Tips For Ensuring Your Baby's Care

Since many of our readers are beyond the DCS world, here's a post for the WWU and the DCS website. -eds.

NASHVILLE -- Across Tennessee, young parents often entrust their babies' care to a friend or relative. While the Department of Children's Services would always hope that a parent would make the best choices for child care, we often hear of instances in which a mother asks, say, a current boyfriend, to keep an eye on her baby while she has to leave home for a few hours.

 

Child-safety experts at DCS have some experienced advice for these types of situations:

•  A mother should monitor the behavior of a potential baby-sitter around the child or children before she ever leaves them in that person's care.

 

• A parent should leave the children with that person for only short periods of time at first, to make sure that the baby-sitter proves capable of appropriately caring for the children.

 

• The baby-sitter should be able to repeat back the child's routines to the parent. When to feed the child. What to the feed the child. When the baby takes a nap. What the child likes to do. What the child doesn't like to do.

 

• When leaving a child or children with a new person, a parent should use a buddy system. For example, a mother should ask a relative or a friend to check in on the children and the baby-sitter to make sure everything's OK while the parent is away.

 

• A parent should also call and check in periodically. If a baby's crying in the background, maybe the parent can help solve the situation over the phone, before the baby-sitter gets too frustrated with the child and is tempted to lose his or her temper.

 

• A parent should always leave the sitter with a list of emergency numbers to call if any problems come up.