Survival Guide

On-Site Day Care The Experts' Choice

The daycare center where you work may be the best place of all to enroll your pre-school child.

Commuting parents who prefer leaving their children close to home may be unaware of the high marks experts give the nation's 4,000 on-site corporate child care facilities.

"Corporate child centers are on the cutting edge of positive development in the field," said Roger Neugebauer, publisher of Child Care Information Exchange, a magazine for day-care administrators. "They tend to be among the best in the world.

"Companies are extremely interested in the educational aspects because they recognize the future work force is going to need educated workers," he said.

Kathy Lynch, assistant director of corporate partnership at the Center For Work & Family at Boston College, said, "Onsite child care is a fabulous alternative, but you need to make sure that's what your employees want. It's difficult for a lot of parents who commute by train or bus to bring their children to the headquarters center."

AT&T Corp. spokesman Burke Stinson said that 88 percent of AT&T's employees polled rejected the idea of establishing a daycare center at work locations in favor of neighborhood centers.

Caregivers at on-site centers, though, "have higher qualifications and are more likely to be trained specifically in early childhood education," said Barbara Willer of the National Association for the Education of Young Children, based in Washington, D.C. The association is a nonprofit membership teachers' organization that sets standards for the daycare industry. It has accredited approximately 6,000 daycare centers of all types.

Employer-run centers attract quality staff because they "generally offer better employee benefit packages than their industry counterparts," a new report by consultants Burud & Associates of El Segundo, Calif., concluded after reviewing 205 such centers.

Education consultant Sandra Burud, who is also president of Burud & Associates, said work site centers "are not day care any more, they are early-education programs." Her firm is a division of Bright Horizons, a Cambridge, Mass., company that provides child care for employers at 155 sites.

Survival Guide is a regular feature at The Working Moms' Internet Refuge

Family | Career | Art of Juggling | Single Moms | Health
Dad's Voice | Bookshelf | News | Recipes | Sports Mom | Discussion Lists
Business Directory | The Boards | Wisdom of Mothers | Postcards | Resources
Search About Us | | Contact Us |Advertising on the Refuge | Home

Copyright © 2000   Working Moms Refuge.