Plenty of parents struggle with the decision of whether daycare is right for their children. In fact, some parents even feel an immediate sense of guilt at the simple thought of passing their childcare duties off to someone else. However, daycare is positive for both the parents and children. It is a healthy and convenient way to foster your child’s development and well-being. This guide explains the top 7 daycare benefits you should understand before deciding if daycare is the right choice for your family. So keep reading to learn more.
1. Stronger Social Bonds
The first and perhaps most obvious benefit of daycare is that it allows your child the opportunity to build stronger social bonds. While attending daycare, children have far more chances to communicate with other children and adults, spend time sharing with others, and practice building meaningful relationships with their peers.
Of course, a child can develop strong social skills while receiving care at home from their parents or other family members. However, home settings rarely offer as many opportunities for your child to meet new people and cultivate different types of friendships and acquaintances. Ultimately, daycare is a great way to expose your child to social settings so that they will be all the more experienced with navigating those settings as they age and engage with life.
2. Structured Daily Scheduling
Another great benefit of daycare is that it will provide more structure for your child’s day-to-day life. When your child has a consistent schedule, they have an easier time predicting what will come next. Having that predictability in their life gives your child a greater sense of comfort and stability.
Dropping your child off at daycare on a consistent schedule makes it easy for them to anticipate what will come next and give them more confidence as they grow up. Likewise, your child will gain even more experience with structured schedules during their time at daycare as they participate in various scheduled activities during their time there.
3. Cognitive Stimulation
Enrolling your child in daycare can also come with the benefit of increased cognitive stimulation. While at daycare, your child will engage with many different people and activities, most of which are likely new to them. These novel stimuli engage your child’s mind and help them develop their curiosity and intellectual ability.
That cognitive stimulation also involves more chances to improve communication skills. In the long run, daycare can help your child learn to better express themselves verbally and understand the thoughts and needs that others express to them.
4. Behavioral Improvements
One of the somewhat unforeseen benefits of daycare is that it can lead to behavioral improvements. During their time at daycare, a child needs to not only learn to interact with other children in a respectful way, but they must also understand how to follow the rules that the daycare sets forth for them.
Learning to follow the rules and the consequences of not following them is something we all need to do at some point in our lives. While the rules set in a household can encourage good behavior among children, the daycare environment also proves to be an exceptional environment in which children can learn what behaviors are acceptable and which are not. This makes them all the more well-adjusted when it comes time to grow up and play within society’s rules in their teenage years and adulthood.
5. Improved Physical Health
Most of the benefits we have mentioned so far relate to a child’s mental and emotional development. However, it is not so surprising to learn that daycare can also benefit a child’s physical health. During daycare, children should have plenty of chances to run and play both indoors and out. The games they play will keep them active and physically fit, which contributes greatly to their overall health.
Interestingly, the bodily benefits of daycare are not exclusive to building a lifestyle full of fun physical activity. It may also help to improve your child’s immune system. At first, exposure to other children and a new environment may cause your child to come down with a cold or another sickness. However, over the long term, that exposure is likely to strengthen your child’s immune system and make them better capable of fighting off illnesses in the future.
6. Preschool Preparedness
In some sense, all the previous benefits lead to this one as well. By sending your young child to daycare, they become better prepared to enter preschool when the time comes. The reason is that through daycare, your child will have already begun to develop the social and emotional skills needed to thrive in a school setting.
By contrast, children who do not attend daycare or an equally mentally and physically stimulating environment have fewer ways to build social skills and develop their mental abilities. This makes the transition to a formal school setting even more difficult. Children who do go to daycare can often have a greater chance of moving seamlessly into preschool and finding academic and social success once they make that significant transition.
7. An Easier Workload for Parents
Our final daycare benefit does not directly impact your child. Instead, we’d like to point out that sending a child to daycare can be a great advantage for parents as well. Simply put, enrolling a child in daycare reduces a parent’s child care workload, which can be a benefit in more ways than one.
Again, there is no reason to feel guilty as a parent who sends their kid to daycare. As we already mentioned, there are many benefits your child will enjoy there. Simultaneously, daycare gives parents more time to focus on other important aspects of their lives, including their careers and personal relationships. Having that important time helps parents remain balanced and well-rounded in their lives, which will probably help them be better-adjusted parents to their children anyway.
Is Your Child Ready for Daycare?
It is clear that there are plenty of daycare benefits for both you and your child. At the Learning Academy, our daycare program gives children of all ages and abilities a safe environment in which they can learn and grow. If you are a parent interested in enrolling your child in our program, visit our site to learn more.
