Policies for Daycare Centers- What’s Right or Wrong?
This article is mainly suited for parents who are looking for childcare and daycare owners who are constructing policies on what their daycare center rules should be.
The main objective of a parent handbook in the daycare setting is to establish rules and boundaries for the parent and daycare provider. Without boundaries and rules many issues erupt which could have been avoided in the first place. It is extremely important for you the parent to understand what your provider expects. As well as the provider, it is important for you to lay down the ground work so that no confusion lies between you and the parent.
Below will be a guideline that you may wish to follow regarding rules and standards established for your daycare center.
A parent handbook about daycare centers should have the following information:
1. Sick policy: What are the guidelines that the center will use when a child becomes ill? When will the parent be called, how high does the temperature need to be for a parent to be asked to come pick-up the child? What if the child has an unexplained rash? Loose bowel movements? Falls and hits his/her head? What is the policy for re-entering childcare after being home with illness? What contagious diseases are not allowed in your center? Will you allow sick children to be in your center? These are all very important questions that need to be addressed by the parent and the daycare provider as well.
2. Pick-Up Child Policy: Issues should be addressed on who is picking up the child, and what if someone else shows up to pick up that child and you don’t know about it. Are both parents together or divorced and what is the arrangement with custody. If there is a situation that a parent is not allowed to pick up a child it would be wise to have legal documents on file stating the arrangement by court. If a child is walking from school or being picked up by your center there should be paper work on file stating these arrangements.
3. Tuition: A contract stating price and payment should be filled out by both the parent and the daycare center. There should be a clear understanding of how many days the child will attend and what the charge will be. There should also be an understanding of what charges there will be when a child is not attending childcare.
4. Vacations and Time Off: Will the daycare provider be taking off for a vacation and will the parents still need to pay for childcare? What about emergency closings, what are the policies regarding this. What holiday’s will the center be closed and are they paid holiday’s or not.
5. Punishment and disorderly behavior: What are the rules of the daycare center regarding punishment? What ages and what ways does the center try to correct behavior? What are the daycare centers grounds for termination? What are the guidelines established when talking to parents about problems.
These are the fundamentals of a day care parent handbook. Remember that all concerns should be addressed in this handbook; it is there to help the parent and the daycare center and especially to protect the safety of the child.
The Daycare Diva, Christine G. Groth, is the creator of The Guide to Instant Daycare Profits. To learn more about this step-by-step program and to sign-up for her FREE Start a Daycare tips and articles, visit http://www.ExpertsAtDaycare.com
How To Teach Your Older Child To Be Safe
Keeping our kids safe is always a big job for parents. Luckily, there is a lot of information out today about child safety in today’s dangerous world. Most of this information is for parents with elementary school age kids. For parents with kids of ages 12 to 18, there is also some great information for you, too, to keep you older child safe. Safe kids are all ages!
What do parents of older children, like Middle School age and High School age kids, need do, to keep these kids safe?
First, the true secret to safer kids, no matter what their age, is confidence. Confident kids are less of a target for sexual predators. Build confidence in your child and you can increase a substantial measure of safety for them, especially when you are not around.
It is true. Self confidence means greater safety for any child at any age. The difference however, is in how you build and reinforce it in older children. Building confidence is an age-appropriate task that requires different things for different ages of children. Build confidence with those age appropriate areas of focus and you truly can build safety for a lifetime.
So let’s start with elementary age children. Younger kids, elementary school age kids between 5 and 11 years of age, need to be praised and reassured that they are accepted and noticed by you, the parent. This means paying attention to them when they speak to you.
Acknowledging them when they call you name, sitting down with them and playing with them on the floor, and engaging them in direct conversation with eye contact. You are basically letting you child know they are important as a human being and you accept them and are there for them as they naturally are. These small things, in minutes a day, can build the foundation of solid self confidence in kids.
What about Middle School age kids, those around 11-14 years of age? How do you reinforce confidence in this age group? You do it by demonstrating your trust your child. Kids at this age want to be trusted. They crave the ability to know you trust them. Building trust in your child at this age is the key to bolstering their confidence. Trust means allowing your child the freedom to make good decisions for themselves independent of you, the parent. Is it easy? Heck no! Will they always make good decisions? Heck, no again! However, it is about your child, not you. You must make the effort to demonstrate your trust in your child at this age.
As for High School age teenagers, they require respect to bolster their confidence. Kids in the 15-18 years old range need to know that as young adults, they have your respect for them as the parent. Respect for them means for everything, too: their hair, clothing, friends and activity choices. Teenagers crave your parental respect for them.
Again, is it easy? No. But, it is the proper parental choice to make. It is about building safety for a lifetime. Safety for college campuses and independent young adults stepping out into the world on their own stems from being taught to be self confident from the youngest of ages. It is true safety for a lifetime.
