When we think about health and safety in child care, it’s often related to hazards we can see. For instance, are providers and children washing their hands properly? Have cleaners and medications been locked away? Are smoke and carbon monoxide detectors present and functional? These are things that can affect children’s wellbeing right now. 

At Child Care Aware® of America (CCAoA), we’ve been thinking about health and safety in a new way. To create safe and healthy child care programs, we need to consider both hazards we can see and those we cannot. That means thinking about children’s health and wellness right now and in the future.  

Keeping child care facilities clean and free of pests is one of the most important things we can do to prevent diseases from spreading. The challenge is that chemicals that providers use for cleaning and pest control are often toxic. And while that might be common knowledge for some, not everyone knows about the risks some cleaners can cause. Also, many of the cleaners that are more toxic are inexpensive, making them fast and easy choices for businesses and low-income families.  

The Child Care and Development Block Grant has requirements around handing and storing hazardous materials. If providers are using ammonia to clean or rat poison to keep pests away, they need to make sure those chemicals are locked away and out of reach.  

The life of a child care provider is never easy. Every day they wear a dozen hats—teacher, nurse, referee, social worker and more. Providers give their all to make sure the children in their care have all the tools they need to grow up happy, healthy and ready to learn. But the stress of doing it all, and for very little pay, can add up to big consequences for providers’ health and wellbeing.

Child Care Aware® of America (CCAoA) has a strong history in advocating for policies that protect the health of children. Background checks, health and safety training, and monitoring visits from the Child Care Development Fund (CCDF) state agency are a few of the many recommendations that CCAoA has supported as foundational for protecting children in child care. With generous support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF), we launched the Healthy Child Care, Healthy Communities technical assistance project to expand and explore a broader definition of health in child care.

Child Care Aware® of America is joining the Healthy Schools Network and dozens of partners around the country to celebrate National Healthy Schools Day on April 3rd, 2018. For the past 16 years, National Healthy Schools Day has brought attention to the ways that school and child care environments can affect children's health. This year the focus is on lead exposure.

Ever since First Lady Michelle Obama launched her Let’s Move! campaign in 2010, childhood obesity prevention has gained a lot of attention. Experts agree that obesity prevention needs to start early, and child care programs are a great place for children to build the eating and active play habits that will help them grow up healthy. Child care providers, advocates, and policymakers throughout the country have invested time, money, and effort over the past eight years to make child care a healthier place for our youngest children. Has all that work made a difference? A new report by Healthy Eating Research takes a look at how far early care and education (ECE) policies, systems, and environments have come since 2010.