I don't pay $100 a day for my kids to watch TV - do I?

Kids watching TV at Daycare. Outrageous abuse of  trust, or totally fine in moderation? Go.

So have you heard the one about a mum who goes to pick up her pre-schooler after a hard day’s work and finds she and some of her little friends are sitting around watching Dora The Explorer?

She’s shocked. She doesn’t know what to do. She doesn’t want to rock the boat (do you know how hard it is to get a place at that Daycare centre?), but she feels it can’t be right. Surely she doesn’t pay more than $100 a day for her kids to watch TV? So she takes to Facebook to ask her mum friends.  And then she’s shocked again, because they aren’t. But they are angry.

‘I often pick up my son and the kids are sitting around watching TV while the Daycare staff tidy up around them. It always makes me so angry. I put the TV on at home to do chores, but I have a million things to do. They have one thing to do, and I’m paying them for it  – LOOK AFTER THE CHILDREN.’

‘I would be horrifed, unless it was strictly an educational show, and even then, only for a few minutes.’

‘At my Daycare, they often have a movie afternoon, but all the parents are contacted to ask what the movie should be and if they approve it. I didn’t ‘think the last one was appropriate, so I objected.’

This story isn’t about me, although I have two children in Daycare, and at one of them they do watch TV. I don’t really mind. The Family Daycare professional who looks after my youngest child (and also looked after my oldest, before she went to preschool) often has the telly on at drop-off. Kids are arriving at different times, they are sitting down and having a morning snack, it’s ABC2, to me there’s no harm. By pick-up, Thomas is off, and the kids are invariably playing outside, building things, dressing up, hitting each other over the head with things, you know, what they should be doing.

But at my daughter’s Preschool, I would feel quite differently if TV was a regular part of their day.  There’s more structure there, there’s a whole team of paid professionals, and although I know that the staff have other duties that aren’t strictly kid-contact related – like filling out those forms that all us parents like so much about what our little darlings got up to all day, and cleaning up so the place isn’t a pigsty – I feel like stimulating, teaching and playing with the kids is the most important thing on their to-do list. They also charge more for their services.

Studies show that kids who are in Daycare watch less TV than their stay-home counterparts, and maybe part of where we sit on the ‘TV or no TV’ spectrum is about how guilty we feel about how much they watch in the rest of their day. Some mums tell me that if they know their kid has some TV as part of their day at Daycare, they will limit the amount they’re watching at home.

Some families, of course, don’t watch TV at all, and if that was the case (how do those people cook dinner?) it’s perfectly understandable that they would not want their kids exposed to it when they’re not around. While others want to pay the professionals for the stimulating, educational stuff so that at home they can relax and maybe watch TV as a family.

I can’t help but feel that we expect an enormous amount from Daycare providers. Of course we all want the best for our children. But we expect a very high level of engagement and education, faultless cleanliness and facilities, opening hours that suit our individual needs, affection and interest in our children, nutritious and delicious food, up-to-the-minute updates about what our kids are doing, photos and diaries and dress-up days. And we want it all for not very much money, please, if at all possible.

So if the staff need to put some appropriate TV on for half-an-hour for some sorting-out quiet time, I’m okay with that.

How about you? Would you be upset about the TV being on at Day Care pick-up, or do you think there’s nothing wrong with a little TV?