In United States, there are twenty million children in the preschool age. Approximately, twelve percent of this number goes to the day care establishments. Day Care Centers are those facilities concerned with caring for the preschoolers and providing them with the necessary pre-school education. The services offered by the day care centers are very important for millions of mothers worldwide; taking care of the child’s health is a mandatory for protecting our beloved ones from being sick.

A recent research published by the Medline (which is a service of the National Institute of Health and The National Library of Medicine) indicates that the day care centers do increase the susceptibility of catching different types of infections in the children; this is mainly due to the increased in the rate of exposure to other sick toddlers, actually, the upper respiratory tract infection, the ear infections, the episodes of common cold and diarrhea increase tremendously in the children going to the day care centers. Furthermore, some studies prove the relation between the asthma in children and the day care facilities. On the contrary, other studies are suggesting that going to a day care center can enhance the child’s immunity system through the recurrent exposure to different type of germs.

New reports have indicated that an average child in a day care facility will get up to 10 colds annually, each one can take up to two weeks, and this means that this child will feel sick for nearly half of the winter. Furthermore, this child will be subjected to at least 3-10 episodes of otitis media per year, and this rate is four times higher than in a child who stays at home.

Unfortunately, a mother can’t protect her child completely from being sick in a day care center. All she can do is trying to reduce the incidence of sickness by learning the child the basic rules of personal hygiene like washing the hands before eating and after toilet, keeping the child at home in the periods of sickness, and performing a periodic check-up to the child by a physician. The physician will examine the signs for inflammation in the ear (otitis); this is to predict the possibility of ear infections in the future.