Child Care Workers Put In the Naughty Corner

Child Care Workers Put In The Naughty Corner
For over discipline while other centres accused of neglect

Two more conflicting stories have emerged this week due to child care and its regulation – with a new ratings system due to start next year. The Herald reported that more than 1000 children needed medical treatment and dozens were taken to hospital after serious accidents at childcare centres in NSW last year.

A Herald investigation revealed many of the accidents were not witnessed by staff, raising serious questions about supervision with children being sent home with broken arms and elbows and other injuries unseen or unreported by centre staff.

This apparent neglect, if true, only serves to back up the need for smaller staff to children ratios, which will come into effect by January 2012, and demonstrates the need for more qualified staff and better pay for those who are in charge of our children on a daily basis. This, teamed with other news stories about the call to fine child care workers up to $50,000 for putting over-disciplining children or inappropriate discipline metered out in the form of the naughty corner or in the more PC term, "time out". Apparently time out is no longer PC or appropriate given it excludes children from participating in activities and can lead to long-term psychological damage.

Is a crackdown on childcare workers and separating children going too far? Is this over-regulation in the extreme? If we start dictating every little way child care centre workers can or cannot talk to, deal with or discipline our children, we're simply taking every bit of authority away from them and they may as well be completely unqualified (albeit perhaps with a first aid certificate) and told to simply babysit the kids and make sure they don't injure themselves or others…

This issue was dealt with very deftly (but sensitively and without excluding any of her listeners) by the ABC's The Mummy Monologues this week, with mother-of-two Amy Taylor-Kabbaz – talking about the politics of the naughty corner.

Amy Taylor Kabbaz rightly sums up the dilemma: "I don't endorse the policy of putting a child in a 'naughty corner' where they are humiliated in front of all their peers and made to feel like an outcast. I think we all know this type of discipline does nothing to encourage a child to behave better, and I am reassured to see the Childcare Association reassuring us that this type of disciplining is not allowed.

"But removing a child from the sandpit when they are throwing sand, and taking them away from the play area to talk to them about their behaviour? Surely that is OK. How else do you teach that child right from wrong? And how else do you set a good example to all the other children?"

If we are asking for child care workers to educate our children and do more than simply babysitting, and if we are keen for child care workers to have proper early childhood education qualifications, surely they should be given the autonomy they deserve trusted to get it right?

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