Hello everybody, it's Sam from Financial Samurai and in this episode I want to talk about preschool and why I think it's worth every single penny and more. So the first day of preschool was tough, not so much for our boy but for my wife and me. My immediate thought was hmm so this is where creativity comes to die.

My wife and I spent three hours a day with him for the first week to help with the transitioning process. During this time I observed how other kids of varying developmental levels behaved. I saw kids have to wait their turn, listening to instruction and trying to communicate with other two and a half year olds who weren't very good communicators at all.

It was kind of chaos, it was kind of free but I was a little bit sad frankly. As I thought about my negative reactions while soaking in the hot tub I came to realize what I disliked most about preschool was exactly what I disliked about work. At work, despite being a strong performer, I had to wait for a colleague in New York City to first make managing director before I could make managing director because he had been promoted to head of the desk.

Although he was several years older we had the same experience, same amount of years of experience working at the firm and I was managing a large book of business in San Francisco. So I thought to myself do I really want to wait another five years for him to hopefully get promoted and then maybe I can get promoted?

So I said screw that. After already being in firm for 11 years I didn't want to wait so I decided to leave and negotiate my severance. At work I remember having to listen to new hires who didn't know my business tell me how to do my job and I found this tremendously annoying.

I remember in New York City, what was it, 1998 and 1999, Goldman Sachs went public in 1999 and suddenly this really private firm where you know we can kind of do what we want and we had this culture of going to breakfast with the partners and just being free was suddenly upended because we were a public company now and our workforce basically doubled in the next three years and it just suddenly felt not as collegial anymore.

I didn't like that. At work I also had to attend endless meetings and hear people blabber on and on about what we should do. Ironically the time spent in meetings significantly cut into the time I needed to do the very things we were being asked to do. Seriously folks, having meetings about meetings is the biggest waste of time and that's why I like working for myself and writing because I just wake up, brush my teeth, go to the bathroom and if it's 4.50 in the morning because I don't know I couldn't sleep for some reason I'm just gonna go on my computer and do some free writing.

It's just so much more efficient. So what was happening was that I was unconsciously associating my initial dissatisfaction for preschool with my tremendous unhappiness at work. I felt terrible subjecting my son to a system that I had so enthusiastically escaped from in 2012. In some ways it felt like I was sending him to prison but after a couple of weeks of preschool I started to have a change of heart and now that I'm three months in I believe preschool is worth every single penny and more and here are the reasons why.

One, preschool will save a parent's sanity. It wasn't until we finally dropped off our boy, wiped away our teals and left did we start to appreciate preschool. Initially during the first month of preschool we finally both got three hours of free time. We used this time to catch up on errands, tidy up the house, go on a brunch date or a lunch date and just to soak and relax in the hot tub together.

For once in many many many months both my wife and I had been going non-stop for two and a half years in a row to raise our boy. Our days would often go from 5 a.m. to 11 p.m. because he wasn't a good sleeper and has the endless energy of the Sun.

I swear he must have been born out of the Sun because he just goes on and on and on. I was also on a mission to fulfill my 10-year goal of posting three times a week and the hardest thing you can ever do is try to write and create and come up with new ideas when you've got a toddler banging on your door wanting to play with daddy.

I swear to God it is just impossible so that's why my hours just kept on getting longer or I'd wake up earlier or I just start work and writing later and it was pretty tough. Meanwhile my wife was on a mission to make sure he had an enriching a home environment as possible and she was the commander of the Knights and he wasn't a good sleeper.

So preschool gave us the vacation from parenthood we so desperately needed. It is absolutely true that once a child is born your love life, your relationship kind of goes way down for the first couple of years. Just look at all the studies and all the research. Happiness goes way down, freedom goes way down, everything goes way down and when you have absolute freedom to suddenly having no freedom because you've got to take care of little one, it's pretty rough and I think it's much rougher than if you were going to a day job for 12 hours a day and then had to come back.

You know you're tired as hell but it's only like a couple hours before your child has to go to bed. When our boy started going to preschool for six to eight hours a day I felt like the heavens had parted. My happiness went from about a six out of ten back up to an eight out of ten on average.

So preschool can save your relationships and it can save you from misery. Two, your child will learn to be more independent. It must be scary for a child to go from always being around his parents to suddenly being in a room full of strangers but over time your child will adapt, learn the names of everyone and figure out how to stand his or her ground.

Our children will also learn how to interact well with others. As a son of US Foreign Service parents I clearly remember the scariness of being the new kid in school every two to four years but I believe the frequent moves forced me to develop social skills and greater confidence.

