The proper punishment for the negligent mother at the Cincinnati Zoo
would be at least a lifetime ban from the zoo.
As for criminal charges, I'll punt on that one, but CPS should investigate.
= new reply since forum marked as read
...I'll do exactly what you can do with your presumptive attitude about who is and isn't sympathetic. And when we're done, we'll still be wondering if you have a suggestion of what to do or if you just wanted to toss a little chum in the water.
Have a great evening.
:large
On one hand, you care enough about your child's well being that you would not want him/her cared for by an individual who has had a lapse in judgement and shown insufficient remorse. Sounds like you're hyper attentive (in a good way) and seriously concerned about the well being of your child...so much so that you feel comfortable making judgements like this based on a 100 word Facebook post. That's your prerogative.
On the other hand, you think Harambe's life was of far greater value to this planet than the life of a child.
So I have to ask...when you say the "life of a child"...do you include your child in that equation? Or do you mean Issac, this child. Would you, if you could...willingly trade the life of your child for Harambe's if you could be guaranteed that he would live. Or are you simply suggesting that this day care provider trade the life of her child Issac for Harambe's.
See - always easy to point out what one of the other 7 billion of us should do but it's a lot tougher when it comes home to our house.
Enjoy what's left of your Memorial Day weekend.
took our first baby home from the hospital. I couldn't help thinking there was something fundamentally wrong with this picture. Yes, it's our baby and our right, but they're really going to let a pair of kids they know nothing about and who know absolutely nothing about babies walk off with this fragile newborn?
My husband chose that day to quarrel badly with my mother-in-law, so she grabbed the food she'd brought and marched out (I was not happy with him). We had no other relatives female or otherwise to turn to, neither of us had any childcare experience beside some babysitting of older children on my part, and we'd moved to LA for a job due to a recession so no friends, and NO INTERNET to connect with helpful new mom forums. Reading Spock just wasn't adequate to our frantic need. We were living in Hollywood in a mostly childless area of entertainment industry people, so I couldn't even run to a neighbor and bang frantically on the door for help.
So it was us, the baby, a couple pages of instructions, and a bag of giveaways. We got home and stared at him and checked the instructions. The baby was supposed to have a daily bath, so we immediately carefully set everything up according to the instructions and dutifully and clumsily bathed the poor little guy while the other took pictures. He didn't break or get sick, and so we stumbled on. It wasn't long before I was just plopping him on a towel in the sink and playing "splash" with him, but I still think there was something wrong with that whole picture.
And I'm just SO glad that, if nothing else is available, today's new moms can have others on line to turn to and a world of information right at hand.
early years of motherhood. Let me tell you how I got so "wise" about how to keep track of tiny ones who could get away on their own: because I had my own terrifying "moment" when my son was just 11 months old!
I was someone with absolutely no experience with any child younger than 3 years old, and I had no knowledge except for that gleaned from innumerable books and articles, most of them not really all that useful (nor, I came to learn, particularly accurate).
My son began walking at 8 months (yes, really!), which means he was quite mobile at a truly dangerous age. But he was so in love with walking that he hated to be strapped down in a stroller.
One afternoon I took him to Penney's, which was having a huge sale on everything because it was relocating to another store site. I meant to purchase some baby stuff at a great price. I had my hand on him--literally, I was holding on to the back of his shirt--as I checked out onesies. Suddenly I felt his shirt pull out of my hand. I instantly turned to grab him again, but he wasn't there! It was so crowded because of the big sale that in just one second after pulling out of my grasp--or more like half a second!--my 11-month old son had disappeared among the forest of legs. I raced around calling for help, telling everyone to look for him. I had every adult, including all the store workers, helping me look, all within a couple of seconds of losing him.
About two minutes after I sounded the alarm, a man appeared with my son in his arms, asking, "Is this the child you lost?"
The little monkey had followed another man and his wife OUTSIDE to the parking lot, and the man who now held him had spotted him following behind the other couple. He realized right away that no parents would have a baby so young walking behind them in a parking lot without even looking back to make sure he was with them and that no cars were coming, so he ran out of the store after him and them, calling for them to stop and wait. When he got to them, he said, "Is this your baby?" They, of course, said no and were shocked that a child so young was following behind them when he seemed barely old enough even to be walking.
The thing is, I never let go of my son while looking through those onesies. I felt immediately when his shirt slipped out of my grip, and I instantly turned to grab him again. But in such a crowd, and with him being so small and so fast, he was out the door and into the parking lot within seconds.
