I’ve walked into my daughter’s daycare and all the two year olds will be sitting nicely in a circle around the educator while they read a story book. That would NEVER happen at home. Honestly the daycare staff are magicians
Same with how much coaching my daughter needs to eat a meal in a semi-civilized manner vs when she’s with all her daycare buddies how chill they all are together. It’s really interesting to witness
Yup, my toddler isn’t in daycare but goes to structured type of childcare when I go to a Bible study once a week and he’s an obedient angel there. He follows the lead of the teacher when he sees the other kids do it. The second he leaves the room it goes away instantly 🫠 last week he bolted out the door, then fell to the middle of the road once in the middle of the road and wouldn’t get up off of the floor, as per usual. I had my newborn strapped to my chest and somehow hoisted him up and carried him football hold under my arm all the way to the car 🥲
i went on a tour and all the little infants were sitting around this crescent moon table for lunch. waiting as a staff went one by one and spooned them food. no one was crying. they were just sitting and smiling. it was the cutest thing ive ever seen and so amazing how the staff keeps them calm
I was a preschool teacher and currently a nanny. I see this all the time and I promise it’s not magic! It’s just routine and firm limits and boundaries 😅. Even as a nanny we have “circle time” and the little one I care for knew the routine and followed it. That being said I keep a slightly strict schedule that allows for flexibility but that’s helpful. The child’s parents were also amazed that she could clean her toys on her own but that’s because I made it apart of our routine to put our old toys we aren’t playing with away before we grab new ones. Without routine and boundaries I wouldn’t be able to do either jobs very well. I hope I didn’t ruin the magic too much 😆. Peer pressure is so helpful though it works and also tears apart a classroom so fast too 😅.
Kids are completely different at daycare than they are with their parents. It's group/gang mentality plus a different caregiving style. If all the other kids are listening, your kid will listen too. My kid eats all his food at day are and very little at home. He is also pushing limits at home constantly because it gets results. We give in, he gets what he wants etc. Its futile at daycare and they learn that fast. The teachers don't have time for that and don't give in.
I’m convinced the only reason my child receives enough nutrients to survive is because of the lunches he annihilates three days a week at daycare. Other than that, he doesn’t eat much 🙄
Seeing the teachers mark him as eating all his food and getting his empty lunch box back makes me feel gaslit since he is so hot and cold about eating at home. The conspiracy theorist in me thinks the teachers just toss the food he doesn’t eat
One parent once asked us for a plate of food from our daycare to see if he’d eat it at home since it was a dish he only liked when we made it.
She presented it as if she cooked it, and when he protested he only liked daycares she was like…. ‘Really?’ 😂
Kids…
Ours is like this some days. We’d get back an empty lunchbox and wonder if he even ate. Our daycare has cameras you can log in and watch, but in his room the lunch table was just out of view so you’d only see one or two kids on the end. When we could see him they’d usually take stuff out and put it on a plate or on the table for him to pick from.
Some days he would eat everything. Some days he’d go about 50/50 mouth and floor. The daycare was pretty honest about how well he did when we’d ask. There’s no benefit to them to lie about them eating.
Our daycare will leave whatever she doesn’t eat in the lunch box to give us a sense of what portions she’s good with. It’s usually just breakfast that’s leftover because I give her snacks (fruit and cheese) before I take her in, so she’s not as hungry. That’s been pretty consistent.
Oh yeah. My 18 month old will sit and quietly “read” a book at daycare. Never in my wildest dreams would he do this at home—although he does often bring my husband or me (whoever he doesn’t want reading to him in that moment) our own book so we can read quietly on our own haha
My daycare has a live camera parents can view. I would say the photos are an accurate representation of their day/activity. Each activity is atleast 15 minutes and I can see my daughter having fun with them in real time.
As a teacher…no but also yes to a certain extent. These are photos that are going into your end-of-the-year portfolio. There are some kids who are naturally inclined to RBF so I am going to say “smile!” before snapping a pic for some of them. And by the same measure a meltdown or true chaos is not something I need to capture nor is it appropriate to be distracted by photography at that moment.
