Poor quality care can hamper what and how well children learn. Low standards of hygiene and safety in poor quality settings lead to injury and illness for children. Inadequate care affects parents and employers as well, resulting in absenteeism, tardiness, and low productivity. The cost to retrain a single employee is estimated to be one and one-half times the employees annual salary. The value of good child care cannot be understated, yet far too many children continue to be denied quality care.
Many children spend their formative years in settings that are unsafe or only custodial.
Parents are being lured into accepting listings of caregivers from various caregiver groups without the support and information they need to properly access a provider or facility. Still others simply choose the first caregiver or facility they come across based on price and convenience. We spend more time choosing a vehicle or for that matter a pet, than we do choosing a quality child care setting. Parents know what they want from child care. A study conducted by Child Care Aware, an on-going public awareness campaign sponsored by the Dayton Hudson foundation and other valuable child care organizations in the U.S. points out that parents are highly concerned about quality, about the basic physical safety and security of their children, about positive emotional and learning experiences, about affection and fair discipline, about caregiver turnover.