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Articles, news and training on how to start a daycare and run a successful daycare business. Parenting articles to help parents with kids in daycare.

Career Evaluation: Look From The Past To The Future

All Articles and News, Daycare Business, How to Start a Daycare

New_Moms From time to time, everyone should sit back and take stock of his or her career. Maybe you’re not yet a CEO (and maybe you don’t want to be), but you probably have dreams, hopes, and plans. Evaluating your career performance can take you one step closer to achieving your goals. These questions should help you determine where you are and where you need to go.

Start by looking back over the previous six months or so:

What are your three biggest accomplishments?
What new professional relationships have you developed?
What new skills have you learned?
What mistakes have you made (and what have you done about them)?

Now look forward:

What are your top three professional goals for the next six months?
What relationships do you want to develop or strengthen?
What new skills do you want to master?

The answers should help you set a course toward professional success.

How to Neutralize Information Overload to Stay Up To Date

All Articles and News, Child Care Marketing News and Articles, Daycare Business, How to Start a Daycare

2013_08_time You can’t accomplish ambitious goals without the right kind of information—and the right amount of it. Be careful not to get buried in data that’s irrelevant. To become a conscientious consumer of news and information, follow this advice:

Don’t read everything. You simply can’t absorb everything that’s out there. Concentrate on prioritizing data, handing it off to someone who can decide whether you need to digest it, and discarding what’s not useful.

Assess your information sources. Identify sources of information that are essential and trustworthy. Weed out any publication, website, or professional association whose information isn’t of the highest quality.

Scan for information. When you open a publication or look at a website, skim before diving in. Focus only on articles or reports that you need to read, not what’s just mildly interesting to you. Stick to what’s important.

Highlight the important stuff. As you read a book or magazine, highlight or underline key messages. Save online articles in a special folder, and check it every once in a while. If you haven’t gone back to any saved material, discard it.

Be an example. If you don’t want to get bogged down by long emails or voice messages, keep your own short. Let others know that they should keep their information as concise as possible—and remind them when they don’t.

Managing the Difficult to Manage

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unhappy-mom Management is never easy, especially when you find yourself dealing with people who are very difficult to manage. Some people can be aggressive, while others are actually not aggressive enough; likewise some people can be very talented but bad at collaboration while others are excellent at collaborating but lack much in the way of genuine talent.

One good tip is to simply accept the fact that management is always going to be difficult and complicated. Do not try to fight it or become frustrated and just try to approach any delicate issues with employees as though it were a puzzle that needs to be solved.

Another important tip is to deal with conflict directly and even-handedly rather than ignoring it or trying to bulldoze your way through it. You are, after all, going to have to carry on working with these people later on, so looking for resolutions that are constructive and fair is an infinitely better idea than just forcing your authority onto others. Try to see the issues through the eyes of the employees concerned.

Teaching Kids About Finances

All Articles and News, Child Care Education, Parenting

dad-son-reading It can be both easy and fun to teach children about finances. Learning about money helps children to also learn how to be generous, responsible and aware of their spending decisions. It is never too early to start teaching your kids about finances in your family. Children who understand what is required to be able to run a household are able to learn the value of money at a very young age.

One way to introduce children to the concept of money and balancing a budget is to give them chores for which they are paid an allowance. It is also a good idea to teach them to save around ten percent of that allowance in a savings account. You should not allow them to borrow against future allowances for a larger purchase, but to save for any items outside of their current budget, thus setting a healthy precedent and attitude to money for their adult life.

Giving children an allowance that they can spend largely as they wish establishes a foundation for dealing with money and being mindful about things that they really want to buy and things that need to be saved up for in order to acquire. Working for chores also teaches them the importance of the concept of work for pay.

Vaccines Not Linked to Autism

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A scientific review has found that childhood vaccines are safe and do not cause autism. Vaccines can cause some side effects but cancer, food allergies and autism are not among them, despite the allegations of a growing anti-vaccine movement.

The authors of the study found that while there have been a rarity of serious adverse reactions to vaccines, such isolated incidents pale beside the real protection that vaccines offer to children. Worried parents have been avoiding allowing their children to be vaccinated, resulting in disease. Canadian researchers have suggested that some vaccines such as measles, mumps and rubella can cause fever and seizures in rare instances – between one to five children in a hundred thousand – but despite the campaigners the new research found strong evidence to show there is no link between vaccines and autism and none of the adverse reactions found in the studies resulted in death.

Doctors continue to insist that parents need to vaccinate their children against disease for the sake of their and the community’s health.

Parents and Mobile Phones

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A year or so ago over a third of twelve to seventeen year old Americans had smartphones – a rise of twenty three percent from 2011 – with a massive seventy eight percent having some kind of mobile phone, according to the Pew Internet Project.

2012_10_conflict Mobile phones are also how young people tend to access the internet these days, with seventy four percent going online at least occasionally with a mobile device, and twenty five percent doing so that way almost all the time. Half of all teenage users of smartphones only use the internet via their mobile phones, using hundreds and thousands of apps to connect with the world and one another.

