Child Care Essay -- June 2009

“Your mom will be here soon, don’t worry.” I tried to make my voice sound reassuring.

The boy stared at me, unconvinced.

“Really. She wouldn’t leave you here. She’d miss you.” I gave the boy a quick hug and nudged him back to the movie room. He sat down on one of the faded couches and went on watching the cartoon play across the screen.

Minutes passed, then half an hour. I walked up the hall, checking doors to be sure they were locked. Suddenly I heard the soft patter of six-year-old feet behind me again. I turned to see two big worried eyes staring at me. “When’s my mom gonna come?” His voice was shaky and his face was pale under his freckles.

“I don’t know. But she’ll be here soon.” I said in a bright tone.

It didn’t work. Tears swam in his big eyes. “All the other kids have been gone a long time, and – and – is she gonna come?” His voice ended in a wail and he started crying in earnest.

I knelt down and put my arms around him. He sniffled and looked at me expectantly. I smiled reassuringly, “Don’t worry. She’ll come sooner or later.”

“Can’t you call her?”

“I tried several times, but her phone was turned off,” I explained. “But she’ll be here.”

He nodded, sniffed, and trotted back to the movie room, running his hand down the blue-painted wall. The sunset streamed through the glass door at the other end of the hall, giving an eerie lighting to the hall – a hall that was usually resounding with the shouts and laughter of all sizes of children. Then, about 4:30 in the afternoon, cars start pulling up and parents come to lay claim to their children. But now, with one lonely child left, the place seemed big and gloomy.

In the gloom of the approaching evening, my thoughts went in a gloomy direction. What if the boy’s mother didn’t come? What then? Should I take the child home? Call the police? Perhaps DHS? I know for a fact that it has happened before – one child left there like the unclaimed luggage on a carousel. How do you explain to a child that his parents forgot about him? How can you come up with reason at all? In this essay, I will attempt to do that.

First, let us look at the sort of families that the children in child-care places come from. The families can be roughly divided into four groups: the single-parent families, the divorced families, the working-parent families, and the busy-mom families.

In the case of single-parent families, the parent is forced to put the child in a childcare place to be watched while he or she is at work, earning the money to provide for the child. This situation is quite legitimate in using childcare.

Divorced families seem to make up the majority of what one sees in such facilities – families where the parents are divorced and have one or both remarried. The child now has extra “parents” and often extra siblings, and he belongs in two homes. I have seen cases where the two homes use the childcare as a pass-off point – one parent will bring the child in the morning and the other will pick them up. As you can imagine, this situation can be quite confusing for a child.

The working family is where the parents are not divorced, but they both work during the day. These children are often the last ones to get picked up.

The busy-mom family is one of the strangest phenomenons that I have seen. It is a family where the mother doesn’t work, per-se, but has “a lot of errands to run” or thinks that her child “needs to socialize”. She drops her child off in the morning at the facility, and then enjoys the morning and/or afternoon child-free.

In a practical sense, there are many reasons for a child to have been forgotten. Perhaps the single mom had to work late and forgot to call. Maybe the divorced couple got mixed up on who was supposed to pick up the child that day. But often (especially in the case of the busy-mom syndrome) I think the reason runs deeper than that.

What is it about being a parent that builds such a bond with the child? Almost anyone will tell you that it is spending time with the child. I have had parents tell me of how they enjoy seeing their child learn things, or think something through for the first time. They enjoy reading books and discussing the pictures with the child – even watching siblings interact with each other. Then I think of what childcare is like. At 7:30 in the morning the child is dropped off and isn’t picked up till 4:30 or 5:00 or even 6:00. All day, the child is learning things and thinking things through, but the parent isn’t there to watch. Who sees the progress? The hired workers – but often there are too many children for them to spend time encouraging the child in the learning process. If siblings are in the same facility they often hardly see each other and never get to build the special bond so special to brothers and sisters. Then, when the parent is off work, he or she comes and picks up the child. Rarely have I heard them ask the child what he learned or what he did. Conversation usually stops at ‘Did you have a good day?’ or the like. The child is, in effect, raised by the childcare facility and not by the parent.

The special bond is never built that causes the parent to always have the child in his or her mind. This is the situation that leads to the child being left by accident – or left because the parent wants to deal with the child as little as possible. And so, the child is forgotten.