What to ask when you tour a dayhome
Including the questions people are too polite to ask. If a provider gets defensive about any of these, that is your answer.
By Angela
Choosing child care is a lot of trust to hand over on the basis of a half-hour visit. Most parents I meet are too polite to ask the questions they actually want answered.
Ask them. A provider who is doing this properly will not mind.
The ones people do ask
How many children, what ages, what does a day look like, what do they eat. All reasonable, all worth asking, and you will get a smooth answer because everyone has practised these.
The ones worth asking instead
What happens when you are sick? A single-caregiver dayhome closes when the caregiver is down. Find out what the backup plan is, how much notice you get, and how many days a year it typically happens.
Can I see the licensing paperwork? Licence, most recent monitoring visit, first aid certificate, criminal record check. All of it should exist and you should be able to look at it.
What do you do when a child bites? Or hits, or will not share. You are listening for a specific approach rather than a slogan. "We redirect" is a slogan. Ask what redirecting looked like the last time it happened.
How do you tell parents when something goes wrong? Small injuries happen everywhere. What matters is whether you hear about them the same day and in what detail.
What is your turnover like? Not staff turnover, family turnover. How long do families usually stay, and why do they leave? Everyone loses families to moves and school starting. If they are losing them for other reasons, ask.
Can I talk to a current family? Not a reference from three years ago. Someone whose child is there now.
The thing you cannot ask about
Watch how the children respond when the provider walks into the room. Not whether they are quiet or well behaved. Whether they look up, whether they go over, whether the two year old holds up whatever they are holding.
You can tell quite a lot in ten seconds and it is more reliable than anything either of you says out loud.
And then trust yourself
You will probably know within a few minutes of walking in. The questions above are mostly for confirming or overturning that first read, which is worth doing, because first reads are sometimes wrong.
But if the place feels wrong and the answers are all correct, keep looking.
