Parenting is no walk in the park. If you’re raising children, you will have moments when you need to take the occasional time off from your duties to keep your sanity.
What isn’t acceptable is abandoning those responsibilities altogether and having someone else do it for you. An entitled, thoughtless mother did exactly this when she left her infant daughter at a daycare and treated the child as if she were a piece of checked baggage.
When the daycare employee called her out, she had the audacity to assert her position as a paying customer, as if she did nothing wrong.
Parents need the occasional time off from their child-rearing duties
A mom, however, completely abandoned those duties and passed them onto a daycare she dropped her infant daughter off at
Worse, she saw no wrong in what she did
Being separated from a parent can be one of the earliest horrible memories a child can carry
Infants develop attachments to their parents as early as six months. That means at 15 months, the child in the story may have already endured an episode of traumatic separation.
Simply put, it’s when children get detached from their primary caregivers, whether forcibly or otherwise. And according to experts, it has serious consequences for the child.
One of these is a possible disruption of a secure attachment.
“Attachment is the lens through which children come to know what they can expect from the world around them,” Dr. Dylan Gee, a professor of psychology and psychiatry at Yale University, tells the Child Mind Institute. “Is this going to be a safe place or a dangerous place? This is foundational to a child’s sense of their ability to navigate the world.”
Dr. Gee went on to explain that a child’s brain is “plastic” and constantly learns to understand their environment and manage stress. But when traumatic separation happens, especially in childhood, neurobiological development can be affected, even stunted.
On the flip side, the mom may also have been experiencing burnout, which is why she went out to socialize and then forgot about her child at daycare. If that is the case, her behavior still doesn't absolve her of what she did.
This is why Berkley University’s The Greater Good Science Center recommends defining what proper self-care is. It suggests healthier ways to decompress, like grabbing almonds instead of a muffin or practicing gratitude.
In the story’s case, the mom could’ve chosen other activities, like a spa day, instead of “going out for drinks,” which made her lose track of time. She was also wrong to think the daycare owes her because she is a paying customer.
At the end of the day, she is the mother with responsibilities to her daughter. She should be fulfilling them, not someone else.
Some readers had their questions, which the author gladly answered
Others shared similar experiences
