Online Class: How to Start and Run a Home-Based Daycare Service

Creating a safe, stimulating, and caring environment for children is one of the most important aspects of starting a home daycare business. Becoming a childcare professional requires a little bit of research, the ability to obtain adequate licensing, and the capability of learning how to run and operate a business from your home. 

This course provides individuals with the basics necessary to start a home daycare business - from defining your aptitudes, motivations, and capabilities to the necessary legal requirements involved in starting a home daycare business. This course will help interested individuals learn about training, insurance, startup needs and costs as well as the need to assess what age groups might be best suited to your personality.

Courses Frequently Bought Together:

Behavior Management 101

Unit Studies 101

Autism 101

Course Motivation

As with any job, starting a home daycare business has its benefits as well as drawbacks. The responsibility and demands of a full time job taking care of the needs of a wide range of children on a daily basis may be extremely tiring and frustrating at times. However, those experienced in home daycare also are the very same people who say they have never felt so rewarded or needed in their lives.

One of the main requirements of a child caregiver is to be able to love other children in addition to your own, if you have children already. Some childcare givers are young, others middle-aged, while others are heading toward their senior years. What do they have in common that enables them to motivate themselves day after day to take care of the needs and demands of squalling infants, demanding toddlers, or preschoolers with special needs? Perhaps they all have extra 'love genes' or doses of patience or just plain like being around children all day.

There is no college degree or program that can actually teach child day care providers. Such care is provided with the experience and education that develops through caring for all types of children with all types of needs. Every child will come with his or her own set of challenges.

While it is certainly advisable that anyone wishing to start a home daycare business consider taking basic classes in child development, it is not a requirement for many states. Our next lesson will focus on licensing and registration requirements in a multitude of environments, but this lesson will focus on the mental and emotional motivations and skills that are necessary to be a successful home daycare provider.

Caregivers are able to offer a multitude of abilities and talents as well as valuable objects of support to parents seeking your services. You'll be required to wear many hats in your job a childcare provider, including referee, cook, nurse, and teacher. However, those very same traits and skills are necessary for any mother, so perhaps it's not such a stretch of the imagination.

Since studies have shown that the majority of home daycare providers are women, we will, for the duration of this course, use the feminine pronoun when discussing scenarios or issues that concern all caregivers. This is not meant to lessen the contributions of many supportive spouses, friends or loved ones, but merely to offer a more personal course of instruction involved in the basics of home daycare.

Aptitude to perform the many jobs and skills necessary in providing daycare is not the only consideration that needs to be thoroughly examined and discussed with other family members. You will also need to decide whether you're going to be self-employed or affiliate yourself with an agency that provides childcare services.

Many community groups as well as religious organizations regularly recruit caregivers to provide daycare services in communities around the country. While they often help with the startup of the business and provide training and some supervision, individuals who go this route should know beforehand that the agency will collect the fees from parents, and you will be paid a predetermined amount per child.

While this type of association may be beneficial to some and offers the benefit of supplies such as those necessary for teaching, arts and crafts, equipment, books, and toys, a person may have to take more children than initially planned for to meet their monetary goals.

Many experienced home daycare providers suggest that those first entering the field began with such an agency. While there may be state and federal guidelines and budgets that you may be required to follow, adequate support is always available, as are substitutes to take your place if you are sick, as well as the potential of offering insurance coverage and other needs.

However, those who decide to go into business for themselves are able to enjoy the benefits of being home with their own children and enjoying an increased income. Best of all, you can be your own boss. It is really up to each individual to decide which way to go, but talking to others who are experienced in the daycare business, as well as accessing resources to local or state governmental agencies for guidance is always a good idea.

Some equipment and supplies and toys will be different for infants and toddlers than the needs required by preschoolers and school-age children. However, two basic essentials for all age groups will be a box or container in which each child can store his or her personal belongings and a clothes hamper that may be used for dirty and soiled clothes.

Equipment and supplies for infants and toddlers may range from safety gates to playpens to rocking chairs, high chairs, and baby walkers, changing tables, cribs, sheets or crib bumpers.

Equipment and toys appropriate for preschoolers and school-age children may include puzzles, climbing toys, small tables and chairs, arts and crafts supplies, pails and shovels, sandbox, just to name a few.

To help with equipment and toys, caregivers are encouraged to let family, friends and church groups know that donations will be gladly accepted. However, do make it clear that you don't want any equipment, toys, or supplies that have been damaged or are missing any pieces.

Feeding, sleeping, and play areas will need to be determined for the ages and needs of all the children you will be caring for on a daily basis. Determining how much of your family home is going to be used for providing childcare also needs to be discussed and agreed upon with other family members.