By “right to know”, I mean in the colloquial sense, since I am aware that it is unlikely that this specific situation is determined by law and if it was, I would have put this in GQ rather then IMHO.
My daughter was in a day home and she was the biter. She was around 1 1/2 at the time and she bit the son of the woman running the day home…
I was mortified, but honestly there was nothing much that I could do. My daughter never bit at home, only the few times at the day home. I couldn’t punish her hours after the fact. All I could do was try and talk to the one and a half year old. She eventually grew out of it, and a few months later when her victim was the same age as when she started biting, she became the victim.
It’s a stage. Lots of kids go through it.
What does the bolded part mean?
From Dictionay.com
Yeah, no kidding. I was wondering what you thought it meant to have a right to know something “in the colloquial sense.” You don’t appear willing to be introspective here or to learn anything, though.
OK, I totally take back the feral comment. I was picturing slightly older kids.
I said it’s not a yes-or-no question. I think you don’t have a right to know who bit your kid - I would want to, too, but I think most daycares refuse to give names to either side, because they don’t want some once-off thing turning into a big deal. Most kids experiment with biting at least once, and the owners don’t want parents getting embarrassed or confrontational or awkward around each other if this was nothing more serious than that.
But I do think you have a right to know who’s *biting *your kid. If this is a repeated thing, then it’s different. At that point, there’s something in the daycare that’s an ongoing danger to your kid - and you have a right to know exactly what it is, what’s going wrong and how they plan to prevent it from going wrong again, same as if there was some piece of playground equipment that kept slicing your kid’s leg open.
Where are you going with this? Is this thread about to get more wanky / delightful?
So, you asked a simple question, got a simple answer, and from that deduced that I am not willing to be introspective or learn anything? Wow. Okay.
I hope so. I hope we get a six page trainwreck exploring the mens rea of toddlers.
That’s a terribly paternalistic attitude for a day care center to have. For the one in a million chance that a crazy parent will open fire on a toddler, the day care center has decided that it is in a better position than me as a parent to determine the best course of action to handle my kid being around a biting kid.
Maybe it was Janie, the same little shitstain that bit my kid last week at home? Maybe the day care center needs to know that? Maybe her parents need to know it? Maybe I need to find a new day care center if they don’t take better action against Janie?
The bottom line is that as a parent (and yes, a parent that has a civil cause of action), I should be making the decision about my course of action instead of some administrator at the day care center. Chances are that we will agree that it’s a “kids will be kids” moment, but if we don’t, then I get the final say-so about how to move forward.
Also, who’s to say that the day care teacher wasn’t doing a line of coke in the bathroom and left the class unsupervised when it happened? By allowing the center to hide behind confidentiality, you’ve given them a way to keep secret any policies that they have which endanger the children.
The parents should be entitled to any and all information about an incident so they can choose how to handle the situation, whether that be calling the kid’s parents, or suing the day care center.
This is ridiculous. The only thing anyone has said they have a right to keep confidential is the identity of the biter. The idea that they’d be using such confidentiality as a shield to hide their coke use in the bathroom has got to be one of the stupidest things ever posted. If they’re gonna keep their coke use secret, they’re gonna do so by not telling you about their coke use, in violation of policies, not by setting up confidentiality agreements.
I voted that it depends, but I was thinking in a global sense. In the case of a daycare group of toddlers, I’d say no. If the children are older, then maybe.
There are very few insane parents, sure, but almost every parent whose child has been injured is capable of losing perspective. For instance, a perfectly rational human being may be moved to forget that “that little shitstain Janie” is also a small child who is still developing. That parent may be too emotional to remember that everyone’s child is sometimes “that little shitstain” and that it behooves all of us to give kids a little slack because they’re children. I’d withhold identifying information from the parents of the biting victim to try to keep them from overreacting against the biter, who is also a toddler.
However, I work with adolescents, and although they’re also not fully developed people, there are occasions when it’s appropriate for a victim’s parents to press charges against the child who hurt their kid. I’d still withhold the name of the offender unless parents were actually filing a police report. In fact, that’s exactly what our school does.
Full disclosure: my oldest child was one of the feral sort, and she was a serial biter when she was three. I ended up keeping her out of group situations unless I was there to restrain her. She grew out of it, and I don’t believe she’s bitten anyone for the past 20 years or so. In fact, in my (admittedly biased) opinion, she’s turned out quite nicely. I’m not sure what she’d be like if her victims’ families had confronted and shunned us because she was so vicious as a toddler.
The coke use was hyperbole. If the center establishes a precedent that matter X is confidential and that only the day care center, and not the parent, needs to know, then it sets up a system where there is no parental oversight over matter X. It’s a “just trust us, we will handle it properly” standard that if abused will be unknown because they are deliberately hiding it.
You do have the final say - you can take your kid out of day care. Other than that, not so much.
This still makes absolutely no sense at all. There are good reasons to keep the biter’s identity confidential, as others have laid out in this thread; you’ve introduced a classic example of the slippery slope fallacy, without offering any response at all to the reasons for confidentiality. Really poor argumentation.
Without all of the information being provided to me, how do I know if that’s the step I should take?
The only “good” reason I’ve heard is that some lunatic might go nuts and kill the other kid…I think. If that’s the case, then we should ban private birthday parties and play dates that have no such confidentiality rules and where parents are presumably killing each other over their 2 year olds’ behavior.
I outlined all of the reasons why a parent should know. And again, who in the hell is some pencil pusher at a day care center to decide that he/she is in a better position to handle a battery on my child than me?
Not that some lunatic might go postal, no - I don’t know about anyone else, but I never said anything like that. That some parents might be obnoxious about it, or the biter’s parents might feel really uncomfortable around the bitee’s, and the atmosphere could turn really sour over a kids-being-kids once-off. That’s why I feel that you do have a right to know about an ongoing situation, because that demands action, where a once-off doesn’t.
Again, I would also *want *to know, even about a once-off. And I think I’m perfectly capable of handling being on either end of the situation like a grown adult. But I don’t think I have a *right *to know.