Expectations of the working parents from daycare centers in Dhaka, Bangladesh

Abstract

This research was conducted to explore the expectation of working parents about the services provided by the daycare centers in Dhaka city. The demand of daycare centers are increasing day by day among the working parents of nuclear families in urban society of Dhaka city. Besides, parents are more aware of their children's care and development. After reviewing several relevant literatures regarding daycare center the researcher came to know that there has been very few study conducted in this country context to explore the working parents' expectations from daycare centers. This study explored what the urban upper middle income working parents expect for their children from a daycare center in urban areas. This study has focused on two objects (1) To gain insight about parents' expectations regarding the services provided by the daycare centers and (2) To explore the existing daycare facilities that parent's receive for their children from daycare service. All findings of this study are expected to be brought into notice of the policy makers and implementing agencies that are able to maximize the quality to ensure children's leaming and overall development. Urban community of Dhaka city was selected as an area of this study where daycare centers are run by different organizations for working parents. Two daycare centers were selected using the purposive sampling technique to get a representative data. The participants of this study were upper middle class working parents and the daycare supervisors. Six participants for interview and two daycare centers for observation were selected equally from the same income group in Dhaka city. Interview questionnaires and observation checklists were used for data collection. For data analysis, all data has been processed manually and analyzed in a descriptive way. The findings of the study showed that the parents of both daycare centers have some positive ideas about the services of daycare for their children in terms of supervision, learning, accommodation, safety, food, caregivers' training, time duration, hygiene and cleanliness. The study disclosed the different expectations ofparents from private and organization based daycare center but they agreed on some points. Private daycare center parents have mentioned their demand for longer duration, open space; health facility for children by a doctor and caregiver's training, whereas organization based daycare parents mentioned the demand for more learning materials, caregivers' training, more accommodation and learning activities for children. In this research parents' education level and socio-economic status made an impact on the study findings. All the parents have minimum satisfaction as they prefer daycare services rather than domestic staff. However, the study revealed some shortcomings in the present daycare scenario, such as, lack of proper training for the caregivers, insufficient activities to address children's school readiness, lack ofproper health care services, rigid contact hours and unavailability of outdoor spaces. It was quite obvious that the parents at organizationbased daycare hesitated to share their expectations and demands regarding the daycare services as they are also a part of the same organization.