Tag: daycare center

5 Ways That You Can Show Love To Your Child

Sometimes it’s hard to know how to say, “I love you,” to a child. It’s not that you don’t love them—in fact, you love them so dearly that if anything happened to them, you would simply be undone. But knowing how to express that can often be a challenge, especially when you grew up with parents who didn’t know how to express their love to you, either. Children who feel loved often have the most secure and happy emotional development, and having this from a young age will put them ahead and give them a boost for the rest of their lives. Here are some of the ideas from our daycare in Upper Darby on how you can ensure that your kids know that they’re loved.

1. Express your love with loving physical contact

As your child’s parent, you can offer your little one a hug, a pat on the back, a hand on the shoulder, a kiss on the cheek, and many other little ways of expressing your love to them. This is one area where if your child doesn’t get it from you, they won’t get it from any other source in life (or if they do, it would be inappropriate). So lavish your affection on your children with loving touch in appropriate moments.

2. Say, “I love you.”

There’s no need to be stoic or expect your children to know that you love them by all the other ways you show your love. Some children are more sensitive to loving words than others, but there are many children who need to hear the words, “I love you,” in order for them to feel secure in knowing they are loved. Don’t be sparing with this powerful sentence in your home.

3. Spend quality time with your child.

The flip side of saying, “I love you,” is following through with actions. Don’t let your loving words come across as empty or meaningless. Let your child feel loved by the way you spend quality time with them. Whether it’s involving them in baking chocolate chip cookies, taking them to the park, or sitting by their bed for some quiet reading time before you turn out the light, quality time will go a long way to show your child that you love them.

4. Give your child a gift.

This is a tricky one, as it can be taken to an extreme where your child expects you to buy anything they see and desire in a store, and you don’t want to go down that road. But a thoughtful or surprising gift that you give to your child can be a special, memorable thing that they will treasure for years to come. This doesn’t have to just happen on birthdays, and it doesn’t have to be expensive.

5. Serve your child in practical ways.

It will take a while for your child to appreciate this one, but when they’re older, they’ll realize how every meal you made, every time you did their laundry, and every time you sacrificed what you wanted to do for their sake, you were really silently saying, “I love you.”

Don’t skimp on making your child feel loved. Giving your child a loving home environment and a positive, nurturing day care environment can go a long way towards giving them a great start in life. Enroll your child in Darlene’s Wee Care 4 Kids today.
How Going Outside Boosts Your Preschool Child’s Development

Most of us lead indoor lives. We go from the house to the car to the store or the office. The brief moments when we breathe fresh air and feel outdoor temperatures are vastly outweighed by the amount of time we spend in our climate-controlled buildings and cars. We walk on perfectly flat floors, encounter predictable objects, and encounter a relatively low number of unusual things. All this is also true for our children. But going outside boosts your child’s development in ways that you can’t easily get any other way. Here are some of the thoughts from our preschool in Upper Darby on how lots of outside time helps your child’s development.

Going outside boosts gross and fine motor coordination

When your child walks on perfectly flat floors all the time indoors, their brains don’t learn about all the micro adjustments that they need to make to keep their balance. Outside, even a flat, grassy lawn has slight bumps and dips. These promote the brain’s ability to integrate the visual information from your child’s eyes with the gross motor muscle movements that they need to make to stay upright. This is even more true when your child is walking on a hill or navigating ground that has large stones.

Fine motor coordination also happens naturally outside. It takes a lot of fine motor skill to pick a blade of grass, pluck a delicate flower, or pick up a tiny ant. If you see your child doing these things, encourage them! In the preschool years, if they develop the ability to pick up that tiny shiny rock, they’ll be ahead when they get to school and need to hold a pencil.

Going outside provides sensory development

When a child is indoors all the time, the only things they encounter are manufactured items. This limits the range of textures, temperatures, and smells that they will have the chance to touch, feel, and smell. Think about the materials that you can find in your home. Wood, plastic, carpet, glass, and metal don’t have the textures that you automatically find when you go outside. Your child needs the sensory development provided by shaggy grass, rough tree bark, gritty sand, a wet dog’s nose, and all the other things they’ll find outside.

Going outside promotes your child’s imagination

Have you ever watched a child pick up a stick and play with it endlessly, while that battery-powered singing toy only holds their attention for two seconds? What is it about the simple things you find outdoors that children love? Whatever it is, playing with a simple thing like a stick means that your child is using their imagination to make the object interesting. Developing your child’s imagination will help them all through their lives, increase their problem-solving ability, and improve their ability to play independently.

