I Am Lean LLC

Owners of daycares and child care centers have seen an increased demand in the number of parents who desire care for infants. However, Parents and lawmakers are concerned with infants being placed into professional childcare settings. Federal law mandates that infants may not be placed in a professional childcare setting before the age of 6 weeks. Parents are very skeptical about leaving their young children, but with work obligations calling and infants being very difficult for other family members to care for, professional childcare is a great viable option. Here’s how you as a provider can make your daycare good for babies and ease the concern of parents.

Before we get started, welcome if you are new to I Am Lean. We help daycare owners spend less time in the center to pursue other passions. We care about helping daycare owners systematize their daycare operations which include their lean strategy each year, lean operating procedures, and lean training plans. Lean is a methodology that saves time, energy, and space, the three things that once spent is very hard or impossible to get back. To learn how to save up to 32 hours a week in your daycare, check out my new audio book: Better Family Daycares Strategy or join a weekly demonstration session here.

Understand The Mind of an infant.

To make your daycare good for infants you should understand the importance of stimulating the mind of each infant in your care. Infants need to be spoken to directly, as if you are having a one-on-one conversation with them. This is called serve and return.

In my new audio book, Better Family Daycares Strategy, the work of Harvard researchers is highlighted that says the majority of the brain of a child including language, sensory pathways, and cognitive function all peak well before the child enters kindergarten. In fact, these areas of brain develop peak primarily from pre-birth to age three.

The researchers found that if children can receive serve and return interactions, they will have a stronger brain structure which can support them to do better not just in school but also for the rest of their lives.

To prepare your daycare to be good for babies you should get ready to talk all day long to the children in your care.

Make the Schedule Equal for Babies

To make a daily schedule good for babies, the first lesson is to know that babies can do and participate in whatever an adult is doing. For example, think about the schedule of a child who is not in daycare. The baby wakes up with the mother, eats with the mother, travels with the mother to her errands and appointments, visits family with the mother, etc. The baby is present for all the activities that the mother is doing.

This is the first lesson in schedule creation, because too often I see infant teachers either just holding babies, rocking babies, or overwhelmed and putting them in bouncers in order to restrict their movement.

If you as an owner has already set a schedule for the older kids in your care that includes a time you will read to them, a time you will take them to the park, a time you will do centers with them, and a time you will do art crafts with them, please know that a baby can do all of these things as well, just at a different level.

A baby can be read to and have story time. The books will look different, as they may be made of fabric or thicker board materials, but story time is good for babies too. A baby can do art crafts. The teacher may have to paint the baby’s hands and make a print for them, but art time is good for babies too. A baby can go to the park. The mode of transportation will look different, as you may need a buggy or cute baby wagon, but going to the park is good for babies too.

Make the schedule developmentally appropriate for babies

The second lesson in schedule creation is that the schedule you create should reflect the good you want to see in the child’s development. Too often I see daycare providers doing things to care for children without the intentionality to support why they are doing it.

Do you know what are the developmental milestones of an infant? If you don’t already know, this is your cue to go and find out. Research which reference tools and books you will use to assess the baby. Then get confidence in your method of knowing whether an infant in your care has reached their developmental milestones or not. If you don’t currently have any reference materials, the CDC is a basic place to start learning about child milestones.

Assess babies and Communicate with Parents

Once you have the milestones that you will assess for, make your schedule based on the work needed to achieve those milestones. For example, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics a two-month-old baby should be able to open their hands briefly on their own and move arms and legs.

Your schedule could include things like Playtime where you will give the baby a hand massage to stimulate their hand muscles to open and close. Playtime could also include holding the baby’s hands to make them practice clapping. It could include placing objects near the baby to encourage them to reach for the objects. Playtime could even include placing small objects in the baby’s hand and closing their fingers around it which helps the baby to open and close their fingers.

Part of your strategy has to be how frequent your staff is expected to communicate with the mother. Each day at pick up, tell parent which song baby loved the most, which dance they didn’t want to stop doing, which blocks or which activity they really enjoyed. Print out the songs and schedule with parents so they can mimic the routine when the child is not at daycare. Let mom know what YouTube Channel you are using. Baby will feel like school is an extension of home.

This communication step becomes very easier to do, once you understand why you are doing the activities you have decided to do. Little by little your strategy will help to ease the concerns parents had about leaving their child in your care.

