Charles "Charlie" Hinton is a food products marketing executive whose wife Kim has just gone back to work as a lawyer. They enroll their son Ben, in Chapman Academy, an expensive and Hothousing preschool headed by a woman named Gwenyth Harridan. Soon after, Charlie and his best friend, Phillip "Phil" Ryerson, are laid off after their boss Jim Fields, early 2000s recession due to children not liking healthy cereal. After over a month of failed attempts to find a new job, Charlie is forced to pull Ben out of Chapman due to its cost and, unable to find a decent-but-more-affordable preschool, decides to open his very own preschool in his home with the help of Phil, calling it Daddy Day Care. At first, the local parents are Gender role wanting to work with kids, but as Daddy Day Care is cheaper and more Student-centred learning than Chapman Academy, the latter begins to lose students. Daddy Day Care opens and Charlie and Phil each begin taking care of several kids, though things don't go smoothly at first due to the kids having several issues and being prone to causing chaos through the house.
Four years after the events of ''Daddy Day Care'', Charlie and Phil take their kids to Camp Driftwood, a camp they attended as kids. But once there, they discover that Camp Driftwood is no longer the kindhearted camp site of their time. To save the run-down site, Charlie and Phil buy a partnership from the older man that ran it when they were children, after the other partner runs off on vacation. They turn it into ''Daddy Day Camp''. They run into misadventures along the way when the owner, Lance Warner, in the rival camp Canola tries to tear it down. The first day of camp turns out to be a disaster involving a skunk and a bathroom explosion, which leaves them left with only 7 campers instead of the original 35 and in need of help to improve their financial situation.