If you’re not in the regular habit of taking your kids outside, why not start? Their brains will love it!

Enroll in Darlene’s Wee Care 4 Kids

Here at Darlene’s Wee Care 4 Kids, we believe in stimulating children in all the areas of their educational and physical development. Learn more about our day care and enroll your child today.
How Exploration and Discovery Build Your Child’s Knowledge Faster
Building your young child’s knowledge about the world is serious business when they are tiny. They are like precious little blank slates, willing and ready to absorb anything that you impart to them, and it’s a big responsibility to impart the right things at the right time. On the one hand, you can’t cram them full of things they’re not ready to understand. If you try, you’ll quickly find that they either shut down, get bored, or start getting wild and wiggly. On the other hand, you don’t want to just leave it to chance that they will learn the things that they need to know. So how do you maximize the speed that you can build their knowledge and get it to stick?

The answer is in designing experiences for your preschooler so that they will learn by exploring and discovering things for themselves. If you make the learning process into an adventure, the knowledge will stick and become part of their bank of experiences from which they will draw in building future knowledge.

Here’s an example:

Let’s say that you read a banana bread recipe to your preschooler.

Can you even imagine them listening all the way through to the end? You’ll probably even bore yourself.

However, this is how too many academic environments handle the impartation of knowledge. “I’ll tell you these things, you listen, and then I’ll expect you to be able to act on that information.”

A child won’t be able to make banana bread from that kind of instruction.

However, what if you take a different approach?

You let the child pull up a stool to the counter. You pull out all the ingredients you’ll be using and line them up in a row in the order that you’ll add them to the recipe. You talk about their names and let the child look at them all.

Then you allow the child to help by scooping, dumping, and mixing the ingredients, at your direction.

This process of exploration and discovery will show your little one many things.
- If I stir too fast, the flour will go everywhere! Oops!
- Cracking eggs and making them land in the right place is tricky business. And raw egg is slippery.
- When I touch the batter, my hands will get sticky and I’ll be tempted to wipe them on my shirt. I should wipe them on a rag or paper towel instead.
- I can do this! I was helpful!
Here at Darlene’s Wee Care 4 Kids, we make it a priority to give your child the opportunity to learn by exploration and discovery. We want their educational experience at our daycare to be enriching, fun, and beneficial. Enroll your child today!
3 Qualities That Your Child Should Begin to Develop in the Preschool Years

How big of a role does your child’s daycare play in stimulating their exploration and discovery of the world? Is your child in an environment that takes advantage of the fact that their brains are active and curious? This critical season of life is a time of great potential for your preschooler, and the environment where they spend their days can either help them thrive and excel, or deny them that boost and cause them to stagnate. Here are three of the qualities that our daycare program in Upper Darby believes that every preschooler should have the chance to develop.

1. Confidence

Some children have a natural swagger and an unshakeable confidence in approaching the world, and others have more of a tendency to timidity. When your child becomes an adult, the ability to exude confidence will be a beneficial factor in everything from getting a job to negotiating with people to extending hope to those around them. If children begin to develop solid confidence in their preschool years, it will already be second nature to them to be confident by the time they become adults.

Confidence is not built by being told, “You can do this.” Rather, it’s built by letting a child make an attempt at something a little harder than they’ve done before, and then letting them enjoy a successful outcome. When this happens over and over again in the early years, your child will have a great start on the path to confidence.

2. Creativity

We live in a world with growing problems, which means that we need a generation to rise up who possesses the creativity necessary to confront and solve those problems. Creativity is not just a spark of genius or something that you either have it or you don’t. Creativity can be fostered and cultivated, especially in the early years, by giving children the raw materials with which they can be creative, and then praising them for things they create. Every child should experience the the joy of creativity, and we do our best to promote that in our day care program.

3. Critical Thinking Skills

It is an advanced skill to think carefully about a puzzling problem and then see the way to solve it. Young children are developing critical thinking skills all the time in ways that we don’t notice, from discovering how to turn doorknobs to realizing how to use a stool to reach things that are higher up. However, this critical thinking ability can tend to atrophy unless children are given continual stimulation with new problems to figure out that are just at their level. If the problems are too hard, they can make a child feel dumb and want to quit, while if they’re too easy, they don’t stimulate the kind of critical thinking and problem solving that the child needs.

