Have you been considering enrolling your child into childcare near Northville MI? If so, you probably have a lot of very reasonable questions before you decide to take the plunge. Your child is, more than likely, your pride and joy so you need some information first.
Even without assuming that your child is your pride and joy, daycare programs can be pretty costly and add time to your daily commute. That doesn’t make wanting to rush into them much more appealing because of all of the costs that are commonly associated with these programs
There’s, of course, the money that you’d need to spend on the program itself, but also money that you’d need to spend on gas, the time you’d need to add to your commute, and hours upon hours of your child’s time that they’d need to be at the program every week.
You likely don’t want to waste your money or your or your child’s time. So, let’s look at how and why quality childcare can make a huge difference in your child’s life before you decide to take the plunge into enrolling them in one of these programs in the long or short term.
Table of Contents
Getting Sick Sucks, Period.
Nobody likes getting sick. It’s uncomfortable, and many people are reminded of their own mortality even when they get a little sick. None of that is fun, especially when you put the fact that you have to work for money on top of that.
Getting really sick can mean weeks away from work, or weeks of just not making any money. Even if you have a decent chunk of money saved up for rainy days, those kinds of savings accounts can run dry rather quickly if you’re sick for long enough and don’t have any money coming in.
The good news is that children have the ability to keep from getting seriously sick too often as adults. “How?” you might be asking. Well, it has a lot to do with the way that your central immune system works. We don’t have all the time in the world for this but join us for a small tangent about how your immune system works.
There are a lot of things inside of your body that are constantly on the lookout for antigens. These antigens include things like fungus, viruses, bacteria, and a few others. Whenever your body sees one of these antigens, it goes into defense mode.
In fact, antigens are rarely the things that are making you feel sick. In most cases, it’s actually your immune system responding to them and trying to get them out of your body. That means that you could easily experience symptoms such as:
- Fevers.
- Chills.
- Coughing.
- Congestion.
- Sneezing.
- Loss of appetite.
- Watery eyes.
- Etc.
Your body has a good idea of how to get rid of these antigens in most cases, but not in all. Sometimes your body has to guess, and when that happens you’re more likely to get very sick. This is all skimming right past the phenomenon known as the “man cold” but you can research that on your own.
To further the information that we need for this article, we’re going to have to talk about how your immune system remembers antigens that it’s already run into. Keep in mind, nothing in this article is anything past a very elementary understanding of medicine.
Whenever your immune system runs into an antigen, it remembers what that antigen was like. Because of this, you’re less likely to get really sick from the same thing twice. You can still get sick, but not to the same degree that you would have before.
Now, take your child. They’ve only interacted with whatever antigens live at home or wherever you frequent. That’s great, they’re getting a headstart on their immune responses before any preschool program, but we can take it a step further.
Putting your child into a daycare allows them to be around other children, which will in turn get them sick so their body can have a headstart on figuring out what to do when they get sick later on. By putting them into a group of children from different backgrounds, you can get them to interact with a bunch of antigens their body has never seen before.
Children that are daycare age are not famously hygienic. Your child might be a perfect angel that understands to cover their mouth while they cough, but someone else’s child will sneeze directly into your eyeballs and not care.
That means that daycares are excellent places to get your child a headstart on getting their immune system strong enough for daily life as adults. That’s important for them to be successful well into their lives and can also save them a lot of discomfort as adults.
Getting Ready for the Education System
School is probably the hardest thing that we have to do in our lives. Most jobs aren’t as difficult as the years in academia you have to spend preparing for them. It’s especially difficult for small children to wrap their heads around, especially when they have to go from home life to kindergarten all at once.
In fact, most children that have to go straight from home to kindergarten feel very stressed out for a lot of reasons. For example:
- Separation anxiety caused by not being around their family.
- Having to learn the basics of every subject.
- Interacting with other children without any supervision from their parents or guardians.
- Being on their own in a strange, new environment.
These things can be stressful for children. Up until this point in their lives, they’ve been able to be at home with varying levels of expectations placed upon them. That all changes everything in their lives and change is stressful for anyone, especially children.
Children that are stressed out typically don’t do as well as far as grades are concerned. In fact, children that go to daycare programs are more likely to perform better in school no matter what level than children that did not go to daycare programs.
This is because of a whole host of different tactics that daycare programs use to prepare children for school, especially things like educational enrichment. Educational enrichment gives children a chance to get a headstart on learning while it’s still something that is done for fun.
By giving your child the chance to ease into the education system before everything is kept in records and it actually matters, you give them the chance to adjust to that kind of life before they have to do it all the time.
Social Skills Early On
We touched on social skills a bit in the last section, but we didn’t get into just how much daycare helps with them. Do you realize just how often you use your social skills? In all honesty, you probably use them every time you leave your house. Here are just a few examples:
- Paying for groceries.
- Making friends.
- Going to interviews.
- Going on dates.
- Giving directions.
- Signing for packages.
- Going out to dinner.
The list goes on and on. You socialize so much throughout every day that you probably don’t even realize it. Every time you leave the house, you’re entering a complicated social hierarchy that you may or may not even be aware of.
Your child will have to deal with the same hierarchies as they age. The people in the roles might change, but there will likely always be someone at the grocery store that they have to talk to in order to pay for their food, or someone to interview with to make sure they’re getting a position that pays them what they’re really worth.
Putting your child into a good daycare will give them the chance to interact with other children around the same level of development so they can figure out what works and what doesn’t work early on, and that can make a world of difference for both their personal and professional lives.
It’s something that a lot of people take for granted, but the early you get to practice your social skills the better you’ll be at executing your social skills later on in life. It doesn’t matter if you’re a teenager or an adult, you need to know how to socialize to get ahead in this world.
Preschool gives your child the best possible chance to get these skills down to a science long before they need to, which means that everything between preschool and adulthood acts as practice before they really need to have it down.
Giving Your Children the Best Chance
You want your child to succeed in this world. Whether that means taking over the family bakery or law school, they deserve to have the tools that they need most to ensure that they’re able to get to wherever it is that they’re going when it’s time to head in that direction.
A good childcare program can help build a foundation on which they’ll build off of for the rest of their lives, which can help them get opportunities that they might not have been able to otherwise.