Joyce Jackson is a child safety expert in northern California. For her extensive website and information see http://www.KeepingKidsSafeToday.com and a free special report at http://www.StopPredatorsCold.com
Sexual Predators That Prowl Our Neighborhoods
Predators are difficult for most of us to recognize. Any parent will gladly stand guard in their yard or take their turn patrolling the street in front of the house watching out for predators. However, watching out for sexual predators searching for your child is just not that simple.
First of all, the media does all of us a disservice. Yes, it is trendy to blame the media for all kinds of ills. When it comes to predators, we are not blaming the media for a problem, as much as alerting you to the shortcomings of movies, television shows and yes, even newscasts.
Movies and television shoes depict predators as if they came from Mars. We see dirty, leering, filthy adults that would make sewer rats cringe, as they slink and lurk behind garbage cans.
Newscasts have become focused more on ratings and selling advertising than hard real news. There are just too many confusing pieces of information and messages out there for most parents to filter through. Unfortunately, a lot of the information on child safety, although well intended, is old, outdated, useless or just plain wrong. Many ideas and notions about sexual predators are just plain wrong, too.
Who are these predators and how can you recognize them? You really can’t. If there is one message for you to understand, it is this one. Sexual predators look like everyone. They look like your neighbors. They look like the people at the grocery store. They look like everyday, normal individuals.
What to do about stopping sexual predators comes from knowledge and education. It’s all about having a trusted source that can filter through the maze of information and disinformation for you. We’re that filter for you.
First, sexual predators are difficult to spot. Not only do they look like us but they drive vehicles just like we do, too. They drive family vehicles that are like every other car on the road.
What we are saying is this: there is no real way to go about your daily life and be able to spot sexual predators. This is why we teach kids the added advantage of keeping themselves safe. This is why we arm kids with all kinds of tool and techniques so they can deal with people, people in general, so that if in the end they shed their disguise as normal people and reveal the hidden sexual predator, your child can be safe.
The Jeffrey Dahmer’s, John Wayne Gasey’s and Ted Bundy’s of this world were described as “the nice guys next door.” All of them were prowling predators no one spotted.
We know that sexual predators search for the child that they see as weak, sad and unhappy. It’s the kid with the shuffling feet, head drooping and eyes fixed to the ground. It’s the child that appears they are in need of a friend. The predator wants an easy target when the time is “right.”
For the most part, predators are not interested in any kind of visible, noisy or public struggle that brings attention to their nefarious deeds.
In fact, many predators choose to befriend a child first. They choose to develop a dependent relationship with a child that appears to be in need of a close friend. It could be a sad, unhappy child. The predator then offers them gifts, ideas, or simple emotional comfort that makes the child feel better. The process slowly introduces sexual context and content into their interactions and conversations.
Some predators immediately engage in sexually explicit conversation with children right from the start. Online or Internet sexual predators may collect and trade child-pornographic images.
Others online may seek real face to face meetings with the kids they emailed or connected with in chat rooms or social blogs. There is no one profile. Predators cunningly exploit weakness and naivete. They will work very hard at driving a wedge between a child and their family. Predators will even accentuate any minor problems at home that your child might have, again befriending them and driving that wedge into the family structure.
A confident child represents more of a challenge, a problem, someone who will be hard to manipulate, for the sexual predator.
Confident kids will also be uncooperative. They understand better, even if they cannot articulate their feelings, that something or someone is “just not right” and will avoid them or stay away.
Today’s world is a dangerous place. Today’s dangerous world is very different than anything seen before. It’s dangerous for adults.
It is very dangerous for our precious children. This sad truth is a reality however, one that you must accept and deal with in order to keep your child safe from sexual predators.
Many parents today just don’t know how to keep their kids safe in a modern world. There is nothing wrong with that. They grew up themselves with their parents warning of “Don’t talk to strangers!” when they were a child heading out the door to play. It was truly useless information to the child back then as it is today, but somehow made the parents feel their children were safe.
Many parents, although they are adults now, still think like this. Today, however, this kind of thinking can not only keep your child unsafe, it may put them at risk as a target for sexual predators. This kind of thinking can really endanger your child.
“This guy has to be a bad stranger,” or “Stay away from weirdoes!” seems like it has to help. The sad news, however, is it is useless. The fact is, many parents today have no idea how to keep themselves safe let alone teach their children safety from sexual predators.
Telling your child not to talk to strangers or telling your child any neighbor can be trusted is a recipe for danger. If you go around like this you are playing with odds that you child will not be the one ever approached by a sexual predator. That is roulette with your child’s life. Teach you child to be safe from all strangers and how to engage a Cirlce Of Safety to do it.
Joyce Jackson is a child safety expert in northern California. For her extensive website and information see http://www.KeepingKidsSafeToday.com and a free special report at http://www.StopPredatorsCold.com
Best Tips For Helping You Choose The Best Overnight Summer Camp For Your Child Or Teen
Some camps have a targeted focus like religious study, academics, and competitive sports. Special needs camps meet the needs of a wide range of children with disabilities; these camps provide an outdoor summer camp experience along with a therapeutic environment. Choosing the right camp for your child, teen or other children deserves a great deal of consideration and attention to even the smallest details.
