On Sunday, August 16, the New York administration will offer a free child care service for 500 children and girls from the city, aged between 6 and 13. The initiative is called Parents’ Night Out (the parents’ free evening) and serves to give families a few hours of free time, raising them for one evening from the costs and organization necessary to hire a babysitter.
Parents can leave their children in one of the five recreational centres run by the City Parks Department, one for each of the five major districts of New York (Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, Bronx and Staten Island). For the next hours, children will be followed by specialized staff. They will play games, sports activities, laboratories of various kinds and will ash in the structures, all at the expense of the administration. In the meantime, parents will have the evening off to go to the cinema, make errands or simply rest.
The initiative was announced by Mayor Zohran Mamdani along with the City Park Commissioner, Tricia Shimamura. Mamdani justified the project by explaining that the cost of living in New York is not only made of fixed expenses, but also lack of time. He said that making the city more accessible also means giving back time to people, and that giving yourself a few hours in itself should not be considered a luxury.
The idea has been very successful and in fact it is expected that the 500 places planned – for which you can apply until 20 July – will soon be exhausted. The response so enthusiastic is explained above all with the rates of private babysitting in New York, which are on average very high and prevent many families from organizing evening exits if they have no relatives to leave their children.
Parents’ Night Out has been conceived as an experiment for a single evening. Programs in which children are held to rest their parents already exist but usually are organized by private or community associations and almost always provide for payment of a fee. Mamdani’s project is entirely dependent on the municipality and addresses the need for free time of parents not as a passenger vehicle, but as a real issue of public welfare.
L’articolo Parents’ Night Out, a childless evening for New York parents proviene da IlNewyorkese.
