In the United States, about six million children under the age of five receive some kind of child care outside of their homes¹, and children can spend as much as 35 hours a week in child care facilities². These child care environments are an important setting in a child’s life, and can impact healthy childhood development. There is the potential for children to be exposed to environmental health hazards in child care environments, such as lead, toxic substances in consumer products, pesticides, and/or flame retardants. It is especially important that regulations and policies for child care facilities recognize, and are designed to reduce, environmental health hazard exposures for young children. Children’s bodies and behaviors are very different from adults – they are growing and developing at a rapid rate, and this makes children more vulnerable than adults to hazardous environmental exposures. A detrimental exposure during childhood can lead to chronic or long term health problems.

Protections from environmental health hazards, through both required regulations and voluntary policies and practices, can greatly improve a child’s environment and subsequent health outcomes. Currently, child care licensing regulations cover some areas of environmental health, such as restrictions on smoking when children are around, or standards for proper ventilation. In 2015, the Children’s Environmental Health Network (CEHN), and the Environmental Law Institute (ELI), released a report titled: Reducing Environmental Exposures in Child Care Facilities: A Review of State Policy. This report examines state policies across the U.S. that address environmental health in licensed child care facilities, focusing on several key indoor environmental exposures, including: environmental tobacco smoke, radon, carbon monoxide, mold, ventilation, pesticides, lead-based paint, and asbestos. The report notes that while there are certain states and programs that are making great strides to implement protective environmental health measures in child care settings, there is still a lot of room for improvement.

By Dr Richard Fiene, Research Psychologist, RIKI and NARA Senior Consultant

Because I get asked this all the time, I thought it would be helpful to share with the NARA membership examples of what national key indicators, risk assessment and differential monitoring would look like practically and not theoretically. 

By: Joshua Verville, Board Officer, National Association of Regulatory Administration

The internet has had a profound impact on the everyday lives of people. We have enormous amounts of information available to search which is accessible by computers, phones, and yes soon eyewear! This proliferation of accessible information via the internet has created a platform for increasing transparency efforts from restaurant grades in L.A to roll over safety on www.safercar.gov. Recently, Yelp launched a new feature that adds open healthcare data and compliance information for over 16,000 nursing homes for consumers to review. These transparency websites provide consumers with information about a service or product in order to allow the consumer to make an informed choice about what they are buying. This is no different or more important than when parents are searching for child care providers across the U.S.