Approximately 70.5% of mothers are part of the workforce, including 64.8% of mothers with a child or children under the age of six. Needless to say, finding an excellent child care center is usually top priority for those mothers who can’t care for their children during the day or for a period of time after school.

But knowing where to begin in your search for day care centers can be difficult. In order to help you along in your search for the perfect child care center, here are the five most important things you need to keep a sharp eye out for.

Low Child-Teacher Ratio

If a child care center places 40 children in the hands of one adult, you don’t want your child there. In fact, such an arrangement might even be illegal! Toddler education is extremely important, even if it’s not in a formal setting just yet. The lower the number of kids in the charge of a single adult, the better. This means your child will get more attention and will have more and better opportunities to learn.

Healthy Food

Every child care center should have the means to feed the children there, especially if they’ll be present for an entire workday. One of the most important things to go over is meal expectations. If the options offered aren’t things that you would feed your child, check to see if you can provide packed lunches and snacks.

Regular Exercise

It’s important for children to stay active, as it results in more attentive and better behaved students. The best child care centers will provide some form of physical, active play at least once per day.

Learning Opportunities

Even if your child isn’t attending preschool just yet, it’s important that a day care center is providing some level of education. Things like basic manners and reading time should be top priority.

Positive Disciplinary Procedures

Every child care facility has its own disciplinary procedures, but it’s important that you’re well aware of what those procedures are before you send your child to one of them. For example, corporal punishment or inappropriate language should never be used in an educational setting.

If you’re looking for the best child care center you can find, these five traits are what you need to be looking for. Above all else, you need to make sure your child is being properly educated and taken care of.

Being able to stay home with a child full-time is a rare privilege these days. Most parents need to opt for some form of daycare service and full-time stay-at-home parents represent just one third of all parents in the U.S. Just one generation ago, that figure was at least 50%, with the mother usually trying at home with the children. Of course, times have changed and women are now much more accepted in the workplace and play a vital role in the financial wellbeing of their families.

In this context, as much as a quarter of all children aged five and under are in daycare, nurseries or some other form of organized child care. Sadly the provision for such care does not meet the demand with most (two-thirds) parents believing that