There are camps with activities as traditional as model rocketry and riflery, to those nontraditional as aviation, computers, language studies, golf, martial arts or community service. There are four basic types of camps to choose from for your child: day programs, sleepaway or overnight summer camp, day programs with trips, and special needs camps. Selecting the right camp that fits into your child or teen’s interests, special interests, needs, special needs and abilities will be one of the first steps
Camps often focus on specialties that include: adventure, art, computer, dance, music, religion, horse riding, sports, theatre, and many others. There are overnight summer camps that are co-ed camps, boy’s camps, girl’s camps or brother-sister camps where boys and girls may have separate venues and activities. Basically, if you can think of any subject of interest, there’s probably a camp that specializes in it.
College credit courses are very popular at overnight summer camps that typically offer students the opportunity to explore a pre-college experience; usually, students entering grades 10 through 12 stay in college dormitories and attend summer classes run by the college faculty. Try to determine whether the director incorporates a similar philosophy to running the camp as you do in parenting your child or children. Although camp counselor jobs don’t usually pay very well, usually minimum wage or less, counselors receive free room and board; many take the job primarily for the camping experience.
Camp tuition can be expensive; similar to travel insurance, there are now insurance policies for families sending their children to overnight summer camp to cover last minute cancellations, homesickness, medical emergencies and emergency evacuations. Check the camper-counselor ratio to determine the number of campers for each counselor. Most camp counselors are in their late teens or early twenties and are high school and college students on their summer break.
Some camps are often called adventure camps – having a very specific theme or interest; many of these programs emphasize skill development and personal growth through the adventures the offer. Is there a special topic (e.g. religion, sports, educational, performing arts, and arts and crafts) that you hope your child will gain ability and experience in? Weight loss camps are for children and teens in order to help them learn about how to lose weight and how to keep it off while having a great camp experience.
The reputation of an overnight summer camp can also be determined by asking what percentage of counselors returned from the previous year. Children will get more individual attention and supervision with a lower number of campers per counselor. Visit the camp; you can view campers and counselors in their element, witness activities as they occur, and just obtain an overall feel of the camp, something that cannot be accurately experienced when the camp is closed.
Typically an overnight summer camp experience will leave a lot of wonderful memories for the child or teen camper. If you think there’s a possibility you might have to cancel an overnight summer camp reservation, camper’s insurance would be a good idea. Choosing a camp close to home will save a lot of money on airfare and possible hotel or motel overnight stays for a parent, or other transportation costs; this is especially true if your child might get a case of homesickness and want to come home early. Think about what you and your child hope they’ll get from going to camp.
For more information on choosing the best overnight summer camp and finding the best sleepaway or overnight summer camp go to http://www.OvernightSummerCamp.biz a nurse’s website specializing in overnight summer camp tips, help, free tuition resources and information on overnight summer camp reviews
In The Last Couple Of Years Child Care Has Become Very Popular
Having a baby at home is a wonderful experience. Looking after the baby and caring for it is an even more fulfilling experience. When calculating how much to feed a baby, on average a baby needs two and a half ounces of formula for each pound of his weight. A baby does not distinguish night from day. If it’s your first, your baby is going to make a big difference in your life. Of course babies cannot understand what you are saying because they don’t have a grasp of the English language but they do understand sounds and tones, and if you talk quietly and make happy noises the baby know this.
If both parents are working and you need to balance the care of your child between day care centers there are many things you can do to accomplish this, even if you are single parent many day care centers will work with you to help out. If both parents work a day job maybe you can arrange to have one of the parents working either at night or a staggered shift, say starting at noon and working to 8 or 9. And usually the best time to do this is in the summer when both parents might be off work.
As you look at the child care alternatives of day care center, day care at someone else’s home, or a dedicated child care worker in your home, there are two other factors you should take into consideration: it may be best to consider only state licensed day care providers; and your friend or co-worker’s considered choice might not be the best one for your family.
In a childcare center you will need at least one certified trained person that should oversee everything, this is very important if something should happen during operational hours. How can a parent be sure they have made the right decision? A parent wants the best possible care for their child. Today child care centers are very expensive, sometimes parents wonder if it is cost effective for both parents to work, because it is so expensive many think that the day care centers are money magnets.
The most important parts of providing daycare for your child and that’s your child’s nutritional needs. Certainly the daycare center is not going to let the child starve and the food the child is given to eat will certainly be good food. Trying to find good quality daycare is very hard.
When the child care deductions came about many parents were very happy about this because it put more money in their pockets. Many laws have changed since 2001, this was around when all the tax cuts were happening and in fact increased the tax deductions for the number for children. Children who are under the age 12 the parents are eligible to receive a tax break for them and this is a life saver for many. If you didn’t know about this tax advantage there are many accountants or professional tax planners that can help with this, and show you how you can claim this deduction on your taxes.
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