mark@tove.UUCP (Mark Weiser) (10/21/84)
The U.S. newspapers have recently been filled with articles about
various childcare workers being arrested for sexual abuse of their
little charges. This has brought to mind discussions my wife and I
had when we were figuring out our work and childcare arrangements
while expecting our first child. (Now have 2, ages 3 and 7).
I haven't heard these exact considerations mentioned before, so
I thought I would bring them out.
We decided to be extremely careful about choosing an organization,
or an individual, to leave our child with or to have come into our
home to care for our children. There are many reasons to be careful,
but an especially important one is the potential for sexual abuse.
If someone has a propensity for sexually abusing children then
they will be driven to situations in which they can indulge that
propensity. That means that daycare centers and the like will
have more than their share of this sort of person. Newspaper
ads offering to care for children in someones home always give
me the shivers. Etc. In some sense (slight silliness here)
the best childcare person is a reluctant one. If they want to watch
your child, wonder why! Thinking about this is enough to make
you never let your child out of your sight.
We are probably a little over paranoid, but we have avoided
putting ads in the paper for childcare workers or calling any of
the many ads for these reasons. We have a very reliable
person now, we think, but our first few times using her as
a babysitter we snuck around peeking in the window for the
first half hour or so. (It felt pretty silly. Does anyone
else do this?) We are also very glad that our daycare place
is a Montessori school whose classrooms have walls that are
almost all glass with people coming and going all the time.
--
Spoken: Mark Weiser ARPA: mark@maryland
CSNet: mark@umcp-cs UUCP: {seismo,allegra}!umcp-cs!mark
U.S.: Computer Science Dept., University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742