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Effective Preparation to Start Your Day Care
In any profession there is this thing called paying your dues.  For an actor, they have to struggle for sometimes years before getting a staring role.  For a business person, success takes years of learning the ropes.  For an athlete, you have to be the rookie before you can be the star quarterback.  There really is no profession where you dont pay your dues because that is the time when you learn how the profession works and how to overcome problems that can get in the way of your eventual success.
If you are nurturing in your heart the desire to have your own day care, there is a process of paying your dues to see your dream realized as well.  This may seem tedious and difficult to think that you have to spend time learning the nuances of the day care profession.  After all, you have the basic requirement if you love kids and love finding ways to communicate to them and help them communicate with each other.
Never lose that one core skill and passion you have to work with children.  But as you protect and grow that passion, there are a lot of details, skills and knowledge that you will have to learn before you own and operate your own day care.  So the smoothest path to success and the path that allows you to pay your dues is to put yourself into the apprentice mode working in a day care for a year or so to allow yourself time to develop those skills and the knowledge of how to handle the many situations that come up in the life of a day care.
This may seem like spying and in a way it is.  But you will be surprised if you come clean with what you want to learn by being an employee of a day care how quickly the management will become your best friend in teaching you the ropes.  For one thing, because you are an eager learner, you will also be a good employee.  By working hard and giving your teachers great work, you will more than pay them back for the knowledge they give you.
Study every aspect of the business of running a day care business.  Yes, you will learn about how to manage the children and plan their days.  But you must also learn the business side of things like getting your day care license, how to hire the right skills so you have medical and counseling people on staff at your day care, how to manage parent relations, what to look for in good day care workers, what legal and medical requirements you must pass to get your day care license and how to handle discipline and other emergencies as they come up.
While the idea of putting in this kind of time to learn the ropes of the day care business seem demanding, when you look at it objectively, you will be glad you made this kind of investment before you opened your day care.  When you turn the key of your own day care facility, you dont want a rookie running the place.  The legal, medical and social issues that can come up during the life of any day care could lead to disaster if you have not had experience working through them. 
Your time " paying your dues" will give you those skills.  Then when you are ready, you can open your day care with confidence because you still have that passion for nurturing children but you have added to it hard won knowledge and now you know what you are doing.  There is nothing more valuable than that.
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