Congrats on your first (or second or third…) child! This is such an exciting time in a family’s life. There’s really nothing else in life to prepare you for the momentous change you’re about to undergo. After you get over the initial shock and excitement of becoming a new parent, you may start to think about more practical matters. Breastfeeding or not, co-sleeping, where to live to accommodate your growing family, and whether to work. And if you work you’ll eventually be asking yourself how you’ll find daycare, child care, or preschool for your kids?
Your selection of daycare is one of the biggest and most important decisions in your young child’s life.
The people who are going to be spending hours a day with your child, several days a week? You want them to be the kindest, most loving people you can imagine. And, as your child ages, you want them to foster a love of learning with a sense of safety.
Finding great daycare can be such an overwhelming decision for new parents. There is a ton of information out there to help you, but many parents find it’s not the information they need to make a decision about the type of care that is right for their family. This guide will walk you through, step-by-step, how to find and choose the best daycare or preschool for you and your kids. The 7 steps covered in this guide are:
Decide which type of daycare is right for you
Learn to identify a high-quality child care program
Search for child care
Tour child care programs
Choose the best daycare
Pay for child care
Transition into your new child care program
There is an eighth and final section of this guide covers the unique steps involved with hiring a nanny. After reading this guide, you will know how to find daycare and will have identified the best child care program for you and your child. This guide provides current information and resources for on how to locate great daycare for your kids. That once daunting decision about who will care for your child? It will no longer seem so scary once you have the confidence of knowing you’ve found great care for your kids.
The first step in your journey to find a good daycare for your family is to figure out what type of child care is the best fit. Fortunately, there are many different types of child care available to families to choose from. Each type of care has its benefits and drawbacks. Understanding these will help you decide which type fits best with your family’s needs. Knowing the type of care you want will help you narrow down your search once you get to that stage.
There are four major types of daycare available 1) family, friend, and neighbor care, 2) family or home-based daycare, 3) center-based daycare, and 4) nannies. There are many different flavors of these types of care. For example, you might employ a nanny as part of a nanny share or hire an au pair. However, these four types of care encompass the main categories of child care.
Below are articles that go into more depth about the different types of care available to parents of young children. They provide an overview of the different types of daycare plus the benefits of some popular types of daycare, like family and center-based care.
1.1 What are the different types of child care?
1.2 Preschool vs. daycare: What’s the difference?
1.3 7 of the benefits of daycare centers
As you start to figure out how to find daycare, you’ll quickly learn that some child care programs are better than others. There isn’t just one characteristic or component that distinguishes high-quality child care from low-quality. Typically, high-quality child care will need to have in place many different practices related to quality, like the facility, the materials, the teachers, and how they interact with children. Daycare may be strong in one area, but weak in another. Truly high-quality daycare programs need to be strong in ALL areas.
There are traditionally four different areas to look at when trying to understand a daycare’s level of quality: safety, the orderliness of the room, emotional support, and academic support for kids. Good child care programs will typically be strong in all of these areas even if they are excellent in just one or two. Low-quality programs will often fail to meet expectations in several areas. And any program that is unable to meet basic safety requirements should be considered low-quality even if they are strong in other areas.
Below are articles to learn more about what makes for a high-quality daycare, child care, or preschool program.
2.1 Emotional and academic support in daycare
2.2 How to tell if a daycare is organized
2.3 10 red flags of an unsafe daycare
2.4 What makes a daycare dangerous?
2.5 Cameras in daycare: the risks might outweigh the rewards
There are many different ways that families search to find daycare for their kids. Good old-fashioned word-of-mouth is still one of the most common ways. Parents will often supplement what they’re hearing word-of-mouth with the internet to find daycare programs near where they live and work.
There are a couple of different types of websites with information about child care programs. The two of the most common are state licensing sites and state Quality Rating and Improvement System (QRIS) sites. Child care licensing forms the basis of safety in daycare programs. Each state has its own licensing rules. However, there is a lot of overlap in states’ child care licensing regulations. Most state licensing regulations will cover areas such as teacher/child ratios, food preparation, diapering practices, sleep practices, and equipment standards.
