Hi - I haven't posted on here before. I had a difficult pregnancy a couple of years ago, and lurked a lot and got a lot of reassurance from hearing what other people were going through but never got up the courage to post. However, we are in a terrible situation at the moment and I just need to try to let other parents know what can happen.
My daughter is now 27 months, and has been at a local day nursery two days a work for nearly a year. The nursery lost a manager through no fault of its own last summmer, and since then there has been no stable management. This had obviously been a matter of concern for us, but as it takes a long time to settle our daughter into a new environment and the staff seemed interested and caring we decided to leave her there. I wish, with every bone in my body, I could go back and change that decision.
Last week, a temporary nursery manager reported us to police and social services because our daughter had bruising on her body. They were small bruises, around her hips. The previous evening she had attempted to climb out of the bath, and I had grabbed her to stop her falling on the bathroom floor, and although I am not sure I remember seeing any marks at the time, the bruises are a fingerprint pattern where I caught her. The bruises were never anything other than brown/green/yellow and after less than 5 days had largely faded away.
The nursery manager made the decision to report this without so much as asking us how the bruising had been caused. She did not even wait to speak to me when I collected my daughter, despite knowing that the police would have contacted me. There is no deputy manager, and so far as I could gather in my very distressed state the member of staff who was left to meet me had had no involvement in the report.
As a result of this, we had police and social services turn up on our doorstep and demand that we take our daughter, immediately (at 6.30 in the evening), to a children's hospital which is over half an hour's drive from our home. There was noone there to examine her, and we had to return for well over an hour of examination and cross-examination the following day. We had been lead to believe, by police and social services, that this would be the end of the matter, but once we were in the examination it became apparent that once this process is triggered, it will inevitably take a number of weeks. We have no guarantee that our daughter will not be taken away from us, and even if it is concluded that no action needs to be taken against us this will remain on police and social services files for ever.
The effect of this on our little family is all just devastating. We are finding it very hard to keep going. I had very bad depression 5 or 6 years ago, which had not been a problem at all in the past few years, but I'm now constantly fighting a sense of absolute panic. I'd also worked hard to start to rebuild a career, and am left with no childcare and no idea how I am meant to trust my child to any kind of childcare again.
However, the things I wanted to let other people know - and which I wish to God I had known, are:
- I have no idea how much 'spin' there has been in what we have been told, but there certainly seems to be a view that in any case where a child has bruises on their torso then all of this is justified. If that is the case, please, please don't send your child to nursery if they have any bruises on their torso - or if they could develop them. I didn't actually see my daughter's bruises in the morning before she went to nursery: I was dressing her half in the dark, and they could have developed later anyway.
- If you have any concerns at all about nursery management, please, please get your child away from that setting. It doesn't matter how good the staff are, this kind of thing is always something which is decided by the manager. And it doesn't matter how they reached their judgement, because they are a 'nursery manager' the police are automatically involved when they make a report to social services.
- If you find yourself in this awful situation, don't let yourself be strung along by police and social services giving the impression that all you need to do is let your child be examined. That is only the start of a process which will inevitably be hanging over you for weeks. From some of the information online, it seems as if we actually had a right to have a lawyer in the examination with us - we are going to take legal advice in the next few days.
Had we known the nature of the process we were engaged in, we would have insisted on doing that upfront. I am just hoping we don't live to regret, for all eternity, not having done so.
