Child Care Chatter: Why choose licensed and approved early learning and child care?
By medicinehatnews on March 8, 2021.
Learning in their early years lays a foundation for all future learning and affects children’s health, development, and well-being throughout their lives. The Medicine Hat & District Child Care Association advocates for the use of licensed and approved early learning and child care. Many families with parents in the labour force use an unregulated arrangement, either a family member, a private babysitter or bringing someone into the child’s own home. This means parents have sole responsibility for assessing the quality of the child care and for managing the relationship with the care provider. The most important reason we believe you should choose regulated care is the fact that there is oversight. Alberta Children’s Services does not oversee private babysitters unless a complaint is made. The only rule is that private babysitters can have six children in their home, not including their own. There are no requirements for education, ongoing professional learning, criminal record checks, reference checks, first aid certification, health and safety standards, ages of children served, etc. There is no ongoing monitoring by anyone other than the parent. While we recognize that some private babysitters can provide a quality service for families, the MHDCCA recommends to families that licensed and approved arrangements be their first choice. Recent tragedies that have taken place within private babysitting arrangements, including the recent Woolfsmith case, show there is a need for more oversight, rather than less. Alberta’s licensed child care programs must meet the requirements laid out in the Child Care Licensing Act and the Child Care Licensing Regulation. Alberta Children’s Services regularly inspects regulated child care programs. Approved family day home programs are monitored by a contracted family day home agency to ensure the health, safety and well-being of children using the government’s Family Day Home Standards. Agencies are required to monitor at least six times a year. Children’s Services is responsible to monitor the agencies’ compliance as well. Children start learning at birth and continue to develop and learn at a significant pace throughout their early years. This means your child deserves the best experiences in their early learning and child care environments. The Medicine Hat & District Child Care Association advocates for the use of licensed and approved early learning and child care. Earlier, we talked about how licensed care is overseen by the government and licensed day home agencies. Now, we explore more reasons to choose child care that is licensed. The first reason is the maintenance of health and safety standards. Licensed child care programs and family day homes must adhere to health and safety standards. These include sanitization, food safety, fire codes and regulation, emergency procedures and much more. High-quality early learning and childcare is much more than custodial supervision that keeps children safe and fed. It is engaging, creative, age-appropriate, learning-through-play-based, developmentally-focused programming. Qualified, well-educated early childhood educators deliver high-quality early learning and child care. We know that the interactions between ECEs and children highly factors into the overall quality of the program itself. There are minimum standards set for the number and certification level of the ECEs. In licensed care, there is support from the program or agency. Child care programs and day home agencies provide leadership and supervision, ensure ECE education and certification meets the standards, and offer professional development. Directors are a welcoming ear and an educated, experienced voice to which ECEs and families can turn. Directors negotiate arrangements between the ECE and the parents, including contracts, fees, concerns and referrals to community resources. Parents can access fee subsidies from the government if they are using licensed or approved child care programs. Please check out our website at http://www.mhdcca.com. This website hosts a list of our members, including ages of children served and hours of operation and information on questions to ask when interviewing programs. Jennifer Usher is a coordinator with Medicine Hat & District Child Care Association 16-15