The use of technology by the young grows more and more personal and becomes an extension of the self. One helpful thing that parents can keep in mind is that their privacy, security and safety tends to depend less on technology than on their own internal safeguards such as respect for themselves and others, kindness, resilience, critical thinking and their own moral compass. The good news for parents is that those qualities are familiar to all of us, have been around just as long as parenting has, and are far better than anything external even as technology continues to change around us.

Fun facts about sea pigs

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Sea pigs are in reality a form of sea cucumber. They are echinoderms, marine animals that include the likes of starfish and sea urchins. Sea pigs are found in oceans all over the world and in some areas actually make up over ninety five percent of the weight of all the animals that can be found on the floor of the deep sea. Regardless of their number, the great majority of people are unlikely to ever set eyes on a sea pig as they live in the deepest and coldest parts of the ocean.

Sea pigs gained their name because of their pinkish, plump, oval-shaped bodies and their puffy legs. They are so small that they can actually fit inside the palm of a hand and are generally just four to six inches in length.

Scientists have been aware of the existence of sea pigs for over a century, having first been described in 1882 by the Swedish zoologist Hjalmar Theel. Sea pigs move about on the seafloor, having between five to seven pairs of tubular, enlarged feet that can actually be inflated and deflated in order to get around.

Play These Games To Spur Your Child’s Imagination

All Articles and News, Fun Kid Stuff, Parenting, Uncategorized

06-13-kids-camp-circle Children start out full of creativity and imagination, and parents can help nurture it as they develop and grow. Play these games with your children to keep their minds active and alert:

Costume play. Encourage games of dress-up. Keep old clothes, hats, and scarves around so your kids can put on a play or pretend to be grown-ups. This lets them try out different roles and express their ideas freely.
Art gallery. Dedicate a section of your home (not just the refrigerator door) to your kids’ art. Display their pictures and sculptures, rotating them from time to time. You can even hold a “gallery opening” for your relatives or your kids’ friends, serving cheese and juice, to reinforce children’s pride in their talents.
Story building. Collect some random objects around your house and ask your child to make up a story around them. Or gather a group of children, give them one item each, and have each one add a sentence to the story about the object he or she is holding. Switch items often to keep the game going.
Forts. It’s a time-honored game, but one that stimulates the senses: Have your kids build a fort using blankets, sheets, and pillows. They’ll learn to solve problems like keeping a roof up and designing doors for easy entrance and exit.
Scavenger hunt. Write up a list of simple household goods—some common, others relatively obscure. Have kids team up to hunt down every item. This encourages teamwork and analytical thinking (“Where would I find a typewriter ribbon?”).

How to succeed as a coach every day

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Coaching and managing are related roles, but separate ones. Managers make sure that a worker’s performance meets explicit goals; coaches strive to help people meet their potential and exceed expectations.

When you start to think about growing your daycare and adding other teachers you need to think about how to coach your new members so they are the best they can be and you are happy.

To hone your coaching skills more keenly, follow this advice:

Be a full-time coach. Don’t limit your coaching opportunities to regularly scheduled meetings, no matter how frequent. Look for ways to be a coach in staff meetings, workplace conversations, even voice and email messages.
Exercise your empathy skills. Watch dramatic TV shows and movies to practice your skills at reading body language and picking up hidden emotions from nonverbal cues.
Clarify goals. Train yourself to clearly define the behaviors you seek in other people, and what behaviors need to change. The better you can flesh these out, the better your ability to suggest improvements and offer useful feedback.
Respond quickly. Closely monitor the people you are coaching so you’ll be able to provide timely and helpful feedback.
Listen. The more someone talks about a new idea, the easier it is for him or her to become excited and committed to it. Let the person you’re coaching do most or all of the talking during your conversations.
Practice what you preach. You can’t expect others to behave in a certain way if you don’t demonstrate the desired behavior yourself.
Provide practice opportunities. When teaching a new skill, give your people plenty of opportunities to practice. This builds not only their proficiency but also their self-confidence.
Talk positively to yourself. Some positive self-talk—affirming your own skills and talents—will keep your morale up and will, in turn, help you to lift the attitudes of others.
Believe in people. When you anticipate great things from others, and let them know your expectations, your confidence will help them work hard to live up to your vision.

Baby safety gates danger

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One of the unwritten rules of parenting is that if you have a baby you have to install baby gates. Baby gates are meant to keep your toddler safe from injury in places such as at the top and bottom of stairs and in the kitchen, but a new study suggests that the gates may be causing as many injuries as they prevent.

The journal Academic Pediatrics says that around 2000 kids get a visit to the emergency room every year because of safety gate related injuries. The majority was minor bumps and bruises rather than anything overly serious but the injuries came about because the children tried to climb or push on them. The main culprits appear to be gates that are pressured mounted, which might stop crawling babies from falling down the stairs but make for a hazardous perch in the case of wobbly toddlers who attempt to use them to assist them to stand, resulting in the gate toppling over.

Experts recommend the use of bolted baby safety gates wherever possible, especially around stairs.