Stay at Home or Child Care Centre – What’s Best for the Little Ones?
This is a question we’re regularly asked.
We’ll try and be totally objective in what follows.
Parental concern
Most parents have a perfectly natural and often deep emotional concern when handing over their children to a third party for the first time. It’s quite different to, say, asking parents, grandparents or other family members to ‘help out’ from time to time.
This is a natural tendency. We love our children and want to make sure they’re in the safest possible hands at all times.
In some situations, using a child care centre may be Hobson’s Choice. Perhaps the parent or parents concerned have no alternative but to return to full-time work in order to financially support the family. If there are no extended family options, then external child care may be the only viable route.
Of course, in other situations, it may be a positive choice made for career or business issues.
However, where you do have a choice, which is the most attractive option – stay at home or child care?
Stay at home
For many, this might seem instinctively to be the best option.
The children are in an environment they’re familiar with and feel safe in. Care is coming from people they know and nobody could doubt that parental love is a big factor in creating happy and content children.
However, there are a few things to keep in mind too.
In 1950, in the western world, the average woman had 4.7 children. Today that figure is around 1.7.
That inevitably means that most families are much smaller than they once were. As our society is now far more mobile than ever before, it’s also becoming less commonplace to have other close family living with or very close by the children.
The net result of those two things is that those large extended family groupings our parents and grandparents would have known are becoming much rarer. Whereas 50 years ago most very young children would have had several near-age siblings and other cousins and family around almost daily to interact with, today that is much less likely to be the case.
Child care services
Children need contact with numbers of other children in order to grow and develop their social skills. It is an essential part of their development. If they’re unable to get that diversity of exposure at home, a child care centre can be highly important as a way of providing it.
Child care services can provide a highly professional, safe and helpful environment where children can broaden out their experience and learn to interact with others.
There is also now some evidence that early child care which involves games/learning provisions, can help the academic progression of children as they move towards school ages.
It’s important to select an appropriate service provider as not all offer the same programmes, attention to detail or stimulation for their children.
Our Centre
At Byford Child Care Centre, we make no apologies in saying that we provide the children with the best of both worlds.
Operating since 1994 in Byford, we’ve even got parents who were once enrolled as children at our centre, now bringing their kids in because they and their parents absolutely loved their experience.
As we’ve always said… “Owned by Families . Run by Families . For Families”
We make our children feel completely “at home” while they learn to excel at the centre.
To know more or to get a FREE tour of our centre, simply call us on 08 9526 2526 or click here.
