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Spanking in preschool

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shmokes:

--- Quote from: saint on February 02, 2010, 10:12:12 am ---
I regret how long it took for us to realize something was wrong.


--- End quote ---

That's the thing that makes me feel so guilty.  When I look back on it I just think to myself, "---maternal-smurf---, you knew there was something wrong.  Your gut was telling you so all along.  There's no excuse."

And I had even articulated it to my wife on a few different occasions.  I'd be like, "You know . . . I don't like this place.  I feel like there are too many kids per teacher, and they have them watch TV a lot, and Maddy's face is always dirty when we pick her up.  I mean, they know when we're gonna be there.  You'd think, even if they sucked, that they would have the presence of mind to be like, "Hey, it's 4:30, we should clean her up."  And Stacy would be like, yeah, we should keep an eye on it and maybe think about looking for another place.

In fact, the final straw was that throughout most of the day there were English speakers there, but Maddy's regular teacher worked 7am-4pm, and for the last couple hours of business there were only Spanish speakers.  Stacy went in one day and they had some form she needed to sign, but the form was in Spanish.  And Stacy signed it!!!   :o  Then she called me afterward because she felt so uncomfortable about what she had just done.  I was beside myself and I called, but just got a Spanish speaker.  So I called again and said to let me leave a message and I left a message, letting them know how furious I was about it and that I wanted to find out what the form was and make sure that didn't happen again.  But they never returned my call.  So I called over and over the next day and got voicemail all day long so I drove down there and pulled Maddy out of daycare.  At that point I finally was able to find out what the form was, and it was something benign, but that was beside the point by then.

I feel like such an idiot, though, that I allowed it to go on for so long.  I'm just lucky that Maddy will never really know about it because I feel like it's almost a betrayal.  Like . . . I'm all she's got.  If she can't trust me to protect her from ---steaming pile of meadow muffin--- like that, who can she trust?  She's totally powerless.  And I swear, if there's a god Maddy is her pièce de résistance.  There is simply no excuse for my being so careless with something so valuable.

Hoopz:

--- Quote from: shmokes on February 02, 2010, 02:50:55 pm ---There is simply no excuse for my being so careless with something so valuable.

--- End quote ---
More parents need this perspective.

 :applaud:

RayB:

--- Quote from: shmokes on February 02, 2010, 10:06:16 am ---Voila

--- End quote ---
(Fixed the spelling for you)

That chart you linked to is pretty damn interesting. Most (all?) the states with the highest numbers seem to coincide with states with the highest problems of illiteracy, teen pregnancy, poverty, etc... ??

ChadTower:

You need to learn some perspective, though.  Maybe that just needs time to develop.  You weren't careless as she didn't get hurt, molested, mistreated, etc.  It was just a subpar daycare.  You did something about it.  Maybe you could have done it a little sooner but the perspective here is that we're talking about a few weeks over the course of a lifetime.  It's done, there was no harm, and now she's in a (hopefully) better facility.

shmokes:
Right right.  Of course.  It's not like I'm going to call DFS or whip myself with a belt or anything.  I consider myself an excellent parent.  It sounds like I'm harder on myself than I am because I'm describing this incident and the way I feel about it in isolation.  In the grand scheme of things, of course, it is minor. 

It just nags me because on the one hand I have the pretty legit excuse of inexperience.  But on the other, my gut was sounding the alarm and I kept telling it to stop overreacting.  It was careless, and I'm lucky that the problem wasn't worse.  And I learned a very valuable lesson (hopefully :) ).  It's fairly minor in the grand scheme of thigns, but that's partly luck.  It could have been major, and either way I had my eye off the ball.

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