Wrong child given to me

[Astressedmumoftwo]

Earlier today I went to pick up my son from nursery. A member of staff I'd never seen before appeared with a little girl who walked towards me out of the door. I quickly explained that I wasn't her mum and the worker apologised and took her back in. I had a chat with the manager after who explained that this new staff member had been mistakenly told I was this girls mum by another staff member.

He was very apologetic, said the staff member involved was very upset about it and said they'd make sure it couldn't happen again by implementing more safeguarding procedures. They seemed to take it seriously at least

What would you do?

Maybe this could be a regular thing, once a month, to give parents and kids a bit of variety.

To be honest judging by some threads on here I can imagine a “help DH brought the wrong child home!” Thread 😂

Same thing happened to me last night.

Asked for X, they brought out Y. I asked if Y was an upgrade Y declined to come home with me though, because I don’t have a dog!

Problem is after the 5th question in 3 minutes all of you would return mine.

Surely it would also be unsafe for them to take their own baby in this situation?

Imagine if the parents had the wrong children until they got to university age and then it was discovered. That would make a good movie!

Once had a chat with my DS primary teacher and some things she was saying didn't add up and realised she was talking about a different boy. She was incredibly embarrassed and apologetic.

If I was a teacher the children would be going off willy nilly - it would be pot luck who you took home

Although I would do nothing about this one off incident, it’s concerning that you say this will happen a lot? I’ve never had anything even close to this happen in the 16 years I’ve had kids at daycare, after school care, sports groups, crèche etc.

It's believable if the child walked towards you kids are so funny!

Presumably someone told her: Ava’s mum is here. Can you take her down? So she did.

Turned out you weren’t Ava’s mum at all.

Tbh, if have been more worried about poor Ava who thought her mummy was there but she wasn’t.

I would go to the Daily Mail with obligatory #SadFace and demand enough compo to pay my leccy bill for the next five winters.

It happened for us twice. At least both times I was given the same gender child - boy :))) Shit happens.

It’s September. New member of staff was misdirected in a chaos that is releasing children to parents. You are making an issue from nothing, it’s a non story. No one left the premises with a wrong child.

This happened to me with DS1. They came out with the wrong LO, I chuckled told them my DS name, they went back in and bought me the correct child. We laughed it off.
It's not a massive deal, they will feel rotten and quite upset about it as it is.

No harm was done and hopefully it won't happen again 😄

Nothing it’s been dealt with, they’ve taken it seriously and I’ll bet poor staff member feels rubbish enough already.

Its actually very hard being new in a nursery and trying to remember parents, children and routines ect. She’ll already be in trouble and the nursery will deal with it.

I’m not sure why you’d want to do anything else, it’s parents who feel they want to take small issues and keep building on them that make the job harder. (one of the many reasons I left childcare).

Could have been an improvement? At points I would have happily swapped out DS1 for one that slept.

@Annonnimouse
Ok procedures like what?
Collecting photos of the new parents at the beginning of the year? Maybe ask for their ID every time? (I imagine parents will NOT be happy lol). Password works for the new random people who collect children for emergency childcare, other than that passwords are useless. Because most of the abusers are family members who can easily discover the password anyway. The person was recognised as a parent from the class.

🤣 I can see it now. Raise them as your own and never talk about the unfortunate incident again. It is what it is, make do and adopt.

This exact thing happened to me just the other week. It was a nursery worker I'd never seen before and they mistook me for another mum.

Not at all bothered about it. I have no concerns that a parent would go to collect their child and they'd take mine instead. Mistakes happen, we laughed. The look on the child's face was pretty funny!

The procedure would be if you do not know which parent belongs to which child, you confirm which child the parent is there for. It is not complicated; the nursery will have these procedures but didn't use them.

Poor person has just started the job they made a mistake, it was rectified and things are being put in place yet you still feel there's a problem?

I wouldn't be surprised if this actually has happened.

It's happened to me. We laughed about it but they had to fill in an incident form which seemed fair enough.

I once thought they'd lost my child. I'd forgotten it wasn't DD2s day at nursery (she was at home with DMIL) and stood at the door to the baby room hysterical until someone reminded me it was Tuesday and she wasn't in on that day.

I think the important thing is that the staff had spoken and new that you were a child's parent. They weren't handing out children to strangers, they knew you were there to pick up someone, therefore reasonably likely to not kidnap an unknown child and leave your child uncollected.

Sounds like a mistake. I'd move on from it otherwise someone could lose their job if you make it a real big deal.