One of the hardest things to do as a parent in the U.S. is finding child care for your small child. If you found your way to this blog post via a search on what to look for when looking for care for your child, then you are in a privileged position. Too many of us don’t have a choice, whether in quality, cost, or location! In fact, child care that is deemed “quality” can be too expensive for your budget and may not even be available where you live. As a result, families end up using out-of-work or retired family members, and indeed are often the only “choice” for families.
If you do have this privilege, and whether it’s an all-day or part-time necessity, or even chosen so your little one can socialize a bit, it’s a daunting task. As a parent, you need to trust the care provider to be a caring professional and be knowledgeable about infants, toddlers, and young children. When considering a child care arrangement, you are weighing quality, goodness of fit, proximity, as well as cost.
Balancing the Ideal with the Reality
Let me offer up my own experience as an example of how things can go. When I first started considering child care for my baby, I had all of these things in mind. I was finishing up my course work for a PhD and teaching as an Associate Instructor so was associated with the University, which gave me access to one of the best early childhood centers around. I knew a lot of the staff because I am in the field, and was thrilled with my daughter’s placement. I was married at the time and my husband’s income covered our living expenses and my salary paid for the child care, which was expensive. At the time, it was $950 a month and I earned $1200 as an associate instructor. So, not a lot of take home pay but I was thrilled with my daughter’s care.
But then things changed. Within a few months of enrolling my daughter, my mom’s health started to decline and it was clear that she was going to die. Also, something was off with my daughter which caused sleepless nights and a lot of crying. She was later diagnosed with epilepsy, but I didn’t know it at the time. This was an incredibly stressful and demanding time that led to me leaving my position. Without the income, I had to pull my daughter out of care. I was then lost trying to finding quality care that was affordable and a match for my family. In all of my daughter’s preschool years, after moving her around four times, I can say I never found that match again. I had to make do with what I could afford and approaches that weren’t what they said they would be, or folks who had great intentions but had no background in caring for young children.
Like so many families, I was vulnerable to having things change on a dime. And once things were out of kilter, we never found our way back to the best situation. There are major barriers for everyone trying to find a childcare match for their family’s needs. With that in mind, I will try to balance the ideal with the reality in helping you find a place for your little sweetie.
Quality Care in Early Childhood Group Settings
Fortunately, there isn’t much else I can write about quality in early childhood settings that the National Association for the Education of Young (NAEYC) hasn’t written and posted on their website. Available programs will vary wildly from one community to the next, with guidance from NAEYC you can get help figuring out what is available in your area and how that compares to the possibilities. So, let me share those links with you here:
What Does a High-Quality Program for Infants Look Like?
What Does a High-Quality Program for Toddlers Look Like?
A High-Quality Program for Your Preschooler
This website https://families.naeyc.org/what-to-look-for-in-a-program has these three excellent guides and more. Now, these resources will guide you to the ideal. But what if you can’t find the ideal in your community or price range, or it’s there, you can afford it, but it is not conveniently located to either your home or your work?
Now, you may ask yourself, why identify the ideal childcare? The answer is simple: we all need parents to push for the best. In fact, those of us in community groups that promote region wide early childhood education want you to ask for the quality in these guides because we believe that there will be more quality programs when more parents ask for them. Those of us who advocate for the ideal can lose touch with realities of what it takes for program administrators to offer high quality experiences for young children. Parent demand can help shape what is available, and good programs will respond to input from the community.
Barriers to Providing Quality in Programs
Let’s take a look at why quality affordable programs are hard to find.
For example, where I live, a small college town, there are very few folks who have earned four-year teacher education degrees in early childhood education. This is true in a lot of places in the U.S. (Places like Finland require early childhood educators who are in lead positions to have a four-year degree in early childhood education.) Consequently, not many people in the U.S. know what a degree in early childhood education looks like. This degree covers child development, building relationships, curriculum development techniques, assessment strategies, working with groups, working with parents, multi-cultural training, and more. Imagine your local elementary school. Now imagine that maybe only one out of the 30 teachers working there has a degree in elementary education. Administrators are forced to hire people who don’t have this degree when there just aren’t people with the degree. Therefore, their employment search is for people who ideally have worked with young children before and who have worked under or with someone who has this specialized training so they have some idea of what it takes to care for very young children.
Because this is so common, communities have developed ways to make up for this lack. To compensate for the lack of training, state requirements, local initiatives, and program directors insist on providing a certain amount of “training hours” each year. Trainings are conducted at local and state conferences and are presented by people with varying degrees of expertise and experience. Directors and teachers decide what training topics are needed and make a plan to meet those needs on a yearly basis. Typically, programs housed in places that can help subsidize the operating costs such as corporations, universities, and churches, have more money to spend on professional development. Professional development for many care providers turns into the teacher training that wasn’t completed at the university.
If you can find a center, home, or program with a teacher who holds a degree in early childhood education, you have found a base level of quality that you would not find elsewhere. Research tells us the education level of the care provider is one of the key indicators of quality. Again, think of your local elementary school. How confusing would it be for you as a parent if only one or two there had teaching degrees and the rest were apprenticing with those few or making a go at it with what little training they receive from a few hours of training here and there, or from babysitting? Whole different ball game compared to a school where all of the teachers have received the same level education that was specifically designed to prepare them for working with infants, toddlers, and preschoolers.
Please continue reading at Finding Child Care, Part Two: More to Consider