By Ben Rolfe, Co-Founder and AI Director, Childcare Marketing Group

My family ran nurseries for 25 years. Eleven of them at our peak. So when I talk about parents, I'm not speaking from the outside looking in. I watched this change happen in real time.

The parents walking through your doors today are not the same as the parents from ten years ago. Not better, not worse. Different. And if your approach to families hasn't shifted to reflect that, you're already behind.

They've Done Their Research Before They've Even Called You 

The first enquiry used to be the start of the conversation. Now it's somewhere in the middle.

Before a parent picks up the phone or fills in your contact form, they've already read your Ofsted report. Checked your fees against two or three competitors. Scrolled your Instagram. Read your Google reviews. Possibly found a thread about you in a local Facebook group.

By the time they reach you, they've got a view. It might be right. It might be built on half-information. But it's there.

This matters practically. You can't educate a parent who already thinks they know you. You can only confirm or challenge what they've already decided. That means everything visible about your setting online has to reflect what you actually are. If there's a gap between what parents see and what they experience when they arrive, trust goes fast.

A thin or outdated digital presence isn't neutral. It reads as a red flag.

Safe Doesn't Mean What It Used to Mean 

Every parent wants their child to be safe. That hasn't changed. But what they mean by safe has.

Ten years ago, safe largely meant physical. Proper supervision. Risk assessments. Safeguarding. Those things still matter. They're table stakes.

But parents today also mean emotionally safe. Will my child be seen as an individual? Will staff actually know them? Will someone notice if they're having a hard day?

This isn't abstract. Parents are asking specific questions now that they wouldn't have thought to ask before. They want to know how your key person system actually works in practice, not just that it exists. They've read enough about attachment to know the difference between a setting that pays lip service to it and one that genuinely builds relationships.

The practitioners who've been in this field a long time already know that emotional safety is the foundation everything else is built on. The difference now is that parents know it too. That's a good thing. But it does raise the bar for how you communicate what you're doing and why.

"They had a great day" doesn't cut it anymore. Parents want to know their child. Not a summary.

Parents Want a Partnership, Not a Service

There's been a real shift in how parents see their role. They don't want to drop their child off and trust that everything is fine. They want to be involved. Kept informed. Treated as part of the team.

This sometimes gets mistaken for parents being difficult. In my experience, it usually isn't that. It's anxiety. The first years of a child's life feel enormous to parents right now. There's so much information, so much pressure, so much comparison happening on social media. When a parent asks a lot of questions or challenges a decision, they're often not looking for a fight. They're looking for reassurance that their child is with people who actually care.

The settings that handle this well are usually the ones that communicate proactively. Not just when something goes wrong. Parents who feel informed and included are far less likely to escalate concerns. They're far more likely to become the families who refer others, stick around for siblings, and defend you if someone else raises a concern.

Interestingly, parents are more forgiving of mistakes than most practitioners expect. What damages trust isn't an incident. It's the feeling that something was hidden or downplayed. Be straight with people, quickly, and most of the time they'll respect you for it.

The Pressure Parents Are Under Is Real 

Here's something worth sitting with. A lot of the parents you work with are quietly struggling.

Social media has created an impossible standard of what parenting is supposed to look like. The parent at drop-off who seems demanding or distracted might be running on very little sleep, managing financial stress, and questioning every decision they make. The parent who doesn't respond to your messages might not be disengaged. They might just be drowning.

None of this means you absorb that pressure or step outside your role. But it does shape how you read behaviour and how you build relationships.

The best practitioners I've seen understand that they're working with the whole family, not just the child in the room. That doesn't require training in family therapy. It just requires a bit of genuine curiosity about how people are doing, not just how their child is doing.

What You Can Actually Do With This

Understanding that parents have changed is one thing. Doing something useful with that is another. A few thoughts.

Look at what parents find before they find you. Your Ofsted report, your Google reviews, your social media. Does it reflect the quality you deliver? Most settings I speak to are better than they look online. That gap costs you families.

Train your team to talk about feelings, not just facts. The ability to tell a parent something meaningful about their child's emotional day is a skill. It can be taught. It's worth investing in.

Sort out how you handle difficult conversations. Practitioners avoid them because they haven't been given the tools to do them well. A short incident, handled with honesty and care, very rarely becomes a complaint. A complaint is almost always the result of something small that was avoided for too long.

Actually listen to feedback. Not just the formal kind. The comments at drop-off, the hesitation in a parent's voice. The settings with the strongest parent relationships treat every bit of that as information.

It's Not All on You 

Running nurseries for 25 years taught our family a lot of things. One of them was that early years professionals carry an enormous amount. You're caring for children who aren't yours, managing the expectations of families who are sometimes scared, meeting regulatory requirements that keep shifting, and doing most of it for wages that don't reflect the complexity of the work.

Parents having higher expectations doesn't mean the responsibility falls entirely on practitioners to absorb it. Settings need to support their teams with the communication skills, the time, and the culture that makes genuine family relationships possible.

The shift in what parents expect isn't going to reverse. But it's not something to fear either. Parents who understand how much skill goes into what you do are your strongest advocates. Building that understanding, one honest conversation at a time, is probably the most valuable thing you can do.

Ben Rolfe is Co-Founder and AI Director of The Childcare Marketing Group. His family operated nurseries for 25 years. He now helps early years settings communicate what makes them genuinely great. childcare.marketing