The Car Seat Problem at Medium-Sized and Small Childcare Centers 

by Jim Shields @enrollsmart


In medium-sized and small childcare centers, parents are transporting their children back and forth from home in a variety of ways.  We witnessed it over the years.  For example, a parent and his children may ride the bus to the childcare center to drop off in the morning but, an aunt may be picking the children up from the center by car that evening.  

In my experience, even when parents ride the bus or get a ride to pick up or drop off their children, they often leave a car seat so that another person can transport their children (relative, spouse, friend).

Car seats are always a good thing for safe transportation. Storing them at your center may be necessary to support your families, however, it's not always such an easy thing and, here's why:

  • Pests - We (literally) had to halt service to a customer once because everything they brought from home was infested with insects; even the box of infant cereal they left.  Though we had empathy for their situation, we were beginning to see these same pests beginning to show up at our center and when we traced the source, the car seat being left behind by the family had hundreds of insects in it.  We had to set it outside covered in a trash bag.
  • Storage Space - Lots of car seats being left at our center was always an indication that our infant and toddler space was doing well as far as enrollments.  But, this became challenging when it came to storage space.  Because we had a medium-sized center, it was difficult to designate a specific area for car seats to be stored.
  • Compliance - It was always tempting for staff to use a child's car seat as a "temporary" holding area in the morning after the child was dropped off.  The licensing rules in most states indicate that children should be removed from car seats shortly after arrival at the center.
  • Child and Staff Safety - We had a multigenerational staff at our center, with the oldest member of our staff being 79.  In addition to taking up storage space, car seats can be a tripping hazard for staff and children if they are not stored out of common areas and walkways.  

Our best results when it came to dealing with car seats came after we developed a policy for leaving car seats at the center and, included in our parent handbook on our website.  

Jim Shields is Enterprise Architect for Enrollsmart and, he has more than 15 years of childcare center ownership and management experience.

Enrollsmart supplies interactive websites and full-end technology to small and medium-sized childcare centers across the country.  Parents can search for childcare, view virtual tours and, apply for childcare from our main website.  To learn more about Enrollsmart, visit our information page at https://www.enrollsmart.net/childcare_software/index.html 



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