look for. We also explore the issue of whether there are enough resources available to support the increasing numbers of children being diagnosed with an Autism Spectrum Disorder and their families.

Learning for Life airs every Wednesday on KING 5 Morning News on KONG 6/16 TV between 8:15 and 8:30 a.m.

Learn more and watch past Learning for Life series and specials here.

(Third story in a series on special needs in early learning.)

When Anna’s son was born with a rare disorder four years ago her world changed and that included her child care. Her options shrank to nearly nothing.

During her four-month maternity leave, Anna looked for a high-quality program around Seattle, but nothing seemed to work. Initially, she hoped to enroll her new baby in a home-based child care near her North Seattle home. While they said they would be happy to add him, they were not equipped for his special needs tied to Ohdo syndrome, a disorder characterized by eating, movement, speech, learning and other disabilities.  

“I would rather have that answer than have him sit in the corner and not get what he needs,” Anna, who requested that her name be withheld, said.

Eventually, Anna found an option, Northwest Center, a long-running resource for children and adults with disabilities. But, the center was too expensive for a family that relies on Anna’s public teacher’s salary and her husband’s income as a Boeing Co. Machinist.

They tried an Au Pair for 18 months, but it didn’t work out. Then Anna heard of a good nanny through friends – an expensive option she was unsure would meet her son’s needs – and hired her. Three years later, the nanny remains a sweet and helpful part of the family, but also a costly addition to their already complicated juggle of half-day preschool at the University of Washington’s Experimental Education Unit, medical appointments and weekly physical therapy.

Parents often complain about the challenges of finding high-quality child care – waitlists, extensive individual research and the shock of fees that can run as high as college tuition. But families with special needs children have a far harder time. They may need accommodations, though not as expensive as some think, have few choices and bigger bills. These barriers may explain why one parent often stops working.

But Anna didn’t have that option. Like many modern American families, she and her husband live in an urban area where two salaries are often needed to cover the steep cost of living.

“I have to work. I don’t have a choice,” said Anna, who also has an 11-year-old child.

Hurdles in special needs child care not only make Anna’s life and others more difficult, but may push these families and their children further outside the mainstream. At a time, when many educators say they are striving for greater inclusion of children with disabilities in kindergarten through high school, these kids often start the first years of their education on the outside.

Complicating their child care juggle, Anna’s family, like many with special needs children, has bills other parents don’t.  Their son has medical treatments, prescriptions and physical therapy that sometimes are not covered by their health insurance.

And while some people may think Anna gets a lot of help with these bills from state and federal programs, Anna points out that isn’t the case.

 “I don’t have any assistance from the state,” Anna added.

As Anna’s son prepares for kindergarten next year, everything is once again changing. Anna will need to find care for her son before and after school. They are on the waitlist for Northwest Center, but they don’t think they will get in.

Anna and her family are not looking for sympathy or charity. It took Anna a year to grasp the idea that raising her son will be a lot different than raising her first child. But now the family accepts the future will always hold unknowns.

“It is just a different lifestyle, and you just accept it and go on. You don’t have a choice. You just do,” Anna said.

 Perhaps they should have a few more choices for child care as they do.

The recession may be over because the media is spending a lot of time lately analyzing its impact on the country, including two stories in the last several days about how it has affected families and early education.

At the Huffington Post, one story talks about the need to invest in early learning now, even though state and federal budgets are tight, because the economic downturn has already impacted school readiness and will drag down the national economy.

A declining U.S. economy leads directly to poorer school performance and lower school readiness. The FCD (The Foundation for Child Development) report points to recent history as a guide, pinpointing the two recessions of 1981-82 and 1990-91 as the key culprits for drops in reading and math scores during subsequent time periods, the mid-1980's and mid-1990's. – “The Children of the Great Recession.”  Huffington Post. 8/6/10.

On Sunday, The New York Times Magazine ran a column, “Home Economics: What the Great Recession has really done to family life,” which takes a critical view of analysis that suggests the economic downturn has had a major positive influence on the U.S. family.