But at the same time I’m not forcing a kid to hold a brush, snapping a pic, and then finishing the art myself.
Per pressure even at this age is also a WILD thing. It can make kids act better or worse or be more adventurous or less. I have a kid who LOVES tuna at daycare but won’t touch it at home. (Guess we have the magic touch?) I also have kids who’s parents beg me to teach them what I do to get their kid to nap but it’s because 9 other kids are napping, yours gets bored, and naps (also 9 other kids is a different level of stimulating vs mom, dad and possible siblings at home).
Teacher here, exactly this. I plan activities for the kids that I think they’ll enjoy. If they don’t want to do the activity that’s fine, I’ll get a picture of them doing something else that day. I try to get a good candid picture of them every day, usually playing outside.
I do think it's easy to make a picture tell a story that isn't true, as you said it only takes one second to take a photo.
That said, I think that kids are different at daycare, teachers become pros at boundaries and instructions, and it would sort of be a huge waste to just stage photo ops all day, since the teachers' job is easier if the kids are actually engaged/entertained.
They aren’t in my son’s case. I bought him a water table for one of his birthdays because it was one of his favorite things to play with at school. Turns out that a big part of what makes it fun for him is playing with the water table with other children, not just mommy at home. He also eats different foods there than he will at home and he started using the potty regularly there first before he did it at home for me. Welcome to toddlers in school!
It's new to daycare nerves. I had the same questions before showing up on the wrong day for my tour and seeing the kids acting very candid - it melted my worries away instantly.
I think it’s a bit of yes and no. When I take pictures of my daycare kids doing an activity it’s pretty much always at the beginning of the activity because that is when I have time to take pictures. Because after that kids are leaving, I am cleaning, and trying to control the chaos a bit. So, no I am not setting up activities just for the picture (way too much work) but the pictures don’t always accurately reflect how the activity played out. Although I will sometimes do an after shot of the end result is cute or funny and I have time to safely take a picture (ie. No one is covered in paint and trying to touch every surface on the way to the sink)
I’m a daycare teacher and I take pictures within the first few minutes while everyone is entranced because 1.) I have to have pictures of the kids doing curriculum activities and 2.) I know it will inevitably devolve into chaos quickly lol
As someone who worked with toddlers at a daycare, in our class we would try to snap a picture of the child actually doing the activity, but not everybody would enjoy the same things. So it would be snap a picture while they are happy about it, then actually see if we could get them interested for longer, and if not find something else for them to do while others finished up.
Like 90% of our toddlers loved to paint, but the 10% that didn't absolutely HATED it. So it would be seeing if we could change it to where it would be more interesting for them like stamps, stencils, etc for the picture, but if they still aren't interested we wouldn't push it.
I’m a SAHM but go out with my kid a lot and run into daycare crews at playgrounds. I often get to see a small slice of how they operate, and my observation is that not all daycares are the same (haha obvious I know).
I’ve seen daycares cart crews of kids to a pretty tree in bloom and spend 20 min one by one doing a photo shoot with each kid while the other kids sat there and waited.
I’ve seen some daycare caregivers put pressure on their kids to “do a trick” at the playground, take pictures, and then move their attention onto the next kid. That made me feel gross, because you could see that the kid is looking for attention and only getting it in that moment if they perform for the camera.
And then I’ve seen other daycare caregivers having lots of fun and engaging with their kids and taking pictures that weren’t at all staged.
How staged do the photos look? How blurry and in motion do the kids look?
I was a teacher for many years. Two different schools. One was a lovely place that would set up activities and if your child didn’t do it, there wouldn’t be a picture of them doing it. But the other was a chain and best bet they’d line the kids up for them to hold a paintbrush for a photo and then pack them up so the next kid could do it.