QRIS is similar to child care licensing but it goes one step further in assessing and rating daycare programs’ quality. Not all states have a QRIS. Those that typically will rate the quality of child care programs in areas like teacher education and training, curriculum use, academic support, and classroom organization.
In this section, we talk about these different sites, how you can find them in your state, and how you can use the information to narrow down your options for the best child care program for your family.
3.1 How to do a daycare search
3.2 How to find great daycare using QRIS search engines
Tours are one the most important steps in identifying a child care program that works for you. By the time you get to this stage, you’ve likely narrowed down your options to a handful maybe 2 to 5 programs. To set up a program you’ll need to contact the Director. Our suggestion is to try and get a tour that is just by yourself and not with a group. This will likely give you a much more realistic sense of what the program is like than if it is a planned tour where they’re prepped to impress (not that that’s bad!).
Be prepared to take notes on the tour. Make sure that the Director is available after the tour to answer any of your questions.
Below are articles that cover what to look for on your daycare tour.
4.1 What to look for on a child care tour
The time has come. You’ve searched, you’ve toured, and now you need to decide what child care program is best for your kids and your family.
If you’re lucky, you have one great program that stands head and shoulders above the rest!
Sometimes it’s not that simple, however. In that case, you’ll need to decide which is the best of the best of the programs you’re considering.
How should you make this decision?
If you’ve used a checklist for your tours, you probably have good notes on what was good and not-so-good about the programs you visited. Compare those notes to see if one program stands out as being better than the rest.
The decision may come down simply to your values. Do you care most about academic support? Safety? Convenience? Assessing what is most important to YOU will be necessary if you’re in the (enviable) position of having several great programs to choose from.
There is no doubt about it: daycare is expensive! Now that you’ve selected the daycare program your children will attend you’ll next want to plan how you will pay for it.
There are several aspects of paying for child care that you will need to plan for. Most importantly, you will need to confirm that your first choice option is affordable to you. Typically, you should aim for your daycare costs to be no more than 10% of your income. That said, many families find that impossible. If that is your situation, you’ll want to think through the trade-offs you need to make to be able to afford your preferred daycare.
Another important aspect of paying for daycare is understanding the tax implications. These implications can be positive! Several tax benefits are available to families using child care. Understanding those tax benefits means you can take full advantage of them.
Below we cover how to budget for child care and how to take advantage of tax incentives to help ease the cost.
6.1 Affordable daycare options
The time has come. After all of your searching for a new daycare program, your child is about to start. Starting at a new daycare program can be a scary time for some kids. There is a lot of change that comes with transitioning into a new daycare program. New teachers, a new schedule, new friends, and new things to learn, are just a few of these changes.
You should prepare for a bit of bumpiness as you transition your child into their new daycare program. Even if it is a positive change in the long run, it is typical to go through a mixture of emotions when they start at a new daycare. You might see that they cry or have tantrums more easily than usual. One thing you can do to lessen the impact of the change is to strive for as much stability as possible at home. A consistent schedule at home will help to provide some reassurance to your child as they adjust to their new child care program.
Learn additional tips on how to ease your child into their new program with comfort and care.
Nannies are a great option for families who prioritize one-on-one attention for their kids. A nanny can be an especially great option for families with babies. Babies require attention, affection, and a calm environment and it’s hard to beat a nanny when it comes to this. Nannies can also be a good option for families with multiple children. They allow the children to both be cared for in the home while also having the advantage of someone who can get the children out to various activities.
But there are some notable drawbacks to having a nanny. The most important one is that nannies are expensive. Employing a nanny is usually the most expensive child care option. This means that many families will simply not be able to consider this option. For those that can, there can be other headaches and complications. Having a nanny means becoming a household employer with all of the responsibilities that come with that. It means paying employment taxes and considering what kinds of benefits you’ll want to provide to make employment with your family appealing.
Read on if you are considering a nanny to learn more about the hiring process, pay, benefits, and activities for your nanny and your kids.