would you believe ds (5) or the childminder? childminer took ds and the children elsewhere

[user1469643462]

It is the summer holidays so ds has to be with a childminer, for 3 days a week. I pay her for the actual care she provides, then i pay for any visits to places on top of that, they were supposed to be going to the zoo today and i had paid £21 for ds's zoo ticket and i know that isnt loads but tbh with the cost i had already paid for her to look after him it was almost today's wages! ds goes there with 2 boys and a little girl aswell all around the same age give or take. Ds got home and was telling me all about his trip to the local museum (which was free) i did not have a problem with that he seemed to have had a great time. I phoned up the childminder and asked if she could just paypal the money back over and she said that she had no idea what i was going on about and that she took them to the zoo I know children do love to use their imagination, so i was a bit undecided, ds kept going on about the objects he had seen and told me a story about a man showing them the kids bit. ds has never been to this museum and it was just odd how well he was explaining it. I would love to phone the other parents but tbh i dont actually know them! it's all very odd...

I am uneasy with talk of young children 'lying' on this thread. 5 year olds do lie : did you break that? No... But many, at 5, still consider anything that happens in their imaginations as real as anything that actually happened. They experienced it in their imagination, so why not?
'Lying' is a deliberate, usually I'll-intentioned, act of untruth. Telling a story from your own way of seeing the world , including via your imagination, deserves a less harsh name, that does not brand the child a liar.

All children are different but I would have believed my son age 2 let alone age 5.
He has always had excellent speech.

During the last year R, he's had day trips to Science & Nat History museum, Houses of Parliament and Colchester zoo. All described very different and accurately.

What a tricky situation and a feeling of dread and hurt you must be going through.

Good luck if you talk to her.

This thread has made me realise (and it is totally off topic) how many kids who are being abused must be disbelieved as 'getting things mixed up'/interpreting things incorrectly. Of course kids sometimes make things up and leave out things but I think it is important not to assume this is what they are doing.

I think it is very strange to go to a zoo and not take even one picture.

My friend used to look after her 5 year old DGD. I say "used to" because after the day that DGD went home and told her parents that Nanna had sent her round various local houses by herself to post leaflets through the letter boxes,they decided that friend couldn't be trusted any more. No amount of friend saying that actually she had gone round with DGD, and the only "by herself" bit was the child walking 3 steps down each drive to the letterbox while she stood at the end would convince them otherwise as they insisted their child was telling the truth. Child was telling the truth but had homed in on a very specific part of it, giving a totally misleading impression.

And, on a related note, my DS has just told me about something that happened at school in very great detail. He initially told me it was yesterday, but then (when I pointed out it was school holidays) he realised it actually happened 3 weeks ago, and he was just caught up in the story. DS is12.

Lweji - So many people have told stories of hoe children lie or don't remember or tell key parts of their days, that it seems quite possible that the CM could lie and then blame the child

That's actually a pretty good point. A deceitful childminder could be banking on the tendency some children have to do this. I know I've taken DS1 out places myself, and then when we get home, he's talking about nothing but the cupcake he had at lunchtime, as if that's all we did. Although it seems like such a stupid lie for a childminder to tell.

Receipts though - we used a private nursery for the DC (DC2 still goes there). We got receipts for the monthly fee payments, all nicely itemized. But they did occasional trips out - pantomime, farm parks, museums, that kind of thing. We had to pay extra for those, but we never got a receipt for the money paid for the trips. I'm in no doubt that the DC went though, as the nursery always took lots of photos of the trips and put them on the nursery's private FB page.

Really, this childminder could have saved OP a lot of worry if she'd just taken a few pictures of the zoo trip and shown them to OP (assuming they went to the zoo, of course).

Absolutely blu. Last year a girl in my year 1 class starting shaking and crying halfway through the morning and couldn't be calmed. Apparently the previous night they'd had a break-in and violence erupted resulting in her father being seriously injured and taken to hospital. Initially we were shocked that the child came to school but also cross that the person dropping off hadn't warned us. On contacting the parents they were completely bamboozled and both left work to come and sort it out. We all sat with her and it transpired on the way to school another parent had said that their shed had been broken into the night before and a bike stolen. When explaining this to the child she said 'oh yes. I was just thinking what it would be like if it happened to us' and was back to her normal self in a second
You have to take the child seriously but you really have to dig deep sometimes to get the real truth as opposed to their version of the truth.

At school my 7 year old was asked to write about a favourite book, and why it was special to her. 'She couldn't think of one, or any good reason, so picked a factual book about dinosaurs and wrote that it was special because it was given to her by her 'dad who got canser (sic) and died'.

Not true at all. Dad has just come in off the night shift and is rooting around in the kitchen for food.

joanna why is that followed by a grin?

