Daycare Sends 30 Toddlers To The Hospital, Which Is Why Mine Stay Home

bleachThirty children between the ages of 14 and 19 months were accidentally given diluted bleach to drink at Growing Tree Learning Center in New Jersey. Call me a sanctimommy until the cows come home, but it’s stories like this that made me unwilling to put my own kids in daycare.

According to Fox43News, a weak cleaning solution of bleach and water was in a unmarked bottle. A daycare worker who was new to the job thought the container held pure water, and gave it to the children. The executive director for the learning center, Keith Kearney, said there is an ongoing investigation as to how this incident happened because the water bottle with the bleach solution was located not with food, but in an area with other cleaning supplies. The employee responsible has been fired.

Luckily, the solution was not very strong, and although the majority of the children were taken to the hospital for treatment, everyone is expected to be fine. Even though there was no long term damage and all the children are going to be alright, I still feel horrible for these families. I could not imagine the fear and anger I would feel if I thought my children were being well cared for and instead found out they had been fed bleach.

I know that for many families, keeping a child out of daycare simply isn’t an option. Other families choose to enroll their children because daycare is a great way for kids to socialize, mature and learn to respect adults besides their parents. But it seems like every other day there are daycare horror stories in the news, from tales of children being encouraged to fight each other for the amusement of the daycare workers, kids being left behind at the park, or random strangers wandering about the daycare premises.

I am an anxious mom to begin with and stories like this do little to make me feel confident  entrusting my kids to the care of other adults for extended periods of time. I know that accidents happen and that my kids could have an incident while in my care just as easily as they could at a daycare, but if something happens under my watch at least I will only have myself to blame. I know there are benefits to daycare, but reading about this incident and others like it makes me extremely grateful that I am able to be home with my kids. Once my children are old enough to talk clearly and tell me about their day, I may reconsider my position, but for now, I’m on toddler guard duty.

 (Image: design56/Shutterstock)

 

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