Starting a day care business provides a great entrepreneurial opportunity if you love children. It could be the best thing you can do to earn an income. The size can range from a small home based operation on a shoe string budget to a large commercial center. It’s up to you to decide the course of your business – either choosing to remain small by creating work only for yourself or growing into an enterprise with large revenue.

Oh, before we go on, let’s set the record straight. Starting a day care business is not the same as the babysitting you did as a teenager. Providing a day care service is a very real business. You need to choose the services you will offer, identify the target child segment, and generally consider all those aspects that you would in any other line of commercial activity. Since the work involves caring for someone else’s children, it takes responsibility and serious commitment. Starting a day care business also has some specific requirements, which you need to be aware of.

Plan resources: Determine the child-care needs of your community. Choose a site that is appropriate and affordable – it could either be your home or a commercial location. Estimate your startup costs and identify the sources of funds. You will obviously need to open a banking account for your business. If you plan to hire people to help, decide on an optimal staff-to-child ratio and recruit accordingly.

Complete the paperwork: You need a license to run this business, and it can take several months to get all the paperwork done! Requirements vary from state to state; hence it is best to get in touch with a local child-care licensing office.

Equip yourself: Get yourself trained adequately to deal with crisis situations like injuries and fire. Contact your local hospital for first aid classes. Make sure you have a medical kit and fire extinguishers handy to deal with emergencies. Seek professional advice on whether you need any further training and certification. Once you business is licensed, it might be subjected to surprise inspection, so make sure you comply with all regulations! For example, do you follow prescribed guidelines while deciding the kids’ menu? Are their play areas safe and secure?

Seek benefits: You will find that there are many support groups that may be helpful. For example, “Save the Children”, a non-profit organization, provides free nutritional workshops, advice, and reimbursement of food expenses. Read the rest of this entry »

If you’d like your child to grow up bilingual but don’t know how to begin teaching the second language, you need to find a language immersion day care. Palo Alto’s multicultural community has produced several language immersion programs for kids so they can acquire the second language easily and naturally. At a language immersion program, children are not made to sit down and memorize complex grammatical rules. Instead, they participate in interactive activities that teach them the language’s culture, and socialize with their peers and teachers using the second language. Here are two fantastic language immersion centers to try.

Amigos de Palo Alto

Parents who want to play an active role in their child’s second language education might be interested in Amigos de Palo Alto, a Spanish Immersion preschool that takes in children with little or no knowledge of Spanish. Through exciting, developmentally-appropriate activities like art, music, and dramatic plays, children will be taught the nuances and proper use of the Spanish language. The preschool program takes in children as young as 2.9 years for three sessions a week. The program also requires parent participation, meaning you or a guardian has to join your child at least once every three weeks. Children in kindergarten, first grade, and second grade are eligible for the school’s part-time program, which provides 8 hours of Spanish language fun each week. Amigos de Palo Alto also has after-school care services for children up to second grade. Read the rest of this entry »