An establishment primarily engaged in providing day care to children. These establishments take care of preschool kids, but also older children. It may also provide pre-kindergarten education. This is the definition given by The North American Industry Classification System, or NAICS, to day care centers.
As families are more and more occupied, studies have shown that in today America, almost half of the children are cared for the most of the day by people who are not part of the close family. There is indeed a day-care for children industry growing in the United States, as more and more parents are occupied and cannot afford to spend much time with their kids for most of the day. Another statistic says that over 20% of all children in the USA are grown and educated by single parents, these single parents, who also have to work, are the persons who most appeal to child care centers.
Although the day care market is vastly developed, there are differences between types of day-care centers. There are the small ones, who usually run in private homes, and only can accommodate a small number of children depending on the area of the house. And there are the large day care services, which are center-based operations. These are the ones who usually are based on franchises. A large proportion of working mothers use these center-based day care services as the main educational place for their children, approximately 15% of the mothers. 13 per cent of working mothers use child care centers as the secondary educational source for their children, in addition to using baby sitters. These child care centers are most appealed by more wealthy families, whereas poorer one resorts to relatives on educating their kids.
There are on the market chains of day-care facilities. Among the best known, one can mention Kinder-Care, who is in business since 1969 and nowadays has more that 800 centers across the United States and Canada, LaPetite Academy, established in 1970, ARA Services, Geber Products. All these companies run o couple hundreds centers across America and some of them also grant franchises.
To start a franchise in this domain, one needs from 500$ minimum to 5000$, or even tens of thousands of dollars, for opening a full-scale day care center. The sum of money of course depends on how well you desire to equip the center in order to obtain the franchise.