Child care  

From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia

(Redirected from Childcare)
Jump to: navigation, search

Related e

Wikipedia
Wiktionary
Shop


Featured:

Child care, childcare, child minding or daycare is the caring for and supervision of a child or children, usually from age six weeks to age thirteen. Child care is the action or skill of looking after children by a day-care center, nannies, babysitter, teachers or other providers. Child care is a broad topic covering a wide spectrum of professionals, institutions, contexts, activities, social and cultural conventions. Early child care is a very important and often overlooked component of child development. Child care providers are our children's first teachers, and therefore play an integral role in our systems of early childhood education. Quality care from a young age can have a huge impact on the future successes of children.

Usually children are taken care of by their parents, legal guardians or siblings. Children caring for children is common in many cultures. This care includes verbal direction and other explicit training regarding the child's behavior, and is often as simple as "keeping an eye out" for younger siblings. The role may also be taken on by the child's extended family. If a parent or extended family is unable to care for the children, orphanages and foster homes are a way of providing for children's care, housing, and schooling.

Of course, the legal guardians of a child almost always employ professionals child caregivers at some point in their lives. These professionals work within the context of a center-based care (including creches, daycare, preschools and schools) or a home-based care (nannies or family daycare). The majority of child care institutions that are available require that child care providers have extensive training in first aid and are CPR certified. In addition, background checks, drug testing at all centers, and reference verification are normally a requirement. Child care can also include advanced learning environments that include early childhood education or elementary education. In this case the appropriate child care provider is a teacher, which requires, aside from the common core skills typical of a child caregiver, a deeper educational training focused on children.

As well as these licensed options, parents may also choose to find their own caregiver or arrange childcare exchanges/swaps with another family.

See also




Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "Child care" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.

Personal tools