My Daycare Experience

Note: The following is long, but I wanted to give a detailed picture!

I was never enrolled in a daycare facility as a child. However, I have worked in two of them, and so have had the opportunity observe this method of raising children firsthand. For those who have never spent a full day in a center as an adult, I thought this might prove enlightening. With this piece, I am focusing primarily on the preschool ages.

Daycares are highly regulated, so much of the director's and workers' days are spent making sure that the center is in compliance. This website gives the regulations for the state of Texas. Of particular interest are the state minimum requirements for child/worker ratios:

Maximum number of children assigned to one caregiver in each specified age group:
0 - 11 months: 4
12 - 17 months: 5
18 - 23 months: 9
2 years: 11
3 years: 15
4 years: 18
5 years: 22
6-8 years: 26
9 - 12 years: 26

Maximum number of children assigned to two caregivers in each specified age group:
0 - 11 months: 10
12 - 17 months: 13
18 - 23 months: 18
2 years (24 months): 22
3 years: 30
4 years: 35
5 years: 35
6 - 8 years: 35
9 - 12 years: 35

It's worth noting that almost no daycare center is going to reach above these minimum standards. In most daycares, the existing workers are already being paid very low wages, and the owner is not going to add more employees to the payroll than are determined necessary by the state.

The workers must meet the basic care requirements for each child. These include feeding at regular intervals (every 2-3 hours), diapering or toileting as needed (for a room with ten babies, this likely means upwards of 50 diaper changes a day to be handled by two workers), and providing care and supervision during regularly scheduled playtimes and naptimes. Throughout the day, the workers must maintain a sanitary environment. The children and the room(s) must be kept clean. For instance, the diaper-changing table is supposed to be wiped and sanitized after EVERY changing (again, often 50+ times).

In addition to caregiving, the workers are responsible for keeping records for each child detailing (but not limited to) the following information:

(1) Times the child slept;
(2) Times and amount of food consumed;
(3) Times of diaper changes (for babies and toddlers)
(4) Child's general mood for the day; and
(5) A brief summary of the activities in which the child participated.
(6) Minor accident reports (ie, minor scratches or bites from other children)

The Texas regulations require that the caregivers give individual attention (ie, talk with, play with, hold babies and toddlers) to each child to the extent possible. However, in my experience, the above duties often precede and leave very little room for this "less essential" care.

What my mother personally encountered as a daycare observer:

Daycare Center #1: This was probably a low-mid scale chain type center. My sisters' and my ballet teacher rented one of the rooms for a period of time while her studio was being constructed. So my mother had a few hours every week while she waited for us during our lessons to become oriented to the daycare scene. She told me that if the parents could see what she regularly saw, they would be shocked. The children were essentially caged in rooms with screaming and bellowing workers. When the parents arrived, however, the workers become as sweet as honey. My mom could not believe the level of play-acting. These women would have had a career in theatre if they ever decided to leave childcare.

What I personally encountered as a daycare worker:

Daycare Center #2:

My employee status: Summer job as a college student. I worked primarily with toddlers.

This was a mid-scale center. The family demographic was middle to upper-middle class. The worker demographic was mostly low-income, high-school/GED educated, although a few other employees besides me were in the process of attaining their degrees. Thankfully, there was little screaming or bellowing (from the workers. The children screamed and bellowed frequently). Each room had a camera, so that the parent could watch their child on video from his or her desk. However, the camera was often the source of frustration for the worker trying to restrain a child from hitting or biting another child. If we so much as laid a hand on a child, even to protect his classmates, we could be sure that the director would come sailing into the room demanding that we be more careful. "The parent could be watching!"

Also because of the cameras, the director wanted to make sure that the room appeared tidy at all times. Therefore, each room was severely deficient in toys and activities, and we spent an inordinate amount of time scooping up each plaything as soon as a child dropped it. I cannot tell you how incredibly BORED those poor children were. It's no wonder that the more assertive ones in the bunch resorted to territorial aggresion, biting and kicking and pushing the other kids, to keep them away from their favored toys. There just weren't enough interesting things to go around.

The entire focus at this center was how things would appear to the childrens' parents. So we had pointless "craft activities" everyday with our 18 mo. olds, which consisted of them watching me and the other worker cut out shapes and glue them on paper. We simply did not have time to help each child accomplish the project themselves.

This center dealt with the workers' lack-of-time issue with Mr. Roving TV and Barney Video. We got our turn with the TV right before lunch, and this was the workers' chance to frantically try to catch up with diaper changes and the childrens' daily reports.

I won't even get into how disgusting the childrens' food was. But I guess it must have met with the Texas State Nutrition and Food Service Guidelines!

