Per­haps the time is nigh for me to do so. I recent­ly read an arti­cle by a UX blog­ger in which he implied fail­ure is a good thing. How else can we learn? 

After near­ly five months of de-tox­ing from my child­care job of four years and reflect­ing on the expe­ri­ence, here’s where I went wrong towards the end: My com­mu­ni­ca­tion skills were poor when need­ing to express extreme sit­u­a­tions (although on reflec­tion only one staff mem­ber and the own­er real­ly caused me prob­lems), my expec­ta­tions of my boss and one of my col­leagues were too high, I was too trust­ing of them – I took them at face val­ue when they were two-faced!

Yes, I made mis­takes but at least those mis­takes were always with those two adults and nev­er with the babies and young chil­dren in my care – in that regard my con­science is clear.

I made a mis­take in not trust­ing my gut instinct about those per­son­al­i­ties I had to work with. I was mis­tak­en in not trust­ing my instinct when I saw poor behav­iours and mis­treat­ment of babies and tod­dlers. In the ear­li­est days on the job I made the mis­take of allow­ing myself to care so much about the qual­i­ty of care babies and young chil­dren deserved to receive, from their par­ents or car­ers, that I com­pro­mised my own health and the hap­pi­ness of my fam­i­ly. I worked myself ragged to main­tain high stan­dards, fre­quent­ly hav­ing to cov­er up for the neg­li­gence and lazi­ness of those same two people.

I sup­pose I should at least be at peace that I didn’t ‘break any babies’ dur­ing my four year tenure.

There was no way to blow the whis­tle on such poor behav­iour by staff or owner. 

‘Breaking babies’ is a psy­cho­log­i­cal habit and once entrenched in a caregiver’s, or even in a parent’s, man­ner they don’t even under­stand that’s what they’re doing – they blame the oth­er par­ent, staff mem­bers, the school’s own­er, who­ev­er they can. “I don’t know” and “I wasn’t there” were famil­iar mantras I heard on my watch. 

To com­pen­sate for my mis­takes I am going to have to accom­plish some­thing big to let the world know there is a bet­ter way to care for young chil­dren. I believe adults can be taught the best way to care for babies so that they aren’t bro­ken from the moment they enter care. But we do need to recog­nise very quick­ly when an adult is dys­func­tion­al and needs to be fired.

We can­not keep it secret that babies and tod­dlers are being bro­ken while they’re in daycare! 

That would be the most enor­mous mis­take of all.