How can early child care prevent child abuse and child neglect?

“How I wonder what you are?” Child care can give anyone the chills. You think you are good at multitasking but what happens next is something far beyond our levels of understanding. You think task one to be babysitting, task two gets lined up as doing the laundry, task three holds reserves for paying the bills in time, task four comes straight from your office to finish up that presentation before you get fired and yes there is the food and care of the family members to be attended upon. Hours hence, you find yourself surrounded by squeaky rubber toys and crayon drawings, with a crawling someone, licking porridge off your head, some meal you destroyed when you accidently slipped over one of the fluffy teddy bears on the way greeting you with that threaded smile and eyeing you with beaded glares while you manage to cope with the to do list without the negligence for the baby at your disposal.

You wake up from your nightmare and think over what just happened. That is certainly not how you had planned it out. However babies are a tough task till you have the knowledge of how to handle a knife with hands greased with butter. I am fortunate to have a mother who knew how to do it well. There are arguments and confrontations on a daily basis when it comes to certain families. Mine was one of them. There was a wise decision apparently that my mother took that was to move to a new city when I was barely one and both my parents were working professionals. This decision was taken because I was planned to be raised in a bigger city than the one with my ancestral place which housed twenty members and a city not so good enough for schools where my mother could get me admitted. So here I was, a planned baby with further plans of being admitted to the finest preschool in the new town, where I was at the disposal of a rickshaw driver who dropped me at a crèche everyday where I was taken care of till my mother or father could pick me up on their way back from work.

I loved my childhood. A single child, another home where I had other kids to play with even after school, another mother who loved me dearly in the house, the happy faces I saw later in the evening when Mumma and Papa fetched me home and the contended faces all of us had while we dozed off to fend for another day in our life. I used to wonder at the happy faces when there was a quarrel while all of us stayed back home for weekends. I used to cry out to shut my parents out so that they could attend upon me for no reason, a small effort on my part to make them stop quarrelling. That helped sometimes, however it did not a lot many times. I was afraid at times that if I cry any further, they might end up shouting at me too. It wasn’t just the work that bothered them. Families delve into deeper ends of relationships and get complicated, and for us there were issues about a joint family going nuclear even when the other relatives had done the same for their children.

You will never know who might take undue advantage of you and get things done, especially amidst this chaos in the house. Children are the most vulnerable beings when it comes to getting work done. You bribe them for a sweet and they will slog all day long to see you smile again and offer them a sweet yet again. There is indeed a lot of courage in parents who leave their child to the responsibility of others while they earn the bread to fetch for the kid. I was fortunate to be in the hands of somebody who had a daughter my age, a family who treated me as their own and a home I felt I was always welcomed to. If one asks me, I respond about child care being the one place where the child grows oblivious of all the worries in his life. I counted my numbers, drew and painted, made friends with the crèche owner’s daughter, did my homework, played and learnt to take care of myself even when I got hurt while fooling around in the ground or stepping down the stairs. My parents were proud of me and so was I. I was living my childhood, surrounded by a bunch of people who cared enough for me and with friends who I made memories with.

I heard my parents speak to each other about what impact they might have on me if the present scenario continued as during the weekend scene. The event that turned the tables for our house was the decision to admit me to a crèche. It was just two blocks across the street and the rickshaw driver was someone who had been staying near the house for years. All seemed settled and when my parents were back from work, I became a reason to waiver off all the stress they had. They found more time for me and themselves. Since I was properly taken care of and fed at the crèche, this lead to increase in the happiness I was worrying about. I became independent early enough to differentiate between right and wrong, grew closer to my parents than anticipated, interacted with greater number of people at an early stage, restored peace of mind to my parents and gave them a reason to smile after work and become children again. I can vouch that early child care for me has helped me grow into a responsible and confident individual who can sense her parents smile even today when they return from work to give her a call.