Remembering daycare
Jun 7, 2002 Ancient Archives, The Story of My Life
I’ve been getting one DVD a week at the library to watch after Noah’s gone to bed. Last night I watched The Virgin Suicides and really liked it. I give it two thumbs up, four stars, a bushel and a peck and a hug around the neck.
Last night I was thinking about some of the kids at the daycare where I used to work. It was my second daycare job and they hired me as head teacher of the toddler/wobbler room. The kids (babies really) were ten months (wobbling) on up to two and a half. We had fourteen kids in the room and three teachers. It was a nightmare set to a Raffi soundtrack.
Kids that age have no place in an institutional setting. They don’t do well all grouped together like that. This is how my day generally went. (And this is long. Someone once complimented me on my pithy entries but this is decidedly un-pithy.)
Since I was the head teacher, I opened the room at 7:30am so that I could (in theory) connect with every parent every day. Parents were usually waiting at the front door of the center before I even arrived so I had children right away. I would greet them, chat with the parents, and make sure the room was set up for the day. (The last teacher to leave was supposed to do this but if a lot of the kids got picked up late, she wouldn’t be able to.) Of course some of the babies would sob and I would have to hold them while they wept and screamed for their parents. This made it hard to greet the other parents and find out how their children were doing and it was also upsetting for the other kids to get comfortable in the room with one of their friends in obvious wretched misery. Actually, most of the kids got used to (read: desensitized) to unhappiness. The worst was when more than one child had trouble separating. This was a sure-fire way to get a headache before 9am.
Ok, at 8:30am the next teacher would arrive (hallelujah!). We served snack at around 9:15am (the next teacher was due 15 minutes after that). We’d gather up the kids and try to get them all to their chairs and serve them something like cheerios with apple juice. While one of us monitored the snack, the other one would start the diapering assembly line. Some of the children were being potty trained (unlike some other daycares, we let parents decide when that was going to happen), too. Occasionally a child would arrive in pajamas with a sack of clothes and we would need to get her dressed (and breakfasted). Every child had a sheet for the parent to take home every day and on that was some basic stuff like how they ate, when they were changed/went potty and room to write about their day. Whoever was changing diapers had to make sure and write “B.M”. or “urine” or “dry” as she changed. Two of the boys were in cloth diapers which meant they needed to be changed or checked every hour. The other kids were on two hour schedules. Obviously kids were also changed as needed.
By the time every kid was diapered, the 9:30am teacher had arrived and begun bringing some of the kids over to the carpet to play with toys. The snack teacher was washing sticky hands and waiting for the one pokey baby to finish his snack. The diapering teacher was washing her hands for the umpteenth time (of course you have to wash your hands after every diaper change which is hygenically proper but is murder on your hands) and then helping sweep up stomped cheerios.
Art or some project was usually after snack but we needed snack to get cleaned up so we could use the tables. At this age, art projects can be great but they’re also a logistical nightmare. Half the kids aren’t interested the other half are but either finish right away or want to stay there for two hours. Nobody gets to do anything for two hours in daycare because it screws up the group’s schedule so that means at least one kid is going to be dragged wailing from the easel because everyone else has their coats on to go outside. You can’t have a teacher stay with the artist because that puts the other teachers out of ratio (meaning they are then responsible for more kids than daycare licensing allows). Nobody gets what they want. To keep things streamlined and save on supplies, a limited number of colors are allowed and a limited amount of paper is given to each child. If E. wants to paint three pictures today, he’s out of luck. Supplies are always a problem at daycares. I remember that teachers used to start hoarding orange, red, and yellow in July because there was always a rush on those for fall projects. We let the kids decide whether or not they wanted to come do a project but some parents would complain if their kids didn’t have something to bring home everyday. They wanted results and didn’t care about process. At another daycare where I worked, the toddler room (I was in the preschool room) handled this by making every kid do the project. They also doctored the art work. This didn’t happen in our room.
After the morning activity, it was time to go outside. Most of the time with toddlers is spent herding them. You herd them to snack, you herd them to the playground, you herd them back in. There’s barely time for individual attention because if one teacher is spending too much time with one kid, then the other two teachers are trying to handle 6.5 kids apiece on their own. Typically, we each had our “assigned” four or five with flexibility. That way we knew that every kid was being watched. So if J. tripped outside and split his lip, we knew just which teacher was going to be the one to scoop him up, get him some ice, and fill out an accident report.
Oh, another thing I wanted to mention was morning naps. They weren’t on the schedule. One little boy apparently hadn’t read the schedule because his body still needed morning naps and usually demanded one while we were on the playground. He would start crying and refused to let any of us pick him up (the class had recently gone through a huge turn-over of teachers and we were all three brand new there). He would wail, curl up on his blankie and eventually drop off. Eventually we would have to try to move him inside because the class was going in and that would wake him up and he’d start wailing again. We tried leaving him with the baby room teachers while we went outside but he not only cried there but screamed and bit and generally made the baby room a bit hellish so the poor guy was dragged out with us every morning. We talked to the director about changing our outdoor time but to do that meant rearranging the entire school’s schedule (since we took turns on the playground) which wasn’t feasible. So poor C. had a miserable morning every day and we started to dread morning playtime.
