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CCTV And Child Daycare Article
CCTV and Child Daycare a Winning Situation
from: Maxx Home GuidesIf you're a working parent, you probably have a desk littered with photos of your wonderful child, perhaps even a mouse pad with his/her photo on it, and a wall calendar with her/his likeness. During your work day, you may wonder how your child is doing, if she's missing you, if he's having his lunch and drinking and his milk. You want to ensure she/he is safe and well cared for in your absence.
Though experts advise parents to make unscheduled visits to their daycare centers during the workday, this is often impossible for a parent who has to keep a job in order to put food on the table.
Since many daycare providers operate out of their own homes, there's always an awkward feeling of invading somebody's residence when a parent shows up unannounced and unexpected. Granted, if you're taking your children to a home daycare provider you have every right to drop by unannounced at any given time, but you probably won't be able to help the way you feel.
A new innovation at childcare centers is the installation of wireless CCTV. Closed-circuit television, or CCTV, refers to the childcare center's use of television cameras, which are set up in strategic locations where the children spend their time during the day. The images picked up go to a set of monitors, which are often connected directly to a computer.
Other times, webcams are hooked up to the Internet directly or to a video server which displays the images captured on a website. Parents may access the website that displays the webcam images via a secured site that requires password access, which allows them to check in on their children at any time during the day.
Parents love this technology, and daycare centers that use CCTV often have long waiting lists because parents like the idea of being able to drop in electronically any time they choose.
Daycare providers applaud the use of CCTV technology in their centers of operation as well. Since awareness of predators who target children continues to grow, and every day brings more news stories about teachers who are discovered to be perverts, it becomes increasingly difficult to ensure children are indeed safe.
Children or parents may misunderstand interactions at day centers, which could lead to accusations and allegations of child abuse, neglect, or molestation when, in fact, none existed. CCTV technology in a childcare arena provides the backup a childcare operator needs to take an unbiased look at an allegation and see if an improper situation actually happened.
For example, a child who's being toilet trained will require adult assistance in wiping. While this is intellectually understood by both parents and caregivers, a parent may take exception to the help offered by a childcare provider when it's offered to the child, simply because it appears to be an awkward position to find the child and adult in. It may be completely innocent and indeed within the scope of the childcare activities, but a parent who's too quick to make assumptions may not see it this way. A CCTV system will exonerate the childcare provider and help the parent understand the reality of the situation.
For this reason CCTV technology helps to ensure parents can see with their own eyes that no suspicious activity happened, but instead that their child may have just bumped his arm while playing with another child or while running -- against instructions -- while playing.