Summary of Article's First 150 Words

Total word count: 1814

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 ...