I agree....it's all relative to where we live. I actually think homes are over priced where we are because there are not a whole lot of high paying jobs near us. There are some higher paying ones within 1-2 hours though so if someone wanted to commute, there is that option. I don't think our area could take a big increase in childcare fee's either. I am at $32/day now and more and more people are commenting on that whereas when I was at $30/day very few, if any, complained.

No matter where we are though, I do think charging around the average is best. There will always be the ones on either end of the spectrum but that is okay too. I prefer to be on the higher end

In regard to childcare for school agers......I used to work in the school age dept at one of the centres and I really enjoyed it even though they were probably one of the hardest groups. They would get bored easy (I actually think they don't get bored, they are just so used to saying they are bored lol), the girls would be catty to each other, the boys were rough, they thought they were too cool for dc,they would back talk(to appear "cool") they could be rude etc etc but I enjoyed being able to do things with them that you can't with younger kids. I also enjoyed the 10-12 year stage as they are really starting to find them selves and it's very interesting to see them grow up to be nice, polite teens. It's harder to entertain them in a home setting with mixed ages but it can be done. I lucked out with the 2 boys I had in my hdc, they were fantastic in regard to playing with the children and wanting to help out (hand out the cups/plates, cleaning the table, reading them stories, pushing them on the swings) but it would have been a lot more difficult had they had the attitudes that I was used to seeing in centres. It also helped that these 2 were only dc friends and didn't see each other in school (went to diff ones) so they really liked coming here and playing with each other. If all school agers were like them, I would only take school agers lol. The biggest downfall to having schoolager's in my hdc was not having a naptime to myself LOL. Thankfully they were okay with playing video games or watching a movie or playing lego during this time.