Wednesday, September 4, 2013

Surveillance Cameras in Child Care Centers

Have you seen all the nightmares on the television or heard some of the stories in your community about daycares? When the time comes to place your child into daycare for early education and socialization, its hard to make the decision on which place your kid(s) are going to get the best care unless they have surveillance cameras.

When you visit a daycare facility that has a camera system, you immediately can feel the difference in the quality of care and cleanliness that the children and facility receive. 
New technologies have also given rise to video monitoring on mobile, such as iPhone and Androids devices, which allow you to monitor the care of your children on-the-go.

In addition, to being able to monitor your children over the internet and on mobile devices for peace of mind. Childcare facilities saw a rise in parents in the armed forces that just wanted to feel connected to their child(s) development while being half way around the world severing our country. And, with grandparents and extended families wanting to stay actively involved it makes for a smooth transition when the whole family can keep tabs on the child(s) progress from down the street or around the world. 

However, just because a Child Care facility has a camera system does not always mean that they will allow you to watch live playback or video archives. Most child care facilities that are now installing the camera systems are not allowing the parent(s) live monitoring much less video playback, which leaves you wondering what they are trying to hide. 

On the other hand, there are several daycare centers in the United States that have always taken a very transparent view on their staff and facilities “From day one we have always allowed the parents the ability to watch the recorded video since the late 90s and we keep several months up to years worth of video archives for the parents to review when they need to, which ensures peace of mind and clearly lines up with incident reports.” -- Carla Wooten President & Co-Founder of Tiny Tykes, Inc. and one of the pioneers of Surveillance cameras in the child care industry. 

Wooten made light that the new DVR Surveillance camera system allows one to go effortlessly to a specific moment in time, while in the old days of slow-time video recording it could take all day to get to one spot in the video tape for playback, which made it very time consuming and frustrating. 

Wooten stated when a parent has a question you want to be able to show them the video right away to help them relieve stress and anxiety. The last thing you want is for a family to be distracted at work or feeling pressure because they could not review something quickly they have a question about. 

In addition, to watching the staffs interactions and remote monitoring, surveillance camera systems can aid in the family dealing with any behavioral issues that may crop up from 0 - 60 months. For example, ADD and ADHD can start as early as 3 years old and become more disruptive if left untreated. Camera equipment is an excellent aid for the child(s) pediatrician to make a successful diagnosis because they are able to monitor the child in their naturalistic environment remotely or from a monitoring room. 

When reviewing child care facilities and the evolution of Surveillance camera systems, there is little doubt it is a great benefit to children and families to have the ability to record the day to day actions of the facility, staff and children while allowing for live and video playback on desktop and mobile devices. 


Finding the right childcare facility can be a challenge, what do you think about surveillance cameras in child care facilities? 

4 comments:

  1. Surveillance system is one of the most important part for most sensitive areas like bank, stations and commercial area. Now we find CCTV cameras in school, shops and various other places. Not only in abroad but such cameras in India also gain huge popularity.

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    1. Yes, the Surveillance Systems have definitely began to take over on a global scale.

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  2. Yes, we've all seen those nightmares on tv and heard those horrible stories and installing CCTV cameras in childcare centers will really help prevent these kinds of things. It is important that we conduct a research when looking for a childcare center and ask about their safety precaution measures.

    - AuPairInt.com

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    1. Thanks for chiming in AuPairInt.com. I do think that other policies and procedures are very important and will be covering many other areas of the Child Care Industry in future blogs.

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