Child Care or Child Watch?

From the desk of April…

My boys attend an enriching, loving child care facility while my husband and I are working on weekdays.  This child care facility offers them a healthy place to cultivate their love of learning and social development each day.  The teachers at this center are a wonderful, kind and understanding bunch who also, thankfully, love to laugh.

At my workout facility recently, my boys stayed in the child watch room while I attempted to get some exercise.  This experience was a negative one and completely different from the child care experiences they are used to.  An incident had occurred with my youngest (who was attempting to potty train) that upset me a great deal.   I gently dealt with this at home with my little boy and followed up the next day with the director of the workout facility.  Hopefully, these people are reflective practitioners who will reevaluate their procedures and policies.  We’ll see.

This incident made me wonder.  What are the differences in “Child Care” v. “Child Watch”?  The term “care” evokes positive feelings- love, kindness, giving, sharing while “watch” means only to observe.  My job allows me to see many different teachers each day.  When thinking back on this, I honestly can say that I witness a great deal of child “caring” each day.  Teachers who want to cultivate students to not only gain knowledge and understanding of subject matter but a desire to learn and become independent thinkers along the way.  Sometimes, simply pausing to reflect on the practices a teacher has in place can help.  Sometimes, it’s a student feeling proud of his accomplishments for the first time in a long time.  Sometimes, it’s a simple caring feeling that comes from a lesson that was effective and positive.

I can imagine that a less caring teacher could be at a school to only “watch” students.  Giving meaningless assignments.  Asking students to think very little.  Worrying only about test scores and data instead of real learning and truly engaging tasks.  The thought of this makes me sad and a little sick.

What are our schools participating more in these days?  What methods of instruction promote child care vs. child watch?  I can only hope my boys are immersed in an environment of child care, not the latter!