Finding reliable child care isn't as easy as Googling the closest center to your house, dropping your child off and sticking with that center until they're old enough to stay home alone.
There's the question of quality. Will your child be in a safe, nurturing, clean environment every day?
There's the question of personality. Will the caregivers be a good fit for your children?
And what happens if your shift changes and you need time outside the typical workday hours?
Or, when your babysitter calls in sick and you need backup care?
These dilemmas were well-understood by Amanda Davis, who has owned a Milwaukee child care center for over a decade, and has been a mom herself for roughly the same amount of time.
"I've seen the struggles a lot of my child care families have gone through, and I've had the same struggles as a mom," said Davis. "Hours of Google searches that lead you to a few facilities you like, and then going on tours to see if they're a good fit and then finding out after all that effort that they don't have the availability you need."
That's why the Milwaukee mompreneur developed an app that serves the needs of both child care providers and parents looking for child care. Kid-Tastic (the same name as Davis' child care center on Highland Boulevard), launched in December and allows parents to search through more than 300 Wisconsin child care providers for the one that works best for them.
Here are the features Davis sets out to provide with her app.
Quality care
"We want to make sure we're putting the best quality providers before our customers," said Davis. "We make sure our providers have a license for child care and are maintaining their license."
Davis said she does that by partnering with the state to receive updated lists of licensed child care providers.
Easy communication
When they download the app, parents create a family profile that includes their contact information, as well as necessary information for each of the children.
Child care providers use the app to post pertinent information, such as the ages of children they accept, and what openings they have available.
Davis said that transparency on the part of both parent and provider makes it easy to see child care arrangements that will work out. Additionally, the app has a messaging tool that facilitates communication between the parents and providers.
Flexibility
Many child care centers have traditional weekday hours that coincide nicely with a 9-5 workday. Unfortunately, that's not the reality for a lot of people's work schedules, such as people who work in retail or the medical field, or who need backup child care for when a babysitter or nanny gets sick, or when a snow day closes the regular child care center.
Davis pointed out that there are child care facilities that provide flexible hours. They just might not easily pop up in an online search. The app's filters allow parents to search for facilities within their specific parameters.
Customized scheduling
Davis, whose children are 12, 6 and 1, is well-aware that child care needs vary drastically depending on children's ages. That's why Kid-Tastic allows parents to create different schedules for different children. Schedules for those children are often different depending on the day of the week, because after-school and extracurricular activities can be secured with the app.
"For children who age out of regular child care, we have recreation programs that have built profiles on the app as well," said Davis. "Parents are able to find availability in karate and musical instruments that they wouldn't have been aware of and that Google wouldn't have offered on the searches."
More about the app
The Kid-Tastic app is available on the App Store for Apple devices and on Google Play for Android devices.
The app is free to use for parents.
Child care providers can set up profiles for free and then pay to subscribe for services provided by Kid-Tastic.
Contact Amy Schwabe at (262) 875-9488 or amy.schwabe@jrn.com. Follow her on Twitter at @WisFamilyJS, Instagram at @wisfamilyjs or Facebook at WisconsinFamily.
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A Milwaukee mom and child care provider created an app to help parents find and customize their child care - Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
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