From that experience I learned that it takes only a fraction of a second, and that even with my hand on him, he could disappear if I lost my grip even for a second or less. That is why I waited for more information before beginning to think that the mother at the zoo was not being responsible enough.
But the boy was 3, so by that age he should have been a known quantity for her. In the first place, his deliberate defiance and the clear evidence that he was watching for her to be distracted so he could make a break for it, as well as witness descriptions of his haste to do what he had been told not to do (they marveled at how fast he was moving), suggests an ongoing dynamic between the boy and his mother.
As I said in my earlier long post, I had a kid like that in my care for a while. I knew how he got that way, and he continued to get into trouble at his own home, even after I got him trained to behave at my place. But knowing what he was like, I simply never gave him an opportunity to get hurt or cause damage. I watched him carefully because I knew he needed to be watched all the time.
I guarantee little Isaiah's mother knows how he is and that he needs to be watched like a hawk. I chastised my little friend's mother for letting him get seriously hurt and landing in the emergency room so frequently, because he had been raised to behave in dangerous ways and his parents, after having raised him so carelessly, didn't bother to watch him as carefully as he needed to be watched.
You can see in this photo of 3 of her kids that the little boy has rather an attitude, and I bet that if the faces were not blurred out, we would see his face twisted into a defiant scowl:
?quality=65&strip=all&strip=all
As I said, I have known kids like that, and I have seen how they get that way. A lot of American parents raise their kids to be defiant and difficult, though I am sure they are not trying to raise difficult kids. Here is a link to a very good article in the New Yorker about how badly behaved and immature so many American kids are compared to kids in other cultures:
"Spoiled Rotten: Why do kids rule the roost?"
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/07/02/spoiled-rotten
But quite beyond that issue, I have also watched parents ignore their badly behaving kids while they chat or text on their phones, take pictures while turned away from the kids, or simply pretend their kids misbehavior has nothing to do with them.
For example, often when I am behind a mother and toddler in line at the grocery store, the kid will be grabbing candy off the aisle display and mouthing it, but the mother, even though she sees what the kid is doing, simply lets him do it, as though it is not her problem at all. I know many people who work or have worked in such stores, and they all say it is a constant problem, and that they then have to go and collect all the items the kids has slobbered on and dispose of them.
Or I will have to dodge young kids who are running around and dashing in front of my grocery cart, all while the mother ignores them, either because she is examining the endless items on the shelves, or because she is talking or texting on the phone. This happens in clothing stores, too.
The zoo mother initially said she was taking a picture when he disappeared, but then, realizing I suppose that it didn't make her seem careful enough, she changed her story to say another child was getting upset about having to go home, so she was busy trying to calm that one when Isaiah got away from her.
The changed story makes me think the first version was closer to the truth, but I still come back to the fact that regardless of what distracted her, she knew what her son was like, and that he needed to be watched to prevent him from getting into trouble--or if she didn't know, she should have, just as my friend should have known that her son would get himself into dangerous situations and end up in the emergency room if she didn't keep a close eye on him.
By the way, if recent articles are true, the defiant little dude is already demanding to be taken back to the zoo and already saying he wants to go back into the gorilla enclosure. This is not a child who learns from experience that he needs to behave better and obey his parents, just as this is apparently not a parent who learns from experience that her son needs to be watched carefully.
Like many young, inexperienced parents I had a scary, scary experience with my son when he was little--and I wasn't even being careless at the time. I was just unaware of how easy it can be to lose a kid even when you are actually holding onto him if you are not 100% focused on him while in a busy public venue.
But having had that one experience, I learned from it. I never again had anything untoward happen to a child in my care--not my own kids, and not the 35 other kids I helped raise--even though I spent 60 hours a week doing daycare, in addition to the rest of the time I was with just my own kids. Even when I had my hands full with a lot more kids than this woman was dealing with (I have read that she had the little boy plus three others), I didn't stop watching them and paying attention when we were out in the world, because I was far too conscious of how easy it would be to lose one or to let something terrible happen to one if I didn't pay close attention.
I lost sight of my son in a department store, but there weren't so many people around. He was hiding in the clothes. We're off to visit his little sister and her children this morning. Being her mom was great, but I like grandparenting a lot also. The littler one is already constantly trying to do more, reaching and running for...the horizon. I'll get to hear all her stories and sympathize, but I'm really with him.