Floor Time is Better for Babies

The third lesson in schedule creation is to know that floor time is better. Let’s take a lesson from the Montessori playbook and allow infants the freedom of movement. Montessori infants are on the floor as much as possible.

Babies learn by experiencing their environment. Allow children to touch, feel, crawl, explore different textures, see nature, explore sounds, and problem solve infant puzzles. Put up mirrors on the wall near the floor to allow children to look at their reflection and learn cause and effect within their bodies.

The setting for the majority of the schedule could very well be on the floor. Think about the various activities you would like to do and consider whether or not they can be safely done on the floor if you had the right resources.

Create an inviting space for babies

This action should be a no brainer, but yet, I still see places with nothing in place to welcome children by their name and make Parents feel at ease. Every child who walks into your daycare should be greeted using their name and be called by their name daily. I have seen children in child care who did not know what their names were because the teachers couldn’t remember, and no one was greeting or calling the child by their name all day long.

Many children are in child care for up to 10 hours a day. That’s a long-time day after day to not be called by your name. If greeting children is a problem for you or your staff, it may be worth creating fun name tags or safety pins that each child could wear until everyone learns their name.

Creating an inviting space also means creating laminated name tags with the baby’s name on it to post on the child’s cubby, car seat, food containers, crib, birthday wall, supply drawer, etc. When parents can see their child’s name all over the center, they recognize that effort has been taken to welcome their child.

Allow mothers to Breastfeed babies

What is good for babies, is their mother’s milk. There is more and more research that says that a mother’s milk is vital to support the development of her child’s life not only to heal illness and prevent things like ear infections and malnutrition, but also to promote psychological wellbeing and contribute to cognitive development.

A 7-year Harvard Research study found that preterm children who received greater quantities of maternal milk both during and after time in the neonatal intensive care unit had greater academic achievement, higher IQs, and reduced ADHD symptoms.

To support mothers who breastfeed infants in your care, consider creating a space for them to feed their child. It doesn’t have to be a very big space, but a comfy chair and a privacy curtain at minimum. If you have the budget and space, why not add a mothering room equip with sink, outlets, comfy seating a small refrigerator, and breastfeed supplies.

Your own staff who are lactating could also use the space along with clients who want to feed their babies before heading home. I don’t know of many daycares who offer mothering spaces for the staff let alone for clients, but if you as an owner chose to incorporate this idea into your program, it would be a game changer and definitely something to ease the concerns of parents.

Adopt Lean Management

This will be the final tip in how to make a daycare good for babies. Lean is a methodology that saves you time. It is a principled based system that helps you manage everything operational about your daycare business. For example, in order to enroll a new infant into your care, you have to give a tour to the parent, have a process for giving out the application packet, have a time to input the payment plan, enter the child into attendance tracking, submit the lunch form for the child, file the child’s paperwork, etc.

Good time management is required in order to complete all of these tasks efficiently. Lean helps you master the art of time management using a tool called leader standard work. And not just that. Lean focuses on 12 areas of your operations and can free up to 32 hours a week of the time you spend in operations. Take this brief assessment to see if lean could help your business:

• Tier Structure – Can one owner manage 20 daycares if needed?
• 5S Workplace Organization – Can everything in the daycare be found in 8 seconds or less?
• Strategy Deployment – Does a strategy exist that is visually managed, collaborative, aligned vertically & horizontally, & is reflected on and adjusted?
• Staff Engagement – Does the daycare have goals for each staff person to improve their work with ideas, small changes, and project improvements?
• Leader Standard Work – The owner and direct reports use time management tools to increase the amount of available time they have in a day?
• Process Standard Work – Are all process a new hire needs to learn documented with pictures and a qualified trainer to teach them expectations?
• Problem solving – Are daily and persistent issues investigated to find and eliminate their root causes?
• Visual Management – Are performance charts, graphs and tools hanging up in the daycare and used to track and discuss team’s performance?
• Visual Control – Are visual signals & controls used in the daycare and acted upon?
• Leaders Developing Leaders – Is there a mentorship program established?
• Accountability Systems and Actions – Does the Daycare post actions they are due, who is doing them, and when they are due?
• Total Productive Maintenance – Does the daycare have a preventative & predictive maintenance plan that the staff knows about and helps with?

If you would like to learn more about lean management check out my new audio book Better Family Daycares Strategy or accept our free gift then join us on a live demonstration session.