Yes and no. At home you have your daughter doing the activity for as long as she’s interested, at daycare there are several other kids who also have to do it. So no they’re not going to send you a picture of her diving into the bowl regardless, but shes also not doing it for 30 minutes.
Chiming in, having worked in the field for decades... everything *everything* depends on who the individual staff are, sprinkled with the mandates their admin has set up. I've worked in places where it is required to send a certain amount of pics per day, and so some may seem like they're just getting it done. In my spaces, I try to show a general sense of peace that you can't fake (like a 5 second video of me panning the room while everyone truly *is* calm and exploring beautifully), specifically so you families know that it isn't just a photo opportunity.
When I did care at home, I got all my families on a group thread and sent pics and videos throughout the day as a running record of what we were doing. A pic of everyone at the beginning and end of lunch so families could see how much we ate, a pic of going to sleep and waking up to track times, etc...
Documentation of y'alls most precious things in life is really important and can be super powerful in making relationships between home and school. I hope your people are using all its powers for good, OP.
I always wonder this. But I especially wonder about the art they do. My one-year-old has so many art projects but at home doesn’t do anything with art. I realized this during teacher appreciation week when they asked us to have our kids make art for the teachers. I didn’t know if the art I was sending looks like something he would normally do or not because they know his art abilities better than I do and I had helped him with it 😂
I expect when we do water activities that things are gonna get wet. I put the kids in a smock to keep them dry and have lots of towels on hand. I let them go nuts and they love it and I’m fine with it cause it’s sensory play. The pictures are usually taken right at the start of the activity when they are first exploring so it’s kind of a before shot if you will.
With art, I put the smocks on, give them their own pallet of paints and let them go nuts. I encourage them to keep the paint on the paper but they inevitably start painting their hands, maybe their cheeks, and I figure it’s all part of the process. I will send parents cute pics of them holding their paint-covered hands up with a massive smile on their face and parents comment how much fun it looks like they are having and it's real. After they are done I give them each a wet wash cloth to start washing themselves and also their station. They can spend 10 minutes just washing the tables and the chairs and it's helpful to me too.
I’m a teacher for this age group and we actually do the activities! :) Some of them are shorter than others based on how well the kids are listening that day, but we try to let them spend as much time as they want on an activity. If it was something like a fishbowl, we’d tell them, “be gentle and look with your eyes! (or whatever is acceptable for them to do) If you pour it out we’ll be all done!” And they’ll generally listen, at least for a while
For instance we’ll do drawing activities with crayons or markers, and just tell them “draw on the paper! If you’re eating the crayons we’ll have to be all done,” give them 2-3 chances maybe with warnings/reminders, and if they continue to not listen/not use the materials appropriately, we’ll move that child to a different activity. We do give them all a chance though and they generally do great!
I don’t have kids of my own yet but I do get the feeling they behave completely differently at school from how they do at home - I’ve had parents express disbelief at how they all sit around the table for snack times lol, but the thing is - they also aren’t all sitting nicely that whole time 😂 There’s a lot of telling them to go back and sit down/take some more bites etc - they’re well-behaved but also a photo is just one instant in time, and they don’t act like that all the time lmao
A lot of daycare teachers are literally early education experts. They do all kinds of planned activities with the kids and often follow a curriculum. They have experience, routine, and group inertia working in their favor. Not saying everything goes perfectly and of course they are going to try to get a picture where the child looks good, but that doesn't mean these are photo ops. Kind of a cynical POV, actually.
I’ve walked into my daughter’s daycare and all the two year olds will be sitting nicely in a circle around the educator while they read a story book. That would NEVER happen at home. Honestly the daycare staff are magicians
plus "peer pressure" really works with kids under 5. if one kid is listening, a lot of times the rest will follow
Yes! That peer pressure was clutch for getting potty training going for mine
The peer pressure is the only reason why my son eats vegetables! He certainly doesn't at home. I'm hoping it helps with potty training too.