The author, Judith Warner, highlights findings of shorter maternity leaves, large percentages of unemployed people saying the recession has strained family life, major losses of wealth among middle-class families and reports of parents working longer hours.

That the Great Recession could then bring hope for a major recalibration — a resetting of all the clocks — is not surprising. Unfortunately, though, it’s not happening in any meaningful way. The poor are getting poorer, and the rich, despite stock-market setbacks, are still comparatively rich. The most devastating losses in household wealth over the past two years have been suffered by the middle class. And families are fraying at the seams.  – “What the Great Recession has really done to family life.”

You can also check out The New York Times Motherlode blog’s take, and join its conversation about the intersection of families and the recession.

The recession is hitting parents hard, with one in five moms and dads saying they are not able to afford child care because of the economic downturn, a survey released this week found.

Overall, one quarter of parents said the poor economy created child care hardships, according to the survey of parents with kids ranging in age from newborn to three-years-old.

While the recession’s most common impact among these parents was being unable to afford child care, it was followed by a spouse who lost a job and took on more child care duties, cutting child care hours and making other child care arrangements, Zero to Three, which sponsored the report, said. Only five percent mentioned rising child care prices.

Together, the responses offered a picture of families who could use help as they try to work and cover their child care costs. Half of surveyed parents relied on caregivers, with nearly one quarter relying on a grandparent, 14 percent using a child care center and only four percent with in-home care.

In separate but interesting findings, the survey showed many parents are not in tune with some of their children’s key developmental milestones. For example, 23 percent of parents expected their children to be able to control their emotions by age three, and 43 percent thought they could by age three.

Research, however, shows kids learn to control their emotions between age three and five, Zero to Three said.

The survey was based on telephone and Internet surveys conducted in June 2009 with 1,615 parents.

Researchers found a few basic steps were associated with battling one of the nation’s health concerns, childhood obesity. Preschoolers who got enough sleep, watched limited amounts of television and regularly ate dinner with their families had a lower prevalence of obesity.

In fact, preschoolers who had all three habits were found to have “a roughly 40 percent lower prevalence of obesity than those exposed to none of these routines,” according to an article published today in Pediatrics, the research journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics. (You can read a summary here.)

Now, preschool teachers will tell you each of these habits likely helps in plenty of other ways, concentration and social skills for example. In this sense, the report is one more reason adequate sleep, a healthy diet and limits on media consumption are elements of quality preschool.

But, how much TV, sleep and family eating are enough?

The latest research offers one idea.

In the study, children who got 10.5 hours of sleep a night, ate dinner with their families more than 5 nights a week and watched 2 hours or less of television a day were in the healthier group.

Since we know these are all healthy habits, it is also interesting to see how many families actually follow these rules. Researchers found one in seven children were in families who had these habits, while one in eight had none.

They also pointed out they found this association in both high-income and poor homes and in homes where the mother was obese. We should clarify this study didn’t make a causal link, but said findings offer “promising behavioral targets.”

News and Notes: Birth to Five Policy has a cool new website. Check it out here.

The cost of child care continued to outstrip inflation last year, with care often costing more than food and rent, a new report found.
Last year, the annual cost of center-based infant care reached as high as $15,895, while quality care at an accredited center hit $16,835, according to “Parents and the High Price of Child Care: 2009 Update.”

“The bottom line is that you get what you pay for,” Linda Smith, executive director of the National Association of Child Care Resource & Referral Agencies, said in a statement. “And today’s economy only makes it that much harder for parents who are already struggling with the current cost of child care to afford the quality child care their children need and deserve.”

The cost of child care rivaled or topped other essentials. Parents, on average, spent more on child care fees than food in every region of the country, the report said. In fact, while the nation’s cost of living rose 3.8 percent last year, center care for a baby rose 4.8 percent and care for a four year old jumped 6.2 percent, the report said, relying on Bureau of Labor Statistics data.

New York topped the list of least affordable states for baby care, with Massachusetts the second most expensive, followed by Minnesota, Colorado, California, Hawaii, Oregon, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Indiana, according to the report. (Washington State ranked 13th.)

