When is Child Care Necessary?

Raising kids is a difficult task. Oftentimes you have to find a way to balance work, friends, and family. That can be a lot to balance on your plate, and figuring out how to do so can help you ensure that you’re living your life in a way that you find to be satisfying. That being said, knowing when it’s necessary to enroll your child in child care is important for helping to ensure that you can have this balance more easily. Daycare is an essential tool both for helping you manage your time and for ensuring that your child is getting the kind of enrichment that will help them become successful adults one day. 

With that in mind, it can be a little tricky to know when you should enroll your child in a daycare program. It might not seem like it’s necessary in a lot of situations, but knowing when to do this can help you and your child a lot both in the short term and in the long term. Today we’re going to be going over when it might be a good idea to enroll your child into a daycare program so that you have a better idea of when you should start looking. 

When You’re Too Busy to Watch Your Child

It’s probably true that most parents would prefer to stay home with their children and raise them full-time. They say that it takes a village to raise a child, and it can feel difficult to do so even with your co-parent when you have to go to work at least 40 hours a week, and potentially school on top of that. Unfortunately, just because you have a child that doesn’t mean that the bills stop coming, and as long as there are bills to pay and mouths to feed you’ve gotta keep going to work to make money. 

Many companies offer at least a short period of maternity leave, some of those companies even offer paid maternity leave. This allows you to spend some time with your newborn full-time without having to worry about going back to work. That being said, maternity leave runs out and once it does it’s back to the grind to get the money that you need to survive. Nothing in this world is free, as they say, and you have to keep bringing in money if you want to keep things moving. 

This is where daycare programs really shine. When you enroll your child in a daycare program, you’re leaving them in the hands of capable professionals that you can generally trust. Daycare programs give you a place to leave your child while you go off and take care of your other responsibilities, and that allows you to go about your day with one less thing on your mind to worry about. Being able to go about your day without stressing out about what your child is up to can help you out a lot and will more than likely make you more productive. 

The truth of the matter is that if you have a child and a job, you’ll need to find something to do with your child. Small children can’t be left at home to fend for themselves 8 hours a day, and that means that you need something. Whether that’s a daycare program or your parents to help lighten the load depends entirely on the resources that you have available to you, but someone has to watch your children so you can be sure that they’re safe and being well taken care of while you’re at work. 

If You Want to Give Your Child a Head Start on Academics

Your child is going to have to go to school for a minimum of 12 years by law. It’s not required by law that they graduate, but at 16 years old children have the ability to drop out without parental consent. That being said, most children do at least 13 years, Kindergarten through 12th grade, and then go to college after that. College can take many years, anywhere from 2-8 or even more depending on what they’re studying and what kind of program they enroll themselves into. 

Whether your child decides to become a doctor, which is a minimum of 17 years of schooling if they enter an accelerated Ph.D. program but more likely to take closer to 21 years of total schooling, or they decide to go to a trade school to become a plumber, which takes 4 years on its own not counting the previous 13 years, your child has a long career in academia ahead of them. Even if they just finish high school and don’t pursue any further education, that’s 13 years of their life. When compared to the average lifespan, that’s about 16% of the time that they’re likely to spend on this planet. 

That’s a lot of time to sink into something. I’m sure you at least have an idea of what your life was like 13 years ago and how drastically different it is now. Those changes are even more pronounced in children who are still developing, by the time your child is done with just high school they’re either legally be an adult or be just on the cusp of adulthood and be no more than a few months away from becoming a legal adult. 

If your child is going to do something for such a long time, it may be beneficial to make sure that they’re properly prepared for it. There are ways that you can get them a headstart at home. Educational enrichment, reading to them, small children’s cartoons that teach the basics of English and Maths. That being said, one of the best ways to make sure that your child is ready for the academic career that lays ahead of them is to enroll them into a daycare program so they can get even more enrichment and learn while you’re going about your dailies. 

There are many studies that show that children that are enrolled in daycare or preschool programs perform better throughout their academic career, ranging all the way from Kindergarten to postgrad school. The reason for this is simple, the people that run quality daycare facilities understand that children are like sponges and are soaking up all of the information that they’re given. They capitalize on this by making sure that the children in their care are getting constant educational enrichment. While in a daycare program, your child will be learning about all sorts of things without them even realizing how much they’re learning. This gives them a great headstart for kindergarten and, by extension, a great headstart for their entire academic career. 

To Teach Your Child Social Skills Early On

One of the best and biggest reasons why people enroll their children into daycare programs is to make sure that they learn how to socialize with other human beings early on. By making sure that your child has a basic grasp on their social skills before they get to kindergarten, you ensure that they have a smoother transition into their schooling experience which allows them to focus on their studies while also honing their social skills instead of building them up from scratch.

Social skills are something that we use on a daily basis. When you go to the bank you have to socialize with the teller, at the grocery store you have to socialize with the cashier, when you’re out with friends you have to socialize with them, even at work you need to have social skills. Our ability to socialize has made our species able to get to the places in the world that we have gotten. It’s just a fact of life, you have to socialize in order to fit in in our society. 

By enrolling your child into a daycare program, you give them the chance to interact with other children at around the same level of development as themselves. That’s huge for them, especially if they’ve only interacted with adults that have had potentially decades on them to learn more and more social skills. Children getting the chance to interact with other children allows for everyone involved to figure out, on their own, what is and isn’t ok. As they age, they’ll learn how to navigate more and more complicated social hierarchies, but these first steps are very important. You have to learn to walk before you can run. 

Helping Your Child and Yourself.

Daycare programs offer you a win-win solution to the issue of “what will my child do while I’m at work or school?” By allowing you a place where your child is being watched and is constantly learning, you can rest assured that your child is in good hands. Your child, while they might not realize it yet, is learning a lot of very complex skills that they will carry with them for the rest of their life, well into adulthood. It’s not often that you find such good win-win situations, but daycare centers really do provide a great one.