Is Daycare Worth The Cost?

Most people have something in common, and that’s the fact that they have a strict budget. Whether you make a million a year and want to make sure you’re pinching pennies for a rainy day, or you’re not quite so fortunate, you probably have some sort of budget to worry about.

This is common for everyone, even leading up to companies. That being said, as a parent you want to make sure that you’re giving your child every single opportunity that you can to make sure that they’re going to succeed in life, and that can come in a lot of different ways.

Whether you’re looking at Daycare Northville MI or for daycare somewhere else entirely, you probably want to make sure that it’s actually going to be worth the resources that you’re allocating towards it. Considering that’s what this article is about, we have a good feeling that you’re here to find out for sure if it’s going to be worth your time and energy.

Fortunately, that’s exactly what we’re here to look into today. With any luck, we’ll be able to discover if this kind of program is going to be worth the price as well as the time that you have to invest in it.

After all, there is a lot of time that you do have to invest into this kind of thing, so the time cost is just as important as the monetary cost here. So, are daycares worth all of the time and money or are they just a huge scam? Let’s look at the facts and find out together.

Academic Performance of Children in Daycare Programs

The most important thing to you, more than likely, is how well your child will perform in school after being enrolled in a daycare program. After all, daycare programs are supposedly meant to help your child be a little more prepared for their scholarly lives.

So, how do daycare programs help your child prepare for school? A lot of ways, actually! That’s why so many child psychologists love it. The tactics that each daycare uses vary quite a bit from place to place, but you can see the basics in play no matter where you go:

• Educational enrichment.
  • Educational enrichment is by far the easiest thing to spot in a classroom. This kind of enrichment is specifically designed to be educational. It can include a lot of things such as:
    • Toys.
    • Games.
    • Group projects.
    • Arts.
    • Crafts.
    • Puzzles
  • Problem-solving puzzles.
    • This might feel like it’s the same as the last entry in the last list, but it does deserve its own little blurb. Problem-solving is a skill that can help in all areas of life, including:
      • Interpersonal relationships.
      • Learning new materials in class.
      • Job interviews.

The list of ways that having solid problem-solving skills can help you in life just continues to go on and on, but the important thing to know is that most daycare programs have at least the most basic problem-solving puzzles integrated into their programs.

There have actually been a whole lot of studies done on children in daycare programs and in most cases, children that are in daycare programs outperform their classmates that were not afforded the same opportunity throughout every single level of education.

This is because daycare programs are designed to give your child a head start on their education. Imagine, if you will, having to go from your normal daily life to learn about quantum physics and Arabic 8 hours a day, 5 days a week.

Unless you happen to be a quantum physicist and speak fluent Arabic, that would likely be at least a little jarring. While children aren’t expected to learn these topics from scratch in kindergarten, they are expected to learn the basics of pretty much everything starting on their first day of kindergarten.

Giving your child a chance to learn these things before they have to is going to set them up for success in the long run. In a way, this period allows your children the chance to hit the ground running. That makes a world of difference when it comes to what you’re actually doing with your child’s time.

Social Skills are Important

Have you ever had to talk to another person to make sure that something got done? That’s kind of a silly question, isn’t it? Of course you have. Everyone in the world has at some point or another. You could even go so far as to argue that every human being has needed to do this in their lifetime.

Heck, language was created with the express purpose of ensuring that humans can communicate concepts too complicated to communicate by only using non-verbal cues. Even since then, for better or worse, we’ve had incredibly complicated social structures.

Because these social structures are so complicated, knowing what you need to do to navigate them is important. Think of your children, now imagine them as people in their late 20s. They’re going to have to do everything you do on a daily basis, including:

• Go to work.
• Go to school.
• Attend job interviews.
• Go to networking events.
• Buy groceries.
• Get gas (maybe?)
• Sign for packages.
• Make friends.
• Go on dates.

The list goes on, but do you know what all of those things have in common? They all require some level of social skills, which, like any other kind of skill, requires a bit of practice. That’s where daycare programs come in.

When you enroll your child into a daycare program, you give them the chance to enter an environment filled to the brim with other children in the same stage of development as themselves. That’s a huge thing for learning social skills.

Giving your child the chance early on to interact with a lot of other children learning the ropes at the same time as they are can make a huge difference in how well they learn to interact with others as adults. There’s a reason for this.

We adults already understand how to navigate these complex social hierarchies. When a child interacts with us, it’s not a level playing field. We already know what manners are, understand weird phrases like “give it the old college try” and know what is and isn’t acceptable to say to other people.

Children? Not so much, and that makes the playing field incredibly unlevel for them. By placing them into a program that’s mostly populated by other children and making them fend for themselves, we give them the chance to experiment on their own and understand the inner workings of these complex social situations.

Does Day Care Cost Too Much?

Now, you might be thinking to yourself that daycare would end up costing more than your rent does, and many families simply wouldn’t be able to afford that kind of price no matter how much it might actually be able to help your children.

In a lot of cases, this would be true. Daycare isn’t cheap in most cases, and it could easily cost as much as your rent or mortgage. That can be troubling, but there’s an important factor to look at here. While you can get incredibly expensive daycare programs, those aren’t always the only good programs.

You can find a lot of good programs on a budget, on any budget. There are a lot of tools available to help you out with this, and you could certainly benefit from knowing how to find them if you’re worried about the cost.

The first thing that you could try is just calling your local school district. They have a vested interest in how well your child is going to perform because your child’s test scores could determine the school’s funding. That means that they’ll want to help you as much as they can if only for that.

Is it a perfect system? No. But even if it’s not perfect that doesn’t mean that there aren’t some opportunities to get the help that you need as a parent to ensure that your child is getting the help that they need before they start school.

You could also try childcare.gov. That website is full of resources that can help you find cheap or even free daycare programs that will still be able to help your children get the head start that they need before they enter the classroom.

These programs might not make your child look more attractive to Ivy League colleges, but they can help your child have good enough grades to get into a good enough school for whatever they end up wanting to do.

Defining the Future

The future is scary but, like it or not, it’s well on its way. One day you’ll wake up and your child will be a full-grown person, interacting with the world with or without any concern for what you might think about their choices.

As parents, it’s our job to ensure that we’re giving our children every possible chance so they can get to wherever they decide they want to be when they’re fully grown, and that’s important if you want to be sure that your child will succeed.