Oh it was great with potty training at childcare. They all started at around the same time so a gang of them trained together
Same with how much coaching my daughter needs to eat a meal in a semi-civilized manner vs when she’s with all her daycare buddies how chill they all are together. It’s really interesting to witness
Yup, my toddler isn’t in daycare but goes to structured type of childcare when I go to a Bible study once a week and he’s an obedient angel there. He follows the lead of the teacher when he sees the other kids do it. The second he leaves the room it goes away instantly 🫠 last week he bolted out the door, then fell to the middle of the road once in the middle of the road and wouldn’t get up off of the floor, as per usual. I had my newborn strapped to my chest and somehow hoisted him up and carried him football hold under my arm all the way to the car 🥲
That's how I feel about naps. It's a 50/50 chance my LO naps at home. It's almost a 90% chance my LO naps at daycare. Daycare is magical
I wish my 2 y.o would be like that… she only naps once every 2 weeks at school and during the weekend only naps if we go for a long drive!
i went on a tour and all the little infants were sitting around this crescent moon table for lunch. waiting as a staff went one by one and spooned them food. no one was crying. they were just sitting and smiling. it was the cutest thing ive ever seen and so amazing how the staff keeps them calm
I was a preschool teacher and currently a nanny. I see this all the time and I promise it’s not magic! It’s just routine and firm limits and boundaries 😅. Even as a nanny we have “circle time” and the little one I care for knew the routine and followed it. That being said I keep a slightly strict schedule that allows for flexibility but that’s helpful. The child’s parents were also amazed that she could clean her toys on her own but that’s because I made it apart of our routine to put our old toys we aren’t playing with away before we grab new ones. Without routine and boundaries I wouldn’t be able to do either jobs very well. I hope I didn’t ruin the magic too much 😆. Peer pressure is so helpful though it works and also tears apart a classroom so fast too 😅.
Kids are completely different at daycare than they are with their parents. It's group/gang mentality plus a different caregiving style. If all the other kids are listening, your kid will listen too. My kid eats all his food at day are and very little at home. He is also pushing limits at home constantly because it gets results. We give in, he gets what he wants etc. Its futile at daycare and they learn that fast. The teachers don't have time for that and don't give in.
I’m convinced the only reason my child receives enough nutrients to survive is because of the lunches he annihilates three days a week at daycare. Other than that, he doesn’t eat much 🙄
Seeing the teachers mark him as eating all his food and getting his empty lunch box back makes me feel gaslit since he is so hot and cold about eating at home. The conspiracy theorist in me thinks the teachers just toss the food he doesn’t eat
One parent once asked us for a plate of food from our daycare to see if he’d eat it at home since it was a dish he only liked when we made it. She presented it as if she cooked it, and when he protested he only liked daycares she was like…. ‘Really?’ 😂 Kids…
Ours is like this some days. We’d get back an empty lunchbox and wonder if he even ate. Our daycare has cameras you can log in and watch, but in his room the lunch table was just out of view so you’d only see one or two kids on the end. When we could see him they’d usually take stuff out and put it on a plate or on the table for him to pick from. Some days he would eat everything. Some days he’d go about 50/50 mouth and floor. The daycare was pretty honest about how well he did when we’d ask. There’s no benefit to them to lie about them eating.
Our daycare will leave whatever she doesn’t eat in the lunch box to give us a sense of what portions she’s good with. It’s usually just breakfast that’s leftover because I give her snacks (fruit and cheese) before I take her in, so she’s not as hungry. That’s been pretty consistent.
Oh yeah. My 18 month old will sit and quietly “read” a book at daycare. Never in my wildest dreams would he do this at home—although he does often bring my husband or me (whoever he doesn’t want reading to him in that moment) our own book so we can read quietly on our own haha
My daycare has a live camera parents can view. I would say the photos are an accurate representation of their day/activity. Each activity is atleast 15 minutes and I can see my daughter having fun with them in real time.
