Reply to In-home day care vs. child care centers

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[quote=Anonymous]We haven't started yet so can't speak to whether we made the right decision, but some differences I found (which can pretty much all be pros or cons depending on your specific situation):

Home-based:
- Fewer children overall
- Higher staff to children ratio
- Mixed age
- Cheaper
- Possibility of sick days
- Longer clustered vacation days (this varies by provider, but they tended to close for a week or two at a time versus the center which closes for long weekends for professional development days several times a year---about the same number of days total, though there are no sick days for centers and there are for most home-based)
- Openings tend to be clustered in the late summer/early fall (big con for us) 
- Openings not always known in advance; few had formal wait lists (can be pro or con)
- Little turnover of staff since most are family-based businesses

Center:
- More expensive
- More children overall, but divided into rooms by age
- Better staff to children ratio for infants (about the same for older children, at least where we are---3:1 for babies, 4:1 for toddlers/2s, 6:1 for preschool whereas we didn't find any home-based care that were less than 4:1 and most were slightly more than that)
- Longer waiting lists, but more openings over the course of the year
- Turnover varied by center---we steered clear of those where teachers were very new
- No sick days
- Professional development days, usually clustered with holiday weekends, to plan around (but no formal vacation closure)

We opted to pay more for the certainty of the center (both the place once we got off the waiting list and the overall certainty of no sick days, etc.) but the tradeoff is that our son will be in a room with many more infants (max 12 I think, and they say most days it is more like 7-8 because of part-time schedules but we'll see) whereas in most of the home-based daycares, he would have been one of two infants with 3-6 older children.

One thing we do like about the center is that it has a monthly parental involvement requirement so we're looking forward to meeting the parents of our son's classmates and hopefully fostering some friendships that way---that wasn't a deciding factor at all (we didn't even think about it till afterwards) but is a nice plus since he would only have had one playmate his age in the home-based setting, so the odds of happening to hit it off with the one other family might have been slimmer.

I think there are pros and cons to each, and our approach is to try out the center we picked and see how we like it after a few months. Hope that helps![/quote]

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