Child Care

Day care or child care is care of a child during the day by a person other than the child's legal guardians, typically performed by someone outside the child's immediate family. Day care is typically an ongoing service during specific periods, such as the parents' time at work.

The service is known as child care in the United Kingdom and Australia and day care in North America (although child care also has a broader meaning).

Day care is provided in nurseries or creches or by childminders caring for children in their own homes. It can also take on a more formal structure, with education, child development, discipline and even preschool falling into the fold of services.

Some childminders care for children from several families at the same time, either in their own home or in a specialized child care facility. Some employers provide nursery provision for their employees at or near the place of employment.

Child care in the child's own home is traditionally provided by a nanny or au pair, or by extended family members including grandparents, aunts and uncles.

The day care industry is a continuum from personal parental care to large, regulated institutions.

The vast majority of childcare is still performed by the parents, in house nanny or through informal arrangements with relatives, neighbors or friends. For example, in Canada, among two parent families with at least one working parent, 62% of parents handle the childcare themselves, 32% have other in-home care (nannies, relatives, neighbours or friends) and only 6.5% use a formal day care center.

However for-profit day care corporations often exist where the market is sufficiently large or there are government subsidies. For instance, in North America, Bright Horizons Family Solutions is one of the largest such companies, with over 600 daycare centers. Similarly the Australian government's childcare subsidy has allowed the creation of a large private-sector industry in that country[3]. ABC Learning Centres is a publicly traded company running about 1,000 daycare centres in Australia and New Zealand and another 500 in the USA.

Another factor favoring large corporate day cares is the existence of childcare facilities in the workplace. Large corporations will not handle this employee benefit directly themselves and will seek out large corporate providers to manage their corporate daycares. Most smaller, for-profit day cares operate out of a single location.

In general, the geographic limitations and the diversity in type of daycare providers make child daycare a highly fragmented industry. The largest providers own only a very small share of the market. This leads to frustration for parents who are attempting to find quality child daycare, with 87% of them describing the traditional search for child daycare as "difficult and frustrating"

Family day cares can be operated by a single individual out of their home. There may be occasions when more than one individual cares for children in a family childcare home. This can be a stay-at-home parent who seeks supplemental income while caring for their own child. There are also many family childcare providers who have chosen this field as a profession. Local legislation will regulate the number and ages of children allowed per family child care home. Some localities have very stringent quality standards that require licensure for family child care homes while others require little or no regulations for childcare in individual's homes. Some home day cares operate illegally with respect to tax legislation where the care provider does not report fees as income and the parent does not receive a receipt to qualify for childcare tax deductions. Family childcare may be less expensive than center based care because of the lower overhead in family childcare. Many family childcare providers may be certified with the same credentials as center based staff.