From school holidays and back up child care to tween counseling and college coaching, the Working Mother Best Companies for Kids aim to serve children of all ages.

Child care and all things related to kids, from babies to teens, is a major focus of our annual Working Mother 100 Best Companies application [[link to 2010 100Best]]. Maybe that’s not surprising for an initiative that for 25 years has challenged corporate America to provide family-friendly policies, programs and benefits to all employees. 

What is surprising, however, is the wide array of programs that the best of the best companies offer to working parents to help with the day-to-day needs and unexpected stress that comes with caring for kids. To create our new Best Companies for Kids list [[LINK]], we looked at more than 200 questions from our Working Mother 100 Best Companies application that relate directly to caring for kids, including access, usage and cost to employees of backup and sick child care. We also looked at college coaching and scholarship benefits as well as teen and tween counseling, parental leave, and pre-natal programs, among others. 

Here’s a quick snapshot of we found:

100 percent of our 10 Best Companies for Kids offer backup child care

100 percent offer school holiday care

90 percent offer sick child care

90 percent offer before and/or after school care

That’s just for starters. These Best Companies also offer employees more access to paid parental leave than the Working Mother 100 Best Companies as a whole, and they’re more apt to provide pre-natal programs like nutrition education and medical screenings.

And for working parents of kids with special needs, every one of these Best Companies offer resource and referral services, while 60 percent offer affinity groups for these hard-working parents (versus 42 percent of the Working Mother 100 Best Companies).   

Talk about setting the bar. We salute these Best Companies for the work they do to serve working parents. They point the way for not only the Working Mother 100 Best Companies, but corporate America as well. 

You can download and read the full executive summary here.

Jennifer Owens is Director of the Working Mother Research Institute and Editorial Director of Working Mother magazine.