The Department of Workforce Services offers long-term assistance based on income eligibility. Children’s Service Society of Utah offers a one time, 2 week assistance for families in a crisis situation though a United Way funded grant called "Kids in Care." Some child care providers are willing to offer discounts when you enroll more than one child from the same family or charge based on a sliding fee scale (income based). Our Referral Specialists can help you search for providers in your area who may offer this type of service.
The Bureau of Child Care Licensing can provide you with a complaint history and compliance record, open to the public, for regulated child care providers.
Utah does not currently have a law regarding the age of children who can be left home alone. However, we have put together a checklist of suggested knowledge and skills that a child should have before being left home alone. Click here to download the checklist.
The safety of the location where care is being provided is part of the licensing process through the Bureau of Child Care Licensing; therefore, providers are not able to provide care except in the location they are licensed for. There are nanny agencies that would provide one on one care; however, they are usually quite a bit more expensive.
Please visit Child Care Aware and enter your zip code to receive contact information for the CCR&R that would serve your area.
Please see our Cost of Child Care Analysis to find average full-time monthly rates for your area.
Centers are non-residential facilities where they enroll more than 12 children at a time. The children are generally split up by age group into different classrooms. See child care center licensing regulations. Family child care providers care for children in their own homes. They usually care for children up to age 12 and there are generally a variety of age groups enrolled. See family provider regulations.
The answer to this question varies depending on your family's specific needs. First and foremost, it is important to choose a quality environment for your child. The provider that best accommodates all of your needs and that you feel is the highest quality location will probably vary greatly from the situation of your friends and neighbors and maybe even your own previous experiences. Because every child is a unique individual and every family’s needs are different, you are in the best position to decide where the best place for your child will be. This is one of the reasons that we so highly recommend taking the time to visit and assess several of both types of child care environments in order to find out which you feel the most comfortable with and will best accommodate your situation.
This can definitely be challenging. If you have contacted the providers closest to your child’s school and are not finding one that can accommodate all of your needs, some other ideas you may consider are: talking to other parents in your child’s class to see if they would be interested in a carpool situation, talk to your child’s school administrator to see if your child could switch buses to ride to a provider’s location that has the opening but may not be able to do the transportation, talk to your boss at work and see if you might be able to work out a scheduling arrangement that would allow you to take care of the transportation yourself; more drastically, you may even consider transferring your child to a different elementary school in an area where more providers are able to accommodate the transportation.
