Article Link: http://exchangepress.com/article/the-life-cycle-of-the-child-care-center-understanding-center-growth-and-development/5013712/
Does your child care center fall short of your ideals? While you may wholeheartedly embrace a developmental approach for children in your care, expecting and even looking forward to the mistakes they will make as they learn along the way, you are less than patient with yourself, your co-workers, and your administration. Yet, your child care center must for the first time balance its budget, manage its staff, and begin providing high quality child care to families in your community.Consider your center, for a moment, as an organization with its own cycle of birth, growth, and development - its own life cycle - just as one of the children in your center. This perspective of viewing the organization as having a life cycle offers insight into your center's development, solace concerning common experiences, and helps to identify needs your center may have and possible interventions at certain points in time.
What we know about the growth and development of child care centers comes from the same knowledge base as all other new business startups and ventures. The model follows a meta-phorical life cycle sequence of developmental stages that is similar to the biological process in child development. Organizations, like people, are born ...