Establishing healthy habits in early childhood is critical to the early care and education setting.  The Child and Adult Care Food Program (CACFP) is an important part of shaping the meals and snacks that child care providers serve for children and staff of all ages.  New documents and training resources have recently been released by the USDA to help participants with the transition to implementing new meal patterns by October 1, 2017.  In addition to these resources, the USDA released updated payment rates and a new labeling verification tool to help providers plan for meals and credit food more accurately, to make it easier for children to receive proper nutrition at every meal and snack time.

As you cross off important items on your family’s back-to-school checklist, don’t forget to be proactive in learning more about the emergency plan at your child’s school or child care program. All schools and before/afterschool child care programs should have an emergency plan in place to prevent, prepare for, respond to, and recover from emergency situations, such as fires, natural disasters (tornadoes, hurricanes, wildfires, etc.), bomb threats, and dangerous intruders. Ask your child’s teacher or school administrator for details about their plan, and seek clarifications if you do not fully understand components of the plan.

Many parents use August to prepare for the school year and cross many tasks off their list—school supplies, nailing down schedules, new clothes, and converting the family mindset from summer vacation to the school routine.

But, there is one more task. And you should add it to the top of your list, because it affects school readiness:

Health care for your children!

Have you ever had a child in your child care program not arrive by her usual arrival time and simply rationalized that the child must be sick or on vacation today? My mission is to show you how this assumption can have lethal consequences for dozens of young children annually.

How? Each year since 1998, an average of 37 children have perished due to what is known as vehicular heatstroke, also referred to as vehicular hyperthermia or child hot car deaths. At the time of this blog, 23 cases have been documented in 2017, and more than 723 since 1998.

The Problem

States need a way to measure whether their current child care licensing standards do or do not meet the Caring for Our Children Basics (CFOC Basics) guidelines. Those are the minimum health and safety standards that child care programs should meet.

Every community is vulnerable to disasters: extreme weather, fires, chemical spills, the list goes on. Luckily, most have a local resource to help them prepare and respond to those disasters: their public library!