Author Guidelines

Healthy Childcare® is a bimonthly publication devoted to the health and safety needs of the childcare setting. With a circulation of more than 33,000, Healthy Childcare® (launched in December of 1997) is one of the fastest growing publications in the early childhood arena.
Each issue of Healthy Childcare® includes five articles which address health and safety issues:

• Medicine Chest: Medicines, treatments, preventive measures, clinical information.
• In Sickness & Health: Health promotion, illness, disease prevention.
• Nutrition Action: Nutrition information, cooking activities, nutrition education ideas.
• Safety First: Safety awareness and promotion in and around the childcare setting.
• Health & You: The health and well-being of the childcare worker.

Each issue also includes health education activities for the young child, reproducible mini-posters and parent information sheets, and information from other organizations dedicated to the health and safety of children.

Topics: Manuscripts must be directly related to a specific health and safety issue in the childcare setting. We do not cover general child development or administrative issues. A complete list of topics covered in previous articles can be seen on our web site, www.healthychild.net/librarysearch.html. Please take the time to review previous topics and do not submit manuscripts that duplicate these topics.

Author credentials: Authors must be employed and/or credentialed in an area of childcare health and safety. We are looking for health professionals, such as physicians, nurses, dentists, health educators and childcare health consultants, registered dietitians, licensed pharmacists, physical therapists, speech pathologists, etc., who are familiar with the needs and interests of childcare providers. We also look for early childhood educators and childcare providers who have special interest and knowledge in areas of health and safety. Our readers look to Healthy Childcare® as a health and safety resource and thus, our authors must have appropriate professional experience. Submissions from free lance writers who do not have appropriate backgrounds will not be considered.

Length of manuscripts: Manuscripts should be fairly short and to the point, between 1,000-1,200 words, and written at a 6th-8th grade reading level. Rule of thumb for length: The manuscript should be two, single-spaced pages. Resources and references are in addition to these two pages.

Format: Healthy Childcare® is a hands-on, how-to-implement publication. Each manuscript should include the following components (although these specific headings are not necessary):

• Introduction: Get the reader's attention and increase their awareness of the topic; show how or why the specific topic/issue is important in child care.
• Description of topic/issue: Describe the topic, such as the specific safety issue, communicable disease, etc. If applicable, explain how the childcare provider can recognize the situation, disease, or hazard. Illustrate how the topic/issue can affect children or the childcare environment.
• Recommendations: Include practical and specific actions to prevent or resolve the situation/issue. We do not accept any advertising or solicitation, so do not recommend brand-name products or specific services which must be purchased.
• Resources: Include resources such as toll free numbers and web sites which will be helpful to our readers. All resources are listed in our "sidebars," the area alongside the article, not in the article, and do not count as words when you do a text word count. Again, we do not endorse or promote any specific products, or accept advertising, so resources generally include professional organizations or associations.
  If you have attributed a fact or a position or an agency, please provide us with the reference that you used for this so that we can verify that this is factual. For example, if you state the recommendation of the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) on immunizations, provide us with the AAP source you used.
• Parent Connection: Include ideas which caregivers can use to involve or inform parents (one-two sentences).

Audience: Healthy Childcare® readers are child caregivers in all types of settings--large and small; center-based, group care, and family home; mother's day out; after school care; etc. Our readers often do not have access to health and safety training, and Healthy Childcare® can provide "to their door" training. While we do have parents who read Healthy Childcare®, they are not our primary audience. However, we include reproducible posters and parent newsletters so that the childcare provider can connect with parents on health and safety information, and each article includes a 2-3 sentence "parent connection."

Examples of articles can be seen on our website, www.healthychild.net. Please take the time to review articles to see how they are structured and the types of articles we include.

Style Points:

• Our name is Healthy Childcare® and we use childcare as one word, not two. Please set your spell check to change child care to childcare.
• We do not use contractions. Every don't, can't, wouldn't that you write, gets changed.
• We speak TO our audience and address them as "you." No uses of "we," "they," or "I."
• Our audience is a childcare teacher or provider. Parents are not our audience so no uses of "your" child or "your" baby. Also watch the use of "classroom" or "class." Nearly 14,000 of our readers are home based childcare programs and we do not want them to think that the article is not for them.
• Similarly, our audience is not a K-12 school-based environment so references to school administration or other school issues typically do not apply. Again, we try to make sure that the family providers are included.
  

Here is a recent example of how we included a family provider reference. An article on training sessions talked about having more than one staff person in a center go through training sessions. We added a recommendation that all family providers (who often are the only staff person), should receive training.

We also referenced staff turnover and the need to have staff on hand that has received training so that if a trained employee leaves, someone with training else is available in the program. This kind of reference probably would not appear in an article for a K-12 audience but is a real issue in childcare.

Submission: To submit an article for consideration, contact Dr. Charlotte Hendricks, Editor, Healthy Childcare® at chendricks@childhealthonline.org. Articles should be emailed as attachments in either WordPerfect or Word files. Please inform us if you are doing multiple submissions of your manuscript.

Manuscripts must include author name, title and/or credentials (as they will be listed in the magazine if published), and a one or two sentence biography. If you want readers to contact you for more information, please include your address, phone number, and/or email address.

Payment: Payment for articles is $125-175 for two-page articles. Payment will be mailed upon publication. For payment purposes, you must include your full name, address, phone number, and social security number.

Copyright: Healthy Childcare® holds the copyright to all published articles.
For further information, call Kathryn Breighner, Publisher, at 877-258-6178.