If you are a parent, or a caregiver of a young child, there’ll come a time when you’ll need to make an important decision: Should you continue to care for your child at home, until they’re eligible to enter the school system? Or is it better to evaluate programs that deliver professional child care in Gaithersburg Maryland now, so you can enroll the child in a suitable center when the time is right? As important as that decision is, it’s often a tough one for parents and guardians to make.
Professional Child Care or Care at Home?
When it’s time for parents to actively look for locations to send their young ones to child care in Gaithersburg MD, it’s often a tough choice to make. This is especially true if it’s their first experience of planning for non-parental child care. So many questions flood their minds:
- Is the center close enough for us?
- Will our child be safe?
- What if the kid doesn’t like it there?
- Why can’t we teach our kid at home, everything they’ll learn at a child care center?
These are important questions, and it would be surprising if a parent or guardian didn’t raise them when preparing to make child care decisions. For years, however, parents often frowned upon non-parental child care. They believed (mistakenly!) that having young children under professional, but non-parental supervision, eroded the parent-child bond.
Not so! The trained and experienced early childhood educators, who run the programs that provide child care in Gaithersburg Maryland, go to great lengths to ensure nothing erodes the trusting bond between children and their parents or guardians. In fact, there’s scientific evidence to prove that, a well-organized and operated childcare environment is often more conducive to the overall development of a child, than that available in parental-care-only settings.
Understanding “Overall”
Before you dispute what science has to say, about professionally run child care centers, and the positive impact they have on children in their care, it’s important to understand what “overall” means. It’s a fact that regulated centers, delivering child care in Gaithersburg MD, can never replicate the love, affection, and bond, that a child shares with his/her parent. And all reputable centers don’t even try to do so! But those emotions and feelings are just one aspect – albeit a very important one – of the non-parental child care equation.
When a child enrolls a professional child care facility, they have access to many benefits and opportunities that home care can’t provide:
- The opportunity to mix and socialize with other children of their own age
- Access to professional supervision and learning throughout their time at the center
- Well-regulated and monitored age-appropriate physical activity, at an individual and group level
- A chance to develop their language, science, math, cognitive and emotional skills
And all this occurs under the auspices of a scientifically developed curriculum that’s approved by the Maryland State Department of Education (MSDE). These are aspects of childcare that parental-care can’t offer, primarily because of the resources and cost they entail. It’s only centers that are committed to investing in institutional child care in Gaithersburg Maryland that can deliver these opportunities to young, developing minds.