Parent-View.com - safe webcam viewing systems for daycare

Many parents carry away a lot of concerns when they drop off a child at day care, but a few centers are offering parents high-tech reassurance: the ability to monitor child by simply logging on to the computer.

“There's a security in knowing that at any given time, you can just plug in and check on them,” said Tammy Barnett, who, along with business partner Tianay Outlaw will be the among the first to offer the monitoring service in Hamilton County when their day-care center, Creative Kids World, opens in Springdale in September.

“It's not required by law, but I could see how a parent would look at it and see the advantages,” said John Allen, spokesman for the Ohio Department of Human Services, which oversees licensing of the state's 3,400 child-care centers.

Many centers, he said, do things to make their care more attractive to parents, such as going beyond minimum standards — which mainly address health issues, for example, cleanliness and staffing — on items such as teacher-to-child ratios.

HOW IT WORKS

• Video cameras are positioned in the classrooms and other areas of the center.
• The day-care center subscribes to an Internet server that receives the images.
• Parents, from any computer with Internet capabilities, use a password to log on to the Web site and pull up the image.
• Because the server knows your child's schedule, it takes you directly to the area that the child is in at the time.

As day-care centers, like any other business, have to keep customers happy to survive, Mr. Allen said he could see how the service could start to catch on.

For now though, there are only a handful in Ohio “that I'm aware of,” he said.

The video image parents see is not full motion. “It's a picture that updates every five seconds or so, depending on what kind of modem you have,” said Christine Austin Steinberg, the founder of ParentNet, the company that provides the Internet service, KinderCam, for Creative Kids World and Kids R Kids, which opened in Warren County earlier this year.

ParentNet's KinderCam, established in 1996, isn't the only one of its kind, but it was among the first to offer the service and now operates in 35 day-care centers nationwide — with a projection of 1,500 more over the next 24 months.

Ms. Steinberg said she came up with the idea for the company while working as a free-lance Web page designer. She'd placed her own daughter in day care and soon found she was losing touch with her day-to-day activities.

“If your child is in day care 50-60 hours a week, you really don't know them like you do at home. Most people can't leave work in the middle of the day to go visit their child in day care, but they might be able to pop online for a few minutes,” she said.

That's what Jennifer Parsons of Maineville, an administrative assistant at CB Richard Ellis, a real estate brokerage firm in downtown Cincinnati, has done “almost on a daily basis, on my lunch hour” since April, when she placed her daughter, Paige, 5 months old, at Kids R Kids.

“I can see the teachers moving around; I can see them feeding her, changing her,” she said. “My family down in Texas pulls it up all the time, too, so Grandma can see her, too.”

While most agree safety is the foremost advantage, it's just one among many. “We really try not to focus on the security portion; it's really more of a way to keep in touch with your kids,” Ms. Steinberg said.

“The cameras are not there to monitor the teachers; it's so parents can participate,” said Ms. Out law, who found out about the KinderCam service on the Internet when researching a business plan for Creative Kids World.

None of the teachers she has interviewed or hired, she said, has had a problem with it: “They'll see it; it's not a hidden camera.”

According to Ms. Steinberg, the cost to operate the system runs about $12 per child per month — depending on the package, which includes equipment and installation — and is billed directly to the center. The center then calculates the cost into tuition rates.

Ms. Steinberg said she hopes to be able to offer the service to day-care centers for free by partnering with advertisers whose products and services would come up on the computer screen.

Ms. Parsons said she looked at several day-care facilities and found Kids R Kids to be “just about the same or a little lower in price” than those without the service. She said she pays $160 a week for 11 hours of care, five days a week, and in return, “gets a whole bunch of piece of mind.”