Today I love going to all types of social gatherings and have no fear of talking to anybody. Three, preschool may help develop greater emotional intelligence in your child. The higher your emotional intelligence the farther in life you'll go because people will end up liking and supporting you more. I gotta say there are a lot of socially awkward and emotionally unintelligent people out there.

For example there are people out there who have no respect for your time so they come 20 minutes late and don't even give you a heads up. There are people who will ask for something from you without first giving something. They'll just take take take and never give. So these are the folks who I think just didn't develop the proper emotional intelligence.

They weren't guided to thinking about other people first before thinking about themselves and as a result they end up being really greedy and I think self-centered and I think it's just not a good way to go and live about life. Four, your child will experience and learn conflict resolution.

Someone told me an interesting quote and he said the greatest violence you will ever experience is in public school. Now that was just specifically to public school and just grade school but I was thinking about that quote and I think it's really true. I remember as a kid I got in a lot of fights and I got suspended, I almost got expelled.

There's just a lot of bad things going on and just for preschool amongst toddlers inevitably bad things will happen. The first time I was told a child had bitten our son I was shocked and angry. I wanted to know who that child was and who his parents were so I could talk to them and make sure that they're doing everything possible to make sure their kid is not going to be a terror.

But you know what I couldn't find out because that just is the way it is in preschool and I learned to adapt and I think my son learns to adapt by understanding that bad things happen and the teachers use these situations as conflict resolution to talk about apologizing, to talk about conflict resolution, to talk about forgiveness and so forth.

Five, your child will learn new habits. One of the biggest reasons why my wife and I were so exhausted as stay-at-home parents was because our boy didn't take regular naps after he turned about 18 months old. Therefore one of our biggest fears was that when he went to preschool he wouldn't nap between 12 30 p.m.

and 3 p.m. when lights were off. But surprisingly during the very first day he napped and he continued to nap every single day for three months except for one day. So during the time your child is in preschool he or she is gonna learn new habits, a new way of doing things in a social setting and I think he or she will surprise you on the upside.

Six, you'll learn how soft or hard you really are as parents. You'll gain perspective especially for first-time parents. We had no idea whether we were strong disciplinarians, too soft, too hard, so forth. You can learn from the good and bad habits of other parents by observing how their children act in a school setting and from your observations you can better calibrate what you should be doing more of and less of.

My wife and I are probably on the softer side because our personalities are pretty chill. Also we don't have to go anywhere and follow a strict schedule. For example since we don't have to get to work by let's say 8 a.m. there was no urgency to wake up our boy at a set time every single morning, prepare breakfast, brush his teeth and so forth.

The absence of routine probably hurt all of our ability to sleep more soundly because our son would just kind of sleep whenever. I mean we do try, we try to get him to sleep by 9 o'clock, 9.30 but you know sometimes things didn't happen and as a result you know we all kind of suffered for like two, two and a half years of sleep deprivation.

You may also learn in preschool what you've been doing right as parents. You know they say that speaking to your child as much as possible is good for learning, therefore we talk to him all day long in English, Mandarin, Spanish and Japanese but we really didn't know how useful our efforts were until we went to school after our teachers said they'd be teaching the class how to count to 10 and we found that really interesting and we looked at each other and smiled because we had already been teaching him how to count to a thousand and I don't know if that's great or not but you know we just why stop at 10?

Okay what's after 10? 11, 12, 100, 200, 500, 1000, million, trillion, quadrillion, whatever and we're not tiger parents we just kind of did what we thought was natural. So preschool is a great way to calibrate your parenting skills and figure out where you stand as parents. 7. Your kid won't get dumbed down.

This was one of my biggest concerns whether my son would regress or get bored if he was being taught something he already knew in preschool. Fortunately that doesn't seem to be how the young brain works. Instead of regressing it continues to absorb new information. If parents continue to provide supplemental education at home I think our kids will continue to grow just fine.

8. You'll develop a support network of other parents. Spending the vast majority of your time only with your partner and child can get very mundane after a while and if you are a stay-at-home parent or a single parent you're gonna really appreciate the network of other parents who are going through the same thing you're going through.

You're gonna be able to get tips, maybe you might make a friend or two, it's nice to go to random you know birthday parties and social functions on the weekend and mix things up. 9. Your child will participate in new activities. You can do plenty of fun things at home but there are certain activities like painting and claymation and science water experience that are much easier to do in school.

