HELP....Need Advice Regarding a Family I Provide Care To.

Savannah, I am so sorry for all the sorrow your family has experienced in the past year. I am glad to hear you are relying on your faith and family to help you through this very difficult time. Your children and the children you care for are blessed to have someone like you in their lives.

That said, it seems like you are putting up with more than you should from the kids in this new family. If one of these kids were hitting a child that was not your own and the parent complained--what would you do? Are you going easier on the hitter b/c it is your child being hit and you don't want to appear to over-react? My guess is that since this girl's brothers play roughly with her, that she is simply modeling what she has experienced by playing roughly with a child younger than she. However, the mother cannot use that as an excuse for her child hitting your newborn in the head with a train!! What if she hit the soft spot and caused brain damage?! As you have found, you can't realistically keep them apart or watch them both constantly and still provide good care to all the children. I would say put this family on two week notice that if you do not see acceptable improvement in the aggressive behavior of their kids, they will be out. Mom and dad need to reinforce your rules at their home or there is no hope the kids will stop being so rough. Good luck!

Is there anyway you could hire an assistant on short notice? Can you post a notice with a temp agency and work out a payment plan? Or perhaps post an opening at a local community college or anywhere that licenses or certifies daycare assistants? It really sounds like you have to many little ones to handle at once and well. To me it sounds like a disaster waiting to happen with the age differences and the apparently mounting discipline issues.

If you can't get help quick and soon, perhaps you should start making arrangements or find a place you can recommend this family to go to in the next weeks or so. If you didn't draw up behaviorial expectations of the kids with the parents you may have bigtime pushback. Be ready for that. If you do have to let the family go, and plan to continue with daycare, be sure to lay out behaviorial expectations with parents and give yourself plenty of outs for the future.

You have done more than your share to work with this family. It sounds in your best interest to let the family go. Childcares we have attended simply state that the childcare provider will give a 2 week notice and may terminate care at their discretion. Perhaps you might try some language like that in your contract. And as someone else mentioned, you may lose other families. If my child was being targeted like that from another family I'd leave the childcare too. Enough is enough!! You shouldn't have to seperate your children to keep them safe from the other kids. Simply tell the mom it is not working out and you are giving her a 2 week notice. Good luck with it.

The fact that all 3 kids show aggressive behavior is a bad sign. Something is going on at home; at the very least they have poor boundaries and their parents aren't doing squat about it.

In addition to this family, you don't say how many other kids you are watching... It sounds like just your own baby and the 16 month old would be a handful. IMO, you would not be hasty in letting this family go. I would not put up with a newborn (especially my own!) being terrorized. Like someone else here pointed out--imagine if the 16 month old was hitting someone else's baby--would you put up with that? Do you think another parent would?

You might lose your other families if these kids get too much more out of control. You've already talked to the mother, and she seemed to brush you off. Ultimately you have to decide if this family is worth the hassle or not.

I think you need to decide yourself if you want to keep this family or not. Either way I see where you'd come from.

If you do keep them just continue to have the chlidren sectioned off. Like most daycare centers the infants and older toddlers are not in the same room at all. There is nothing wrong with sectioning the kids off.

I use to work at a friends inhome daycare and when we had kids hurt other's feelings, not share, or hit we would send the "victim" to the other child and have them say "I don't like it when you....." If the victim couldn't talk or use words we would sorta do it for them. It sounds so simple yet it really works well.