Back inside for circle time (which is not really circle time with wobbling toddlers), trying to keep the older kids entertained and trying to stop K. from biting everybody. K. wasn’t happy in a group setting and biting was his way of letting us know that. While one of us (usually me ‘cuz I know more fingerplays) did circle time, the other teacher got lunch from the kitchen and began setting it up, and the third teacher started calling kids to get their diapers checked and hands washed.
Lunchtime! Toddlers are herded to the table to eat. Our snack/lunch table was in the room so that made things easier but messier. Everyone is given the same amount of food and drink except for the veggie child who begins to wail because she doesn’t have a hot dog. Somebody flips their plate on the floor and needs help with that. D. by now has finished his meal and is crying for seconds. One teacher is supervising and trying to socialize with the kids, one teacher is getting the finished kids up and cleaned up and diapered, and one is setting up the cots for naptime which immediately follows lunch.
When every kid is freshly diapered he or she is led to his or her cot where a favorite plaything from home awaits. One of the teachers begins cleaning the spills and the other is distributing bottles to those children whose parents give them bottles at naptime. The other teacher is sitting between the kids who have trouble getting to sleep or who occasionally leap from a cot to bite his neighbor (K.). Somebody puts on some sleepy music and we begin patting backs to get them to sleep.
Nap time is hard because it’s also when lunches have to be taken. Someone would leave as soon as four kids were out (putting the two teachers in ratio) and then an hour later she would come back and in theory, enough kids would be out that the other two would leave. Since I got there earliest, I also left for lunch earliest which left me alone for the second-half of nap. Nap lasts two hours. What always happened is that by the time the two teachers came back, so many kids would be up that I would be trying to keep things just below chaos. Hopefully before too many kids woke up, I’d have time to write on every child’s chart so the parents would know how the day was going. I would also try to lesson plan (ha!) for the next day, like cutting out shapes for an art project or pulling together books or something. As the kids woke up, they would be moved out of the wobbler room (a connected room where nap took place) for free-play. I would stand by the half-door between the two rooms and try to monitor the romping awake children and the sleeping children. This is usually when K. would wake up and I would have to leap over the door to try to save someone from a major chomping. Arghhh. Just remembering it raises my blood pressure.
When the other two teachers arrived it was back to the diapering assembly line and also time to serve snack. The third teacher would clean up the cots. After snack (which resembled morning snack), parents would start to arrive. Ahhh, the blessed sight of a returning parent! We would move the class into the large muscle room and eventually, dwindling in numbers, return to our room to wait out the end of the day.
Now of course I’m leaving a lot out. I’m leaving out bad stuff like how to handle it when someone takes a bloody header off the slide and needs immediate first-aid while the rest of the children begin freaking at the site of blood, or what to do when someone starts throwing up and needs to be seperated from the class only the director is at lunch and someone has to clean up the vomit and said child is still vomiting and now the director is saying she can’t get a hold of the parents and the child doesn’t want to be left with her in her office because he doesn’t know her from Adam so one of your teachers needs to go leaving the rest of the room out of ratio and smelling *really* bad. Or about the parents who sneaks off without saying good-bye to her child no matter how many times you’ve told her not to and you don’t see she’s gone until you hear K. screaming with rage and turn from changing a squirming toddler to see him sink his teeth into another child’s arm from across the room. Rainy days were always bad because it meant we didn’t get outside at all. But I also left out good stuff like how we helped K. manage his anger better and how we finally got his mom to quit leaving like that. And how much fun it was to see E. mastering language. And how C. learned to love one of the teachers and quit sobbing his mornings away. Oh wait. That turned out bad when the teacher quit to go back and get her masters and we were back to square one. (sigh)
I’m also leaving out all of the nurturing that happens. It’s fly-by nurturing because you only have three laps for fourteen kids and you can’t get too comfortable because you need to be ready to leap up to avert disaster. But there’s time for intimate chatting at diaper time and hand washing time and it’s fun to play peek-a-boo in the big muscle room (this was an indoor room with a climbing structure). I loved those kids (especially E. and L. and A. with her funny croaky voice) and I loved some of the parents. But institutional daycare isn’t good for kids.
I don’t think there’s a way to make institutional daycare work either. You can’t hire more teachers because teachers are expensive. You can’t make parents pay more because they’re already paying so much. You can’t cut back on the number of kids because then the daycare doesn’t have enough money to operate. Personally, I think we need to quit thinking about improving institutional care and start trying to figure out a way to reinvent it.
If I ever find myself mother to a toddler and in need of care, I’ll search out a nice cozy home with a small group of mixed-age kids. But a center? Never.
March 17th, 2004 at 8:51 pm
I am a grandmother working part-time in my forth institutional daycare setting. These daycares have been anything from church run to privately owned. I am truly wondering how long I am going to last in this church run setting. I can tell of nightmare treatments of these little people who are entrusted to a strangers care. If parents were Truly aware of the care their precious little one is receiving they would be furious. I have gone to the administrator and the state welfare to report these things to NO avail! I feel that most of these places should be closed, and parents who Really care for these precious children should as you say “look for cozy home settings with small groups of children.”