I have been providing childcare for 20 years and you can TELL the families where the parents work in PARTNERSHIP with their childcare providers to provide consistency between home and program in ALL areas EXCEL in relation to parents who do not ... there is visible differences!

The reality is YES we have them for 10 waking hours a day verses the 4-5 waking hours that parents have their own children and in reality most of those hours are spent traveling too and from daycare, bathing, preparing meals and eating and so forth so therefore a LARGE part of the onus on offering children a head start in the early years falls on us .... however CONSISTENCY in messages is KEY in how children learn to value things so children whose parents ALSO spend some time in the evenings and weekends with their child reading, singing, showing interest in their 'learning' by not only providing them access to things but 'being there' for them are going to VALUE that in our programs ... they will see this is important to their parents too and therefore they are more inclined to 'attend' to them when we offer and therefore master and retain quicker.

For example I had two infants start in my program at the same time and both attended full time 9 hours a day roughly the same drop off and pick up times ... so they had access to the EXACT SAME program from age 1 until they went off to school at age 4 ... if it was ALL on us than those two children should have been EXACTLY the same in school readiness and so forth but they were so DIFFERENT in development and while there is certainly argument for NATURE aka the children had different temperaments and personalities their NURTURE at HOME was vastly different too and that affects their learning or ability to learn!

Child A parents were what I call 'hands on' parents, they got down to the child's eye level when talking and talked the child through things, they asked LOTS of questions around what we were working on and showed interest in the program brought things from home to 'accent' the program and read the calendar and so child never missed show and share day or other activities to tie HOME to the PROGRAM for children, the child was enrolled in ONE extra curricular activity at a time and based on conversations with parents and child as they learned to talk - they were home bodies and spent a lot of time at home in the evening as a family or outside in their large property tending to it while the child played outside with them .... very low stress family orientated lifestyle ... parents were not materialistic folk the child had very few 'toys' and spent a lot of time outside.

Child B parents were what I call the 'busy' parents - they rushed in and out of program because they always had somewhere to 'be' - it was hard to 'share' things about the program with them because they were only half listening due to the rushing, the child was enrolled in at least 4 extra curricular 'enrichment' activities a week being rushed off to this or that and because parents were often busy elsewhere too playing sports and having 'couple time' and so forth extended family or babysitters helped out, the child had EVERY possible toy and gadget out there from Leap pads to Gameboys and so forth ... that type of family where the kid have the 'best' of everything out there.

Can you guess out of those two children whose language excelled, whose social skills excelled, whose independence and problem solving skills excelled, whose imagination was out of this world and was able to play with little to no direction and so forth ... who eagerly attended to formal learning activities in program?