THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Thursday, October 20, 1994 TAG: 9410200414
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Column
SOURCE: Marc Tibbs
LENGTH: Medium: 62 lines
Who came up with the idea of day care, anyway?
Probably some overworked, insensitive parents who put a higher priority on paying for a BMW than on giving their kids TLC.
In the nearly two years since the birth of my daughter, it's become clear to me that day care is the fast-food equivalent of parenting. It's a place where workaholic parents can drop their darling offspring into the hands of perfect strangers - hoping that everything goes well.
I know, maybe my wife or I should stay home, but we're the epitome of the two-paycheck family. We don't have a BMW, but we're workaholics just the same. And besides, for a hefty fee, and an equally hefty amount of trust, a day-care center will feed your kid, change her diapers and otherwise occupy her time for about 12 hours, or until you return from the office.
I'm sure that in most day care, children are safe, cared for and nurtured, but there are a few things about it that I still don't quite understand.
Like, why is it that day care sends your kid home whenever she contracts some kind of virus? In most cases, the virus came from some other infected kid. And when you send her back, she's bound to get reinfected.
We must have checked our daughter out and sent her back to day care three times before the center finally got the virus under control.
And every four weeks or so, there's the face of a new adult in my daughter's class. Turnover among teachers is high.
So every other month, our daughter comes home uttering the name of some new stranger in her life. They all seem to love her, but there's something unsettling about people you haven't met slobbering over your kid every afternoon.
And occasionally things happen at day care that this parent finds inexplicable.
A week ago our daughter came home with a knot on her head the size of Kansas. It was the kind of bump every kid her age is bound to get. She didn't appear to be in any pain, but it caused my wife and me enough concern that we started asking questions.
At 20 months old, our daughter isn't exactly a fluid conversationalist, but she can make herself understood. When we asked about the knot, she started muttering the name of one of her classmates.
Kids will be kids, I thought, but it troubled me that no one at day care had told us there had been an ``incident.''
I called the next day and learned that my daughter's teachers could only speculate about what had happened.
And finally, when I picked our child up the other day, the classmate whose name she had been uttering was proudly wearing two bandages on the side of her head.
My wife thinks there's nothing to it.
But I'm convinced this pair of 2-year-olds were whaling away at each other over some toy or something, and day-care ``experts'' were afraid to let us know they didn't stop it before it was too late.
Maybe instead of sending our daughter to day care, my wife and I should use that money to pay for therapy to cure our workaholism. by CNB