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Working parents face impossibly hard choices every day when it comes to their career and their roles as mom and dad. It's a constant juggling act, trying to balance all the balls in our hands while not letting any fall to the floor. And the one thing that keeps it all going and running smoothly is our childcare. If that fails, we are in trouble.
For one Manhattan couple, their childcare did more than fail this week when their babysitter disappeared with their 17-month-old for hours. Little Annabelle Ceria is now home safely with her parents, but for a terrifying eight hours on Wednesday, she was missing with nanny Beatriz Rios. The nanny had a number of different stories explaining her absence. One was that her cellphone was stolen and she couldn't get in touch with the parents. The other was that she got lost on the subway.
Rios has been their sitter for months and acted as though nothing had happened even though the parents were visibly shaken. So can they ever trust her again?
In a word: No. They can't. The fact is, with childcare, there are many things that can be forgiven. Being late a few times isn't a huge deal so long as our sitter is loving with our kids. Feeding my kids cookies or letting them watch TV, though not my style, are not fire-able offenses. But being unreachable for any period of time, especially for eight hours, is simply unacceptable.
Even if Rios is telling the truth, it would be next to impossible for me to work if she were my sitter because I would panic if she ever forgot to pick up her phone, even for a few minutes. Trust is just a deal-breaker, and even though this story has a happy ending, Rios broke that trust.
Unfortunately, it's hard to imagine being a parent and trusting ANY sitter again after this, let alone the one who made the mistake in the first place.
It seems to me that everyone in this family would do better with a new sitter and a very clear system of communication. Luckily this story has a happy ending, but as parents, we can all feel for this family.
What would be a sitter deal-breaker for you?
Image via shawnzrossi/Flickr
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