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The Importance of Child Care and Early Education for Parents

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Responsible and responsive parenting develops your child’s cognitive and social skills that they’ll carry throughout their life. As a parent, it’s important to think about and prioritize your child’s development for their future. 

Thankfully, there are more than a few ways to foster and nurture your child’s growth to set them up towards a healthy life. These include showing high levels of warmth and performing positive behaviors to cater to your child’s needs.

This article will shed light on the importance of child care and the importance of early education for your child’s upbringing.

What is Child Care?

Child care is a safe and healthy way to develop children to thrive inside and outside school. It brings in well-qualified, stable employees and sets up efficient management with a healthy child to adult ratio. An ideal child care facility like Raising Stars offers well fleshed-out programs to improve all facets of a child’s development in their early years.

Why is Child Care Important?

As more mothers enter the workforce, it’s vitally important for their children to attend a child care facility to develop their skills. Regardless of their financial and social background, all children should have access to early education and child care. This is to enhance their well-being and promote appropriate development.

What is Early Education?

Early education refers to the period wherein children go to school for the first stages of their life, typically before the kindergarten years. This type of education is important in their formative years because it’s the time when they first learn how to interact with others. This is also the time when they develop hobbies and form personalities that they’ll carry with them for life. 

According to UNESCO, an NGO with a mission to promote intercultural dialogue through education, early education is defined as a way to promote the holistic growth of the child. Good ECCE (early childhood care and education) can set children up to become well-rounded, nurturing, responsible, and capable global citizens in the future.

Why is Early Education Important?

Early childhood education doesn’t just involve learning about life’s basic skills. It’s also a time when the child learns emotional, physical, cognitive, and social skills to interact with the world around them. In addition, it also develops their brain and fosters a proper bond for the child, parents, and the outer world.

If this early childhood education is successfully implemented, it can positively impact the trajectory of the rest of your child’s educational journey.

How to Promote Early Education and Learning at Home?

Now that you understand the foundations of ECCE, you may be wondering how do we implement that in your daily lives?

The environment your child grows up in plays a big role in how they learn. While going to child care can help you during the times when you’re busy, as a parent, you spend the most time and influence their learning methods. 

Here’s how to help promote fruitful learning to your child.

Read To Your Children

Reading to your children throughout various stages of their life helps them discover and learn more about the world around them. Pediatricians would recommend reading to your children as early as their birth.

The reason for this is because it fosters their curiosity and widens their imagination. Aside from that, reading to your child also gives a plethora of benefits, namely:

  • Helps your children know the ins and outs of the language, learning early literacy skills 
  • Helps your child distinguish between reality and make-believe
  • Develops your child’s brain, focus ability, concentration, communication and social skills
  • Helps them understand the world and other cultures better
  • Helps them widen perspectives and power through new, challenging events better

Lastly, reading to your child also strengthens the bond between you and your child. This will help lead them to a healthy and happy road to development in their future stages of growth.

Showing them Shapes, Names, Numbers, Sizes, Colors, in Their Environment

Letting your child learn numeracy skills, or the ability to apply maths concepts in their daily life, is vital to developing their ability to solve problems critically. Honing this trait will help them better solve problems  (“How long do I have to wait for the bus to arrive?”) and make logical decisions: (“Which item is the more expensive one?).

As early as possible, developing these skill sets would lay the foundations of their ability to recognise patterns, solve problems, and digest information. 

Aside from books, movies are a great way to help toddlers and children digest information and come up with better conclusions. If you need a little help looking, here are family-friendly, kid-safe 13 Best Disney Channel Movies for Toddlers To Watch.

Bring them to a quality health care facility

Parents don’t only have to provide emotional and developmental support to their children—they should bring food to the table too. For too many of us, juggling both family and work can be difficult to manage, especially with a traditional 9 to 5 job.

If time is an issue, you can find a local, nurturing, and friendly community to make education exciting for your children when you’re not at home. This will give you peace of mind knowing that your child’s in the right hands, but it also prepares them for the future.

Jeff Campbell