In our room, we had the meanest little 18-mo old boy imaginable mixed with some sweet-tempered, sensitive children. He was always trying to bully them. We did the best we could to keep him away from the other children, but that usually meant sticking him in the corner with most of the toys to himself while we tried to entertain the others with the leftovers. Watching him was nearly a full-time job in itself. I felt really bad the few times that he managed to hurt others before we could intervene. One time he bit a little girl so hard that she started to bleed profusely. To our dismay, a couple of our "sweet boys" began to imitate Mean Boy and push the other children around. So much for positive socialization!

Towards late afternoon, many of our children became grouchy and whiny. They were tired of being bored and they were tired of being "socialized." (How do we adults feel if we NEVER get a moment of downtime to ourselves?) About this time, some of the children would always try to go pull their pillows and blankets out of their cubbies and curl up by themselves in a corner. But we were not allowed to let them do this. We had to try to keep them actively involved with the group. How would it look to the parents if we didn't?

Daycare Center#3:

Employee Status: Substitute preschool teacher. I worked with babies-4 year olds.

This was more of a high-scale center. It cost well over $1,000 /mo. per child, so our parents were generally well-off professionals. The center advertised that it's teachers possessed at least a BA degree, however this was not true of the baby and toddler teachers. The focus of this center, as described on their website, is education:

All children are born geniuses. The challenge is to keep them that way through stimulating and challenging intellectual activities with the main emphasis on fun. The brain grows and develops more in the first six years of life than at any other time, our aim is to capture this motivation and develop it for the future.

In order to accomplish this goal, the center had the children (except for the babies) rotate from classroom to classroom throughout the day, each room having a different educational focus. There was the Physical Education / Active Playroom which doubled as the nap room, the computer room, the "Home Room" (with dolls and toy dishes and other "playing house" type toys), the music room (with toy instruments), the craft room, the eating room, etc. Sounds good in theory. However, we did spend a TON of time transporting groups of children from room to room every 30-45 minutes and there were significant issues with crowd control. At least it helped the boredom problem, although it did not exactly foster long attention spans.

Since this center focused on education, the full-time "teachers" were supposed to prepare lessons and activities for the sessions in each room. The poor women did their best. However, lack of time, the rigors of crowd control, and the necessities of their other duties often interefered.

As in the other center, we had a large "time" problem. As workers, we did not have enough time to give to each child, especially the less demanding ones. Demanding, misbehaving children or children needing attention to their physical needs took the bulk of our time.

To their credit, this facility did not use a TV to babysit the children. They also took pride in the fact that children were being exposed to quality culture, such as classical music during naptimes.

Interestingly, even a nice center such as this one could not afford to pay cushy salaries. The baby workers were paid less than the other teachers. As a result, they were less educated. The workers in the babies' room did not even fully speak English. I often wondered how the babies were expected to learn to understand and speak excellent English when their full-time caregivers did not.

During the days I spent at this center, I never understood how we were expected to effectively discipline misbehaving children. Most of the teachers just bumped the problem child to another room for a few minutes. Sometimes this helped, sometimes it didn't.

Each daycare shared one glaring problem: In spite of our best efforts (or lack thereof in the case of some), we were not mom (or dad, for that matter!). We had records of each child's food allergies and medical conditions, and eventually we learned about their different personalities. But we did not have an intimate knowledge of the child. We cared about them all, but we did not have a burning passion for each one's individual welfare. How could we? We were so busy with regulations and parents and crowd control and the necessities of basic care. We could not say to a child: "You are mine, and I love you!" Because, perhaps the very next week or month, that child would be traded to another teacher who would not know him from the next. And then another. And another (Turnover in daycare centers is very high!).

I remember looking at a baby's smile and thinking, "how could a parent bear missing this?" This, meaning their child's entire life, except for a couple of hours every evening. Hours when both parent and child have already been exausted and spent from the day, and are not quite themselves. I remember a little girl who used to call me "Mommy." Baby, I'm not your mommy. I wish you could know what it's like to have a mommy who has time to bake cookies with you and take you grocery shopping and let you help dust the furniture and who will laugh when you want to put seventeen ribbons in her hair.

Real life. That's another thing these babies miss out on. They live artificial lives, with parental simulations standing in for Mom and Dad, who have real lives and values to consistently model over a period of years; real care to give based on what the child truly needs at the moment rather than state regulations; hugs spilling from true love.

It is not my intention to bash parents who have their children in daycare. But I do want to provide a clear picture of what daycare is. I honestly believe that if you are a half-decent parent, your child will benefit from any measures you can take to limit the time he has to spend in the daycare environment. Even the most well-intentioned institution cannot replace you in your child's life.