Advocates

Quality Early Care and Education

High quality early care and education has long lasting benefits to children and to society as a whole. When young children are in high quality settings, there are positive impacts on school success, lifelong health and well-being, as well as tremendous economic return on the investment. Seventy percent of children from birth to age five are in some form of child care. But the quality of these settings often fails to best support all aspects of children’s healthy development, including their social-emotional, early learning and health needs. For many families, quality child care or any child care is far too costly to access. Docs for Tots believes that advocates and policymakers can create opportunities to increase doctors’ engagement in improving access and knowledge about quality early care and education. We also believe that early care and education settings have the potential to improve children’s health.

To improve early care and education, as advocates and policymakers you can:

• Engage doctors as messengers to support your advocacy for quality early care and education
• Champion increased integration of health promotion opportunities into Quality Rating Systems, child care regulation and other vehicles
• Advocate for support of a child care health consultant network [link to Child Care Health Consultant page]
• Ensure doctors and other health professionals are participating in the conversations and decisions around quality early care and education
• Engage doctors as public champions of your advocacy agenda by partnering with Docs for Tots