A baby doesn’t “accidentally” end up UNDER YOUR LEG held FACE DOWN for more than 20 F#@&ING minutes because you…oops…“fell asleep”. Give me a friggin break! She was pinning the baby down in hopes of quieting the baby and forcing it to sleep. If you are a Nanny and THIS is your only way to quiet a fussy baby, then you are in the wrong profession. If you employed this Nanny then you as the employer are responsible for what she does while in your employ.
Add to that OTHER people there AND CCTV cameras…shut the place down.
You’re trolling, right? A fucking baby died in this daycare center. Murdered by one of their care providers. Why was she hired in the first place? If they have CCTV, why didn’t someone notice and stop her when it was obvious she was killing him? Why did the center initially try to evade responsibility after the murder? Why did they try to cover for the murderer? Would you send your kid here? Well, would you?
Of course it should be shut down. Can’t believe someone is even questioning this.
The problem is systemic because this sort of story isn’t an isolated one. I truly don’t know how we can prevent these tragedies from happening altogether, but there have to be some actions that can be taken to improve things.
It’s only recently that cameras have become mandatory at these schools. Sometimes, schools “lose” the footage or refuse to release it. It shouldn’t be up to the schools and it should be possible to view the daycare cameras remotely and store the records in the cloud.
Having a certificate clearly isn’t enough (the woman in this case was certified). There needs to be clear and severe penalties for instances of neglect and abuse that result in injuries and death - both criminal penalties for the carers and meaningful civil/financial penalties for the daycares themselves. Maybe that will encourage daycare owners to take a more active role in ensuring that their staff don’t (e.g.) smother children with blankets (true story) or crush them into the mattress until they stop moving (I still can’t believe this woman didn’t bother even checking that he was asleep and in a comfortable position after she’d smothered the life out of him - I remember checking my son’s breathing all the goddamn time when he was tiny and I hadn’t even been pinning him down at bedtime…)
The daycare in this case was more concerned with minimizing the fallout among the other parents than contacting my friend (it took them 40 hours to reach out). What they should have been doing was proactively ensuring that the carers were actually caring for the children. Instead of emphasizing pointless bullshit like “all the kids must sleep at the same time” (in the video you can see the other cribs are covered with blankets like birdcages - you can’t even see the babies inside and you’d never know if one of them were vomiting, for example), they could be encouraging compassion. This woman could have taken the child on her stomach and rocked him till he slept, or read him a story, or basically done anything that didn’t involve pinning him face-down till he “slept”.
I don’t have any words of comfort for my friend and I’m heartbroken for her. All I can hope is that someone, somewhere will finally take some strong actions in an attempt to prevent more of this kind of tragedy. Perhaps her story is the wake-up call that people need to mobilize and demand changes.
For Chinese readers you can read a summary of some of the other cases I alluded to on Appledaily, who published this article yesterday:
I wish. But it seems like every 3 months there’s another daycare horror story and nothing changes once the outrage dies down. Didn’t a little girl suffocate after being locked in a shoe closet a while ago?
The child’s mother has collected all the news items together under one Facebook page called “The story of my child at Taiwan’s largest daycare chain”.
Most of the information is in Mandarin. I believe/hope she will be moving toward pushing for change in Taiwan to prevent repetitions of such terrible tragedies, as well as providing updates on the legal situation in her own case.
If you can, please share the page with your friends - especially your Taiwanese friends.
You’re right. The timeline post in English doesn’t - nor does the Mandarin version of the same (though to be fair I have no idea how she held it together enough to write those posts in the first place)
Some of the English language news reports refer to We Care Baby and all the Mandarin news items on the new page refer to it by name as 「我們的托嬰中心」or 「我們的連鎖托嬰」.
The Mandarin names won’t translate well if anyone uses machine translation to read the posts, as they look like a deliberate masking of the real name (“Our daycare center”, “Our daycare chain”).
There was a case not too long ago of another baby murdered in a daycare where the nanny put the baby under her thigh in order to “help it go to sleep”, the child also suffocated.
The daycare my son went to from 1.5 to 3 yo had CCTV in most areas which parents could access at any time from their cellphone. We never seen anything that even approached child abuse however there quite a number of times over his year+ stay there where one of us called the center and asked WTF was going on. After seeing news reports and our own experience with the CCTV I would never have a baby in a daycare here which didn’t have parent accessible CCTV coverage.
They have CCTV 24 hour coverage at pet hotels. It should be mandatory for kids.
The school of thought responsible for “letting the children cry” is the same one proposing gentle pressure to help babies feel safe…interpreted here as imposing the sleeping schedule no matter if kid has a fever/disease, is restless or upset or sick.
To keep them warm and covered of course. Because god forbid a cool breeze comes into contact with their cheek and releases utter devastation upon their open cells. I’m sure the reasoning is something similar to that kind of backwards bullshit.
The government did an investigation. They reviewed 14 days of CCTV inside the daycare. They found that ALL of the staff were using pressure and covering the mouths and noses of the children to get them to sleep for extended amounts of time.
The government has ordered the daycare be shutdown for 1 year.
I feel that all of the staff should lose their personal daycare / nanny licenses and the place fined so heavily they would never be able to reopen again under a new name and location.
Jesus Christ. A one year shutdown? They should all face jail time for putting all those kids at risk and then receive an “UNHIRABLE” stamp on their faces.
Ah, that one old trick to get the kids to sleep. They should have known the other one, which is much faster. A quick punch to the baby’s face knocks them out right away.