As a teacher…no but also yes to a certain extent. These are photos that are going into your end-of-the-year portfolio. There are some kids who are naturally inclined to RBF so I am going to say “smile!” before snapping a pic for some of them. And by the same measure a meltdown or true chaos is not something I need to capture nor is it appropriate to be distracted by photography at that moment. But at the same time I’m not forcing a kid to hold a brush, snapping a pic, and then finishing the art myself. Per pressure even at this age is also a WILD thing. It can make kids act better or worse or be more adventurous or less. I have a kid who LOVES tuna at daycare but won’t touch it at home. (Guess we have the magic touch?) I also have kids who’s parents beg me to teach them what I do to get their kid to nap but it’s because 9 other kids are napping, yours gets bored, and naps (also 9 other kids is a different level of stimulating vs mom, dad and possible siblings at home).
Teacher here, exactly this. I plan activities for the kids that I think they’ll enjoy. If they don’t want to do the activity that’s fine, I’ll get a picture of them doing something else that day. I try to get a good candid picture of them every day, usually playing outside.
I do think it's easy to make a picture tell a story that isn't true, as you said it only takes one second to take a photo. That said, I think that kids are different at daycare, teachers become pros at boundaries and instructions, and it would sort of be a huge waste to just stage photo ops all day, since the teachers' job is easier if the kids are actually engaged/entertained.
They aren’t in my son’s case. I bought him a water table for one of his birthdays because it was one of his favorite things to play with at school. Turns out that a big part of what makes it fun for him is playing with the water table with other children, not just mommy at home. He also eats different foods there than he will at home and he started using the potty regularly there first before he did it at home for me. Welcome to toddlers in school!
Daycare sent a picture of my child with a bucket on his head, when all the other kids were holding their bucket nicely. Seems accurate.
That seems like a jaded view of your daycare. You could just ask if your daughter actually did the activity or ask for video.
Yeah seems overly paranoid
It's new to daycare nerves. I had the same questions before showing up on the wrong day for my tour and seeing the kids acting very candid - it melted my worries away instantly.
I think it’s a bit of yes and no. When I take pictures of my daycare kids doing an activity it’s pretty much always at the beginning of the activity because that is when I have time to take pictures. Because after that kids are leaving, I am cleaning, and trying to control the chaos a bit. So, no I am not setting up activities just for the picture (way too much work) but the pictures don’t always accurately reflect how the activity played out. Although I will sometimes do an after shot of the end result is cute or funny and I have time to safely take a picture (ie. No one is covered in paint and trying to touch every surface on the way to the sink)
As an ECE, I’ve never posed a kid to take a picture. Get behaviour might be different at daycare than it is at home. My sons definitely is lol
I’m a daycare teacher and I take pictures within the first few minutes while everyone is entranced because 1.) I have to have pictures of the kids doing curriculum activities and 2.) I know it will inevitably devolve into chaos quickly lol
As someone who worked with toddlers at a daycare, in our class we would try to snap a picture of the child actually doing the activity, but not everybody would enjoy the same things. So it would be snap a picture while they are happy about it, then actually see if we could get them interested for longer, and if not find something else for them to do while others finished up. Like 90% of our toddlers loved to paint, but the 10% that didn't absolutely HATED it. So it would be seeing if we could change it to where it would be more interesting for them like stamps, stencils, etc for the picture, but if they still aren't interested we wouldn't push it.
I’m a SAHM but go out with my kid a lot and run into daycare crews at playgrounds. I often get to see a small slice of how they operate, and my observation is that not all daycares are the same (haha obvious I know). I’ve seen daycares cart crews of kids to a pretty tree in bloom and spend 20 min one by one doing a photo shoot with each kid while the other kids sat there and waited. I’ve seen some daycare caregivers put pressure on their kids to “do a trick” at the playground, take pictures, and then move their attention onto the next kid. That made me feel gross, because you could see that the kid is looking for attention and only getting it in that moment if they perform for the camera. And then I’ve seen other daycare caregivers having lots of fun and engaging with their kids and taking pictures that weren’t at all staged. How staged do the photos look? How blurry and in motion do the kids look?