Your child will also be exposed to new books and toys to keep him or her stimulated throughout the day. 10. The other thing is consistency. As stay-at-home parents we get tired, we also get a little bit bored. So with a preschool setting there are multiple teachers who rotate often time and continue to stick to new programs and new ways of doing things.

So that consistency is really helpful to create an elevated level of excitement and newness every single day. And the final benefit of preschool, I think it's a lifesaver if you are pregnant or have a baby. Being pregnant or caring for a baby is already difficult. Concurrently caring for a baby and a toddler who won't stop running around and getting in trouble takes Herculean strength.

For all the mothers out there who are just tired and exhausted, I feel you, I hear you and just know one thing that a doctor told me, it takes nine months to create a baby and nine months to recuperate. So give your body some time to heal and don't be too hard on yourself.

By sending your toddler to preschool not only do you feel great that a highly qualified person is teaching and caring for him or her, but you feel great that you get to spend more time taking care of your body or your baby. It is also natural for the older sibling to get jealous of the baby sometimes.

Therefore this separation may help lessen the jealousy and increase the harmony at home. And who doesn't want as much harmony at home as possible. So of course not everything is perfect. Here are some downsides to preschool you'll likely experience, or at least your kids will likely experience. One, more sickness.

Despite a "don't come to school sick" policy, I'm sure some kids still do because parents have to work and also nobody knows exactly when a sickness stops being contagious. Your child will get sick much more often and as a result you will probably get sick much more often as well.

But hopefully in the long run this builds the child's immune system and he or she will be less sick as he or she gets older. Two, more chance of danger. You're basically letting go of your child and having someone else care for him or her. And in a school setting it's probably six to ten kids per teacher and one person can only see and care so much.

It's very unlike at home where it's a one-to-one ratio or maybe a one-to-two ratio. So your little one will inevitably get hurt, injured, bonked, bitten, whatever the case may be. Hopefully it'll never be something life-threatening. You know I pray that nothing bad ever happens to our son and your children.

But expect accidents to happen. Three, activities at home may change. You know one of my favorite activities I used to do with my boy was to go for a one-hour walk around the neighborhood. We'd go everywhere and it was so fun to get exercise, to eat on a curbside step, to see new garage doors, to see the sunset and so forth.

Now when he comes home he's tired and he hardly ever wants to walk with me and it's a little bit sad. But when we do it's maybe for 15 minutes and then back home he goes because he misses mommy as well. So expect activities to change and you've got to adjust accordingly.

And then finally it's the cost right. Most cities in America don't have universal preschool. Therefore expect to pay between $800 to about $2,500 for preschool a month depending on location and amount of care. We pay $1,950 a month for full-time care plus about a thousand dollars a year for fundraisers which will inevitably happen because we want to support our teachers, we want to support the facilities and so forth.

It's not like they're making tons of money even though the cost is so high. You know we could go down to part-time care three days a week for $1,650 a month but we prefer the flexibility. So the cost is something you've got to calculate and it's always a cost-benefit analysis.

Do you pay this cost and then go to work and you better be making enough money to afford it and you better like your job enough to want to spend 10 to 12 hours a day at your job. Otherwise it may be better to stay at home. So in conclusion I say preschool is worth it.

Preschool is a necessity to help support parents careers. If your child can learn while also giving you the ability to earn, that's a great combo. For us preschool has allowed us to gain back some of our freedom. Not all, some of it six to eight hours a day. During the weekdays we've gone back to doing more of the things we love to do like write, play tennis, go out to eat, go to the beach, nap and so forth.

And I'm noticeably happier than I was before you went to preschool. So happiness, how do you put a price on happiness? I really can't. I would pay I don't know 25% of my net worth if I could increase my happiness by one point out of ten. Sure why not.

Happiness is what it's all about. And children are a joy but make no mistake about it they also bring about tremendous amount of suffering, sadness, fear and frustration too. And so with this happiness alone I think preschool is worth all the money in the world. As long as your children enjoy preschool, I think preschool is one of the best things you could do for them.

Make sure you consistently ask your kids how their day was and whether they are having fun. If they're having a great time then keep on having them go. If they're not, ask them why, see if you can figure out some ways to improve their experience, talk to their teachers or find them a new school or keep them at home.

Every child adapts to school differently. It's up to us as parents to find the best environment for our children to learn. Thanks so much everyone. If you have any thoughts or questions leave a comment and if you enjoyed this podcast please share and subscribe. Thank you.