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Parents & Families

Choosing Child Care Checklist

Finding child care can be overwhelming and stressful. Our interactive and smartphone friendly checklist can help.

The Choosing Child Care Checklist lets you record what aspects of child care are more important to you and your family so you can make this decision as an educated consumer.

The Checklist includes questions you can ask the program director or the teachers and lists other things you can observe as you visit each program. Record your answers on the Checklist. Use the results to compare the programs to each other.

As you visit the first facility, you could put a plus sign (+) in the column next to any question where that program does well. You could put a zero (0) by those items where they are just okay. You might put a minus sign (-) by those areas that don’t seem right. There is no system for adding up points. This checklist just allows you to see what matters and how each program seems to do on those things.

If you find some of the answers difficult to understand, visit the Child Care Aware website at www.childcareaware.org. Find your local Child Care Aware office here.

Choosing Child Care Checklist