Study Looks at Balancing Childcare and Farm Work

Study Looks at Balancing Childcare and Farm Work

Haylie Shipp
Haylie Shipp
It’s time for your Southeast Regional Ag News. You’re listening to the Ag Information Network. I’m Haylie Shipp.

Work/life balance. It’s hard, right? Throw kids in the mix and it gets even more complicated…especially when childcare options are limited.

These challenges can have consequences for the farm business, the safety of children, and the well-being of the family as a whole.

To better understand farm and ranch families’ lived realities balancing children and work, researchers at the National Farm Medicine Center are asking farmers to share their experiences through a new national survey. Florence Becot, National Farm Medicine Center associate research scientist, explains…

“It’s really to understand what are the experiences of farm families raising children on farms and how that intersects with their ability to do the farm work as well as the safety of the children.”

She says it’s an important study as the farm bill is underway, adding that the American Farm Bureau Federation listed access to rural child care as a priority for the legislation…

“We asked a number of questions not only about what their situation is like, but also the kind of solutions that they would like to see, based on their situations. And so, those questions will be important to understand what do folks in agriculture want to inform potential policy discussions that might be going on.”

Head to this website to get more details and take the survey yourself:

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