Same, sorry Joanna but not funny in the slightest quite sick actually.

Who goes to the zoo and doesn't take even one photo?

Did you go early today and talk to their children /parents ?

I still can't believe that a cm didn't take a single pic of the daytrip - even if of other children and not yours. But some kind of proof

You need to drive to zoo and museum and see which ds recognises

Joanna is laughing, I assume, at the outrageous tail told by her child, not about losing a husband to cancer.

Don't worry Joanna as a woman who HAS lost my darling husband to cancer, I don't find your post offensive.

I'm sure Joanna meant no harm either.
POVERTY PAIN - a very sensible post. Sorry for what you've been through

Poverty

I think Joanna's dd just thought of an attention- grabbing line, she didn't grasp the actual concept at all.

Children pick out the strangest things to talk about from days out. One summer we did everything. I was about to start work again the the sept and wanted to have a great summer with the children. I think we barely had a day where we stayed in. On their return to school the children were asked to write a bout their summer. One bloody sentence my ds wrote !! Not even a long one. Don't really know what to make off this thread but what I will add is that at the playgroup I go too the childminders that attend are constantly taking photos off their charges. And I would have expected photos of a trip to a zoo especially if I'd paid for the trip. Even schools do it

Just coming to this thread and eager for update from op. I would find it quite unusual for a 5 year old to not mention anything about a trip to the zoo and just go on about a museum that they possibly visited another day. A younger child may jumble things up but not at 5. I also think it is unusual that the child-minder would not keep receipts/ tickets to give to you for what she used the money for? I have had people mind my kids during school holidays before and handed over money for treats, trips out etc and was always given the receipts for any purchases when I picked the kids up. I wouldn't expect pictures as proof but definitely the receipts/ ticket.

MrsKCastle Don't get me wrong. I don't think either the CM or the child is lying and I'm genuinely surprised so many posters think that one or other of them is. I think the CM and the OP's son are talking about one and the same trip. It's just, as many other posters have said, the child has focussed on and remembered a bit of the trip that seems obscure to everyone else.

What is slightly odd is the number of trips this CM takes the children on. The OP says he's only been to this CM for 4 sessions and yet she also says the CM has taken him to the park for a picnic, to the splash park, to the fair, and to the zoo. The woman deserves a bloody medal not 400 amateur private detectives practising their sleuthing on her.

I didn't see Joanna's post as being offensive or laughing at cancer, just as laughing at the random stuff children can come out with. I'm sure her DD didn't really understand the concept behind what she wrote either.

Poverty

And a great big YES to what Blu said. At this age they're not actually lying per se, they just don't have a firm distinction between reality and fantasy so if something "happened" in their imagination it can be perceived the same as if it happened in real life.

I must say, though, that OP's update about her DS saying he saw "a dog" when prompted about animals does incline me to believe that they really didn't go to the zoo, because that suggests it's not just that he can't remember which animals he saw or wasn't interested in them, or was focussing on a museumy-type part of the zoo which was more interesting to him. He can remember seeing an animal in the street but not at the zoo? That doesn't ring true, unless somehow they managed not to see any animals at the zoo but that seems unlikely as well.

Still hope there was some kind of misunderstanding but I'm sliding slightly off the fence and into the "CM is a lying thief" camp If it was me I'd definitely try and talk to the other parents. Confronting the CM, however tactfully, isn't likely to end well IMHO...

No, not meant to be offensive. Apologies to anyone who was upset.

Hi all, at work so got to make this quick but will reply when home. Got there early, caught a mum, I spoke about the zoo trip, she said that her ds didn't enjoy the trip and cm said he was unhappy all day, etc. etc. but she hopes the other children enjoyed it (this boy goes the same amount as my ds) he is about 3 I'd say. I thought oh, so another mum seems to know they went to the zoo. CM literally greeted me with a leaflet from there, I was then quite relieved actually, thinking ds had just not been explaining it well, etc. I was then relieved, didn't really need to say anymore, then left and caught a mum about to come inside with her dd, she was about ds age, maybe a few months older. I spoke to them about the zoo, she came back with 'oh yes, dd had a fab time, it's a shame (ds's name) and (the other boys name) doesn't come on a tuesday'... So now it hasn't really helped me at all! It has just added a third thing to work out :( by that point, I couldn't go back in... You've all been really good, but now what? I have to go to the cm, I think, but it's going to seem so odd dragging it out and up again on Monday.. I really wish this was all sorted. Yes, she is great with the days out, she takes them somewhere each day for the summer.

Maybe CM got confused and charged you for the zoo trip on the Tuesday when she was meant to charge Jake's (for example) mum for the zoo trip?

Though that would worry me that she didn't know who she was in charge of!