Precious Memories Site Visit Analysis

I went to Precious Memories Child Care for my site visit. Precious Memories’ mission is to provide day care for children who have been rejected from other care facilities or schools for either financial or behavioral reasons. Most of the children at precious memories are from low-income households. This background predisposes these children to significant current and future health problems. In a 2000 study of low-income children who were being placed into foster care: 44% of children had an identified health problem and 92% had at least one physical abnormality. Of the 44% of health problems the most common finding was infection mostly otitis media. (Simms et al., 2000). This is a perfect example of an easily treatable illness that may be ignored and can lead to long-term complications including hearing loss. …show more content…
Another common problem touched upon during our site visit were children with autism and other developmental disorders. Precious Memories said that they are comfortable providing any care that a parent could provide however they are not primarily a school and do not provide specific therapy for children with developmental disorders. That treatment if available is provided by the school system. The social cost of these problems going untreated is a cycle of problems that the site manager told us about. She said that several of the parents of children in care were themselves once children at Precious Memories. As an institution that is almost entirely funded by government problems this cycle has great cost to society. In addition it means that the children will have to remain in their care for extreme lengths of time. They talked about taking care of a patient with autism until he was 21 years