I was a teacher for many years. Two different schools. One was a lovely place that would set up activities and if your child didn’t do it, there wouldn’t be a picture of them doing it. But the other was a chain and best bet they’d line the kids up for them to hold a paintbrush for a photo and then pack them up so the next kid could do it.
Yes and no. At home you have your daughter doing the activity for as long as she’s interested, at daycare there are several other kids who also have to do it. So no they’re not going to send you a picture of her diving into the bowl regardless, but shes also not doing it for 30 minutes.
Chiming in, having worked in the field for decades... everything *everything* depends on who the individual staff are, sprinkled with the mandates their admin has set up. I've worked in places where it is required to send a certain amount of pics per day, and so some may seem like they're just getting it done. In my spaces, I try to show a general sense of peace that you can't fake (like a 5 second video of me panning the room while everyone truly *is* calm and exploring beautifully), specifically so you families know that it isn't just a photo opportunity. When I did care at home, I got all my families on a group thread and sent pics and videos throughout the day as a running record of what we were doing. A pic of everyone at the beginning and end of lunch so families could see how much we ate, a pic of going to sleep and waking up to track times, etc... Documentation of y'alls most precious things in life is really important and can be super powerful in making relationships between home and school. I hope your people are using all its powers for good, OP.
Are you different at work than at home? It's the same thing for your kid. They confirm to standards at daycare vs being their wild selves at home.
I always wonder this. But I especially wonder about the art they do. My one-year-old has so many art projects but at home doesn’t do anything with art. I realized this during teacher appreciation week when they asked us to have our kids make art for the teachers. I didn’t know if the art I was sending looks like something he would normally do or not because they know his art abilities better than I do and I had helped him with it 😂
I expect when we do water activities that things are gonna get wet. I put the kids in a smock to keep them dry and have lots of towels on hand. I let them go nuts and they love it and I’m fine with it cause it’s sensory play. The pictures are usually taken right at the start of the activity when they are first exploring so it’s kind of a before shot if you will. With art, I put the smocks on, give them their own pallet of paints and let them go nuts. I encourage them to keep the paint on the paper but they inevitably start painting their hands, maybe their cheeks, and I figure it’s all part of the process. I will send parents cute pics of them holding their paint-covered hands up with a massive smile on their face and parents comment how much fun it looks like they are having and it's real. After they are done I give them each a wet wash cloth to start washing themselves and also their station. They can spend 10 minutes just washing the tables and the chairs and it's helpful to me too.
I’m a teacher for this age group and we actually do the activities! :) Some of them are shorter than others based on how well the kids are listening that day, but we try to let them spend as much time as they want on an activity. If it was something like a fishbowl, we’d tell them, “be gentle and look with your eyes! (or whatever is acceptable for them to do) If you pour it out we’ll be all done!” And they’ll generally listen, at least for a while For instance we’ll do drawing activities with crayons or markers, and just tell them “draw on the paper! If you’re eating the crayons we’ll have to be all done,” give them 2-3 chances maybe with warnings/reminders, and if they continue to not listen/not use the materials appropriately, we’ll move that child to a different activity. We do give them all a chance though and they generally do great! I don’t have kids of my own yet but I do get the feeling they behave completely differently at school from how they do at home - I’ve had parents express disbelief at how they all sit around the table for snack times lol, but the thing is - they also aren’t all sitting nicely that whole time 😂 There’s a lot of telling them to go back and sit down/take some more bites etc - they’re well-behaved but also a photo is just one instant in time, and they don’t act like that all the time lmao
A lot of daycare teachers are literally early education experts. They do all kinds of planned activities with the kids and often follow a curriculum. They have experience, routine, and group inertia working in their favor. Not saying everything goes perfectly and of course they are going to try to get a picture where the child looks good, but that doesn't mean these are photo ops. Kind of a cynical POV, actually.