I’ve been following a story in the media here about an unlicensed child care provider who has been arrested and charged with forcible confinement and obstructing police. The story was first published yesterday, with details of how the parents of 11 children, ages one to four, were called to come and pick up their children at the care provider’s home after police and paramedics raided the home following complaints by two sets of parents. I couldn’t help but imagine what it must have been like for those parents to get that call out of the blue in the middle of the day… “Come and pick up your kids, the police and paramedics have shut down your daycare.”
Today, the follow-up story said that four of the youngest children, all under the age of two, were “forcibly confined” in a playpen in the furnace room of the home during the day.
I’m chilled by this story because it could have so easily been me, been my kids. The article quoted one parent as saying “he had not seen the place where the children stayed during the day, and never thought to ask because he had known [the daycare provider] for the past 10 years and trusted her.” A part of me wants to rail against the parents for not being more diligent, but who am I kidding? I had only the vaguest idea of what was going on with the kids during the day when they were in home care, and almost all of that came from what they told me. Sure, when we first signed up with a care provided, I asked to see the places where the kids would eat and sleep and play, but after those first couple of meetings, the furthest I usually went into the house was the front hallway to help put on or take off boots and coats. When I think about the amount of trust that is built into a daycare relationship, and the very few checks and balances we put into the system, it makes me a little bit queasy.
Even though I’ve been researching (and ranting on) daycare issues for a while now, there were issues that these articles have clarified for me. In Ontario, an unlicensed care provider can provide care to a maximum of five children under 10 years of age and unrelated to her, regardless of how many caregivers are present. I always thought that if there was another adult present, the caregiver was allowed to take on more kids, but apparently that’s not the case. The fines are significant, too, topping out at $2000 per day. I can think of two or three caregivers I know personally in the neighbourhood who might want to take note of this… although it would take an unsatisfied parent or disgruntled neighbour reporting them to the authorities to set any kind of fine in motion, because there doesn’t seem to be any kind of infrastructure for the review of unlicenced care in Ontario.
A related article in today’s Citizen also noted that “according to the City of Ottawa, there are 17,247 spots available at licensed child care facilities within the city — but there are 12,000 children on the waiting list.” Another stat extrapolates to the province as a whole: “For the 1.919 million Ontario children under the age of 12, there were only 229,875 licensed child care spots.”
What this means to me as a parent is that I’m over the barrel when it comes to child care. It’s a sellers’ market for child care, and now that I’m lucky enough to have someone I trust with the boys, I’m terrified to do anything to jeopardize that relationship. I’m honouring our initial contract with our nanny through May, even though I’ll be home with the boys starting in January. No doubt, it will be great to have an extra set of hands to help with the new baby for those first bleary couple of weeks, but I’m thinking it’s going to get pretty redundant after a month or so when the extra $350 a week would come in really handy. But, I don’t want to rock the childcare boat lest I find myself scrambling – again. And that’s a slippery slope indeed, and exactly how parents develop the kind of willful obliviousness that lets an extreme situation like the one in those articles happen.
Back in the day, when I first started looking into child care for Tristan, I actually had a preference for unlicensed care because of the flexibility it offered. Now, my first preference is for licensed care, and when The Player to be Named Later is born, I’ll put all three boys back into the system on waiting lists for licensed, in-home care. It didn’t work out for us last time, but maybe with a year’s lead time, we’ll get lucky. In an ideal world, our sweet nanny will still be available… but I can’t afford to bet on it. In the end, it’s not like my preferences matter anyway, because in a market like this, sometimes you just have to take whatever you can get… and that’s a sad and scary thought.