The report offered a few interesting recommendations beyond the demand for greater federal funding of child care grants, including a suggestion the early learning-friendly Obama administration could embrace.

“Requiring the Department of Health and Human Services in conjunction with the National Academy of Sciences to determine the cost of quality child care and report back to Congress.”

The report’s broader goal gets to the heart of the early learning issue: Are child care, preschool and pre-k parts of our commitment to public education or elements of a different and complimentary system?

The Virginia-based child care group suggests its position in another recommendation.

“Designing a system to help underwrite the cost of child care so that all families, not just wealthy families, can afford the cost of quality child care.”

Since Father’s Day was yesterday I thought it would be a good time to highlight the better coverage of the modern dad because I found a lot when I returned from vacation this morning.

There is little question fathers are changing – the amount of time dads spend on child care tripled over the last four decades according to a Council on Contemporary Families research paper  – and that means dads are playing a bigger role in their children’s early learning.

These changes are obvious in the annual deluge of media coverage on Father’s Day, which has changed for the better in the four years I’ve been writing about families.

Here are highlights of the coverage of Father’s Day 2009:

• Obama Promotes Fatherhood as National Priority, Associated Press via Wall Street Journal, 6/9/19.
• New Daditude: Today's fathers are hands-on, pressure off, USA Today, 6/16/09.
• Father’s Day: Why Men Are Hard-Wired To Cuddle Their Babies, Wall Street Journal blog, The Juggle.
• Father's Day Link Round-Up, Part One, Daddy Dialectic: A Blog for 21st Century Parents, 6/14/09.
• More Dads Working Longer Hours, Study Confirms, 6/18/09, LiveScience, via MSNBC.com.
• More Condescending Advice For Dads, Courtesy of CNN/Careerbuilder, Dadcentric, 6/22/009.

Thanks to RebelDad for helping to find these stories.

We know the economics of child care are breaking down even more under the strain of this relentless recession. Over the weekend, The Oregonian ran the best story I have read about how and why child care doesn’t work in the 21st Century economy.

It is a story about two college-educated working parents who can’t afford child care for their two young children.

Set aside the misguided notion that mothers have much of a choice when it comes to working a paid job or staying at home. Not when wage and salary data, adjusted for inflation, show the typical Oregon man earning $3 less an hour in 2007 than in 1979, according to the Oregon Center for Public Policy.

Let go of the lie that Grandma lives down the street and wants to watch Junior for free. Not in a state where more than half the residents weren't born here.

No shortcuts in sight, what's left is a scramble. – Two parents, two kids...and only 24 hours a day, Oregonian newspaper, 4/18/09.

While child care is steep in neighboring Oregon, it generally costs even more in Washington state, where parents pay, on average, $10,140 a year for infant care in centers, according to the National Association of Child Care Resources and Referral Agencies.

Washington ranks as the 14th most expensive state for infant care.

That means middle class and even upper middle class families can struggle to pay for child care, not to mention families further down the economic ladder.

It is problem I’ve run across again and again in covering the finances of child care in recent years. Economists and my own experience convinced me the laws of supply and demand don’t work here.

Now families are struggling even harder with this flawed equation as they lose jobs or hours, while lawmakers consider cuts to early learning programs.

This is another unfortunate wrinkle in the massive economic contraction: more families may no longer be able to afford child care, the story suggests.

 In nearly 60 percent of two-working-parent couples with children younger than 5, at least one spouse worked some combination of weekends, evenings and nights, University of Maryland professor Harriet B. Presser found through studying Department of Labor and Census data.
Almost 40 percent of married women said child care drove the decision to work odd hours, Presser reported in her 2003 book, "Working in a 24/7 Economy."

Bobbie Weber, a researcher with Oregon State University's family policy program, says our own state's data hint at an emerging trend of low-income families increasingly avoiding paid child care.

"Some families," Weber says, "were priced out of the market. – Oregonian, 4/18.

Plus, the story is a great read. The writer beautifully carries you through the family’s day.