This study reviews recent trends of laws and evaluation criteria of heath, nutrition, and safety in
child care centers, and addresses future research directions on them. To this end, we analyzed Child
Care Laws, Child Care Acts, Child Care Program Accreditation Standards and Criteria, as well as
master’s theses, doctoral dissertations and journals that have been published on these issues since
1991. Through a comprehensive and critical review, we revealed three following findings in terms of
child heath, nutrition, and safety. First, it is necessary to strengthen regulations for all children’s
heath, nutrition, and safety, or to discuss measures corresponding to those regulations to provide the
best possible care to every child. Second, a careful examination of accreditation standards on health,
nutrition and safety found that, although specific actions and criteria on these issues were already
prepared, their implementation is not mandatory and the quality of provided health, nutrition and
safety is not properly guaranteed. This finding shows that what is still necessary is to devise
effective plans for handling institutional frameworks and processes of child care program
accreditation standards. Third, among the three categories of health, nutrition, and safety, the topics
on safety were found to be studied most frequently, whereas the other two topics were considered
much less. It thus indicates that more research on health and nutrition are necessary.