Who Ultimately Determines the Quality of Child Care? The Parents.
Regulations and standards may set the benchmarks of quality child care but what it’s parents say that really matters.
If you’re a family with a child under five years old, it’s very likely that you have an issue you’re dealing with and that is child care: finding care, asking around which provider to avoid, or arranging your schedules around the child care. Your family life probably revolves around giving your child the best.
You will also find that a lot of people want to tell you what that “Best” means.
Government will point to its standards and vetting process to suggest that that licensed centres is the way to go. Child care advocates will say that publicly run or non-profit child care centres is the apex of quality care. I know parents who swear by Montessori centres.
But like parenting, the ultimate judge of what works best is YOU.
You spend the most amount of time with your child. You see the outcomes of the education through their behaviour. You feel whether or not there are challenges, despite the updates you get on innovative apps or paper reports. You can look at spend an infinite amount of time poring over Quality Ratings, reading articles, and listening to child care champions saying to join their camp. But all of them would not matter if your child is not thriving.
But parents can be poor judges, too.
The inspiration for this blog post came after reading a CBC article that talked about the safety and quality of child care in Ontario. The article started with the case of Eva Ravikovich, a 2-year old who died under the care of a child care provider in Vaughan four years ago.
The thing that got to me was that it was a clear case of negligence on the illegal home daycare’s part having more than 30 children under their care (in Ontario once you go over 5 children, you need to have license from the Ministry of Education). But to have that number of families who trusted the home daycare operator must mean that the home daycare demonstrated that was it doing something right.
So should we stop trusting home daycares? Do we now think that unlicensed child care providers are not perfect for our children?
Parenting has been around since the dawn of mankind and we have gone this far with relying on our parental instincts and intuition. These instincts are sharpened by advice from our peers and supplemented by government bodies and child care advocates.
There are millions of things that parents worry about and finding child care is, unfortunately, one of them. Each child is unique and their needs are equally unique. But we parents are the ones who ultimately say that care they get is perfect for them.
