What is Villyge and how does it help working parents?

It’s an employee-paid benefit, so employers offer it to the working parents and caregivers that work for them. We hook parents and caregivers up with coaches like prenatal, lactation, teen care, all the way up to elder care. We help the managers navigate the support of the employees on their team through different challenges such as adoption, experiencing loss, or getting married, so they know what to say and how to respond. Often people don’t want to say the wrong thing to someone when they are going through a big life change or are grieving, so they do nothing. That can be just as bad as saying the wrong thing. Villyge wrote the playbook to have those tricky conversations.

What does childcare coaching look like?

We help working parents with the navigation of the decision of what’s best for your family. Does it make more sense to have a live-in au pair, a nanny, or to utilize the on-site childcare? How do you handle payments with them? What kind of conversations do you need to have with your childcare provider? We don’t provide childcare, but we’re WELL aware of how deeply this issue affects parents. Our coaches work with a number of things from what salary you pay them, do you pay for benefits, or even  how to deal with the labor shortage .

Choosing the best childcare provider is more than just finding the option that fits your schedule for the right price. 

It’s also about recognizing the tradeoffs you’re willing to make in order to get the results that you want. Is flexibility more important to you? Or reliability? Or knowing exactly what they’re going to teach your kids? Do you really want to be in the details of this decision or would you rather be hands off?