When you tour a daycare, the brochures talk about ratios and curriculum. But what actually shapes a young child's developing brain is something you can only read between the lines. In this episode, our hosts unpack a recent KinderPage guest piece by Dr. Elahe Raoufi (MD, MA, CRPO, CCPA), a physician-trained psychotherapist and founder of Odyssey to Me Psychotherapy Clinic in Richmond Hill, who reframes the daycare search around the one thing licensing checklists can't capture: whether the room offers your child a surrogate nervous system.

The conversation walks through the Serve-and-Return interactions that build emotional regulation, how sensory mismatches quietly drive 5:00 PM meltdowns, the questions worth asking on a tour to reveal how staff really think about hard moments, and what to do when your child is struggling at drop-off. The hosts also explore Dr. Raoufi's decompression hour for families whose daycare is "good enough but not perfect," plus when it's time to move past "wait and see" and bring in a professional. Read the full written piece, "A Clinician's Guide to Choosing a Daycare," at:
https://kinderpage.ca/blogs/clinicians-guide-to-choosing-a-daycare

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