The great news is that here at Darlene’s Wee Care 4 Kids, we use a curriculum called the Creative Curriculum that is built to enable children to develop precisely these skills. We believe you’ll agree and see the difference when you enroll your child. Get started today!
The Importance of Attachment in Early Childhood

For most new parents, it is excruciatingly difficult to be separated from your child, and in today’s world, it seems like there’s a never-ending string of milestones or “firsts” when you have to make that separation. When your baby is a newborn, it’s hard to tear your eyes off their chubby little face for even a second to go to the bathroom or take a shower. But as they get older, you start to have to leave them alone for longer and longer amounts of time. You have the first day you have to go to work, the first day you leave your child with a babysitter, the first day you drop them off at daycare, their first day of school, and so many more.

At our daycare in Upper Darby, we are there for so many of those moments, as tearful parents drop their children off and can barely tear themselves away. However, we’d like to encourage you as a parent that if this is the case for you, that’s actually a healthy thing. What you should be concerned about is if you don’t have a close bond with your child. In this article, we’d like to look at what a healthy attachment is and how you can foster that with your child.

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What is Healthy Attachment?

Attachment in early infancy is an important skill for children to have, and there is a very small window of opportunity where children are able to form healthy attachments. If they miss this window, it’s frequently the case that they are unable to form healthy attachments later in life. You as the parent play a big role in fostering your child’s ability to form these healthy attachments, as you are the first person they attach to.

A healthy attachment is a secure bond between parent and child, causing the child to feel safe, loved, protected, and not abandoned. When it breaks your heart to leave your child alone, that’s probably a good thing. Your child is at a crucial stage of brain development where they are forming their perception of how the world works, and your presence, nurture, and love are a big part of that.

Does Leaving my Child Break That Attachment?

The first time you leave your child, it will be incredibly difficult for you and for them, but you will come back. When you repeatedly show your child that even though you sometimes have to go away, you always come back, they will remain secure and realize they don’t need to worry as much when you’re gone. Of course, it is important to choose a daycare provider who will provide that safe, nurturing, loving environment for your child while you’re away. The time you do spend with your child will work to reinforce that strong bond that you’ve had with them since birth.

Darlene’s Wee Care for Kids is a healthy, safe, clean, and loving environment for your child to come to when you have to be at work or away. We love children! If you haven’t enrolled yet, don’t wait any longer. Contact us to start the enrollment process today.
Sensory Processing Disorder Meltdown

Darlene’s Wee Care for Kids, in Upper Darby is a Top Rated Local® child care facility who offers services for special needs children. We can work with deaf children, as well as children with Autism or physical handicaps, who are developmentally delayed, and who have other special needs. Call us today for a tour of our facility.

Every parent knows that meltdowns come with the territory. They can happen anywhere and at any time and for any reason. Maybe you were the worst parent ever and cut their sandwich just the way they usually like it, maybe you told them they can’t eat the soap. Their little bodies don’t seem to be able to contain the bewildering emotions that wash over them at any moment.

As they grow older they typically grow out of meltdowns (until they are teenagers when they have new, more fun ones!), but sometimes a meltdown is more than a just meltdown, it’s a sign of something else going on. Young children can’t express themselves accurately because they are little and just learning all the words for emotions and learning to understand their experiences. Sometimes there is a sign of sensory processing issues that might not be diagnosed until later. This week we’ll discuss what sensory processing disorder is and what it can look like at different ages. We’ll cover some coping strategies and home therapy tips in upcoming blogs.

All of our senses are based on signals from the body to the brain, through the nervous system, be they smell, sight, touch, all stimulation is processed by the brain. According to the Star Institute, “Sensory Processing Disorder (SPD), exists when sensory signals are either not detected or don’t get organized into appropriate responses.” This can mean that the child either seeks out certain stimuli, avoids certain stimuli, or becomes easily overwhelmed when experiencing too much, or too little stimuli. Because this can clearly go in any direction, it can be hard to diagnose.

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What it Looks Like at Different Ages

According to Understood, an infant with SPD might not like to be held tightly, may be overly fussy, or may need to be constantly held. A toddler doesn’t like certain fabrics or shoes, or tags, for example, has more meltdowns than an average toddler. One remarkable sign in toddler and preschoolers is that they are easily overwhelmed in groups. This is relative and dependant on an individual child. Some children may find three children too many if it’s in an already stimulating context such as a ball pit/ They may react by melting down or acting inappropriately. A grade-schooler may have trouble making friends because they are awkward, they play roughly. They may have fine motor skills that, for example, makes penmanship difficult. Check back for future blogs for more information on this topic.
When you are looking for a daycare that is sensitive to your child’s needs, be they diagnosed or not, turn to Darlene’s Wee Care for Kids. We have staff that knows ASL and that have experience working with children who face challenges of all types. Call us today to schedule a tour of our facility.