KinderCare Education

I feel compelled to write regarding an incident that occurred with Sabrina Bratton, Director at the Blue Springs 7 Highway KinderCare.

I had my son enrolled there for only three weeks when I had this incident with Sabrina Bratton. He was signed up for part-time care, Monday through Wednesday. This was a Wednesday at the end of an icy cloudy day, when it's easy for tensions to be high. I received a voicemail at work at 5PM from Sabrina in which she carried a hostile tone, told me several times she thinks this would be Saxon's last day, and described how he was embarrassing her in front of other children's parents. I wasn't able to leave work until 6, and the emotional outburst Sabrina threw at me when I got to Kindercare was atrocious, off-putting at best, and has made me go out of my way to discourage others from ever sending a child to a center under her supervision.

We left another daycare center after several years because my son was acting up, and I was receiving calls too frequently to come and pick him up. They had a red card system, and being a smaller daycare they did not have behavioral plan structures in place. He was getting in trouble for biting and kicking and other aggressive crappy toddler behavior that I work tirelessly to amend in him. I am tough but gentle on my kid, a good parent who disciplines well and has a strong village of people raising this boy, but I am a single parent, and my son's father is highly emotional and has been somewhat absent in his life. My kid throws normal tantrums, and is mostly a very sweet, funny, friendly, and intelligent kid.

I gave Sabrina all of this information on my first visit to Kindercare and painted for her an entire picture of our experience. I took a tour on a Friday and explained my frustration to her: my son has difficult behavior issues, he was sometimes in trouble for being aggressive and rebellious at his previous daycare, he gets highly emotional and throws tantrums, and they were calling me frequently to pick him up. I was completely frustrated with this center, felt like they weren't meeting my son's needs, but not acknowledging it with me directly. I cried in Sabrina's office, and she expressed to me why Kindercare was the right choice for us. She reiterated several times that they don't give up on kids, they meet kids where they're at, they don't kick kids out, they're not in the habit of calling parents at work. All the things I was looking for in a center, she promised could be delivered. I understand now that Sabrina is just a salesperson, not a humane daycare director like she was selling herself to be, as what she did was complete false advertising, and her lies lead to completely traumatic effects on my family.

Sabrina began sobbing a few minutes into the conversation and stood over me, incredibly and visibly emotional, while I stayed stoic and sat in a chair, having already cried to a coworker at work upon receiving Sabrina's hostile and threatening voicemail.

A few minutes into the conversation, I began to cry, at which point she visibly mocked me. Her reaction shocked me and I said something to the effect of "Did you just make a face at me because I cried?" Her response was "Well it's just that I cried, and you didn't show me sympathy when I cried, soooo" and did kind of a gesture with her hands, showing me my feelings were not important to her. Not that this needs to be said, but speaking that way to a distraught parent should alone be grounds for termination.

When she told me I'd need to be able to leave work if Saxon was acting up (once again, something she promised during my tour was not a Kindercare practice) and I reminded her that I was a single parent, she interrupted me to say "Yeah, my mom was too, but with 4 kids, actually, yeah, 4 kids…" I am quoting her practically verbatim, because I remember the exact way she said it, with some extreme passive aggression. She didn't say this and then continue into some helpful story about her mother's experience; she said this with the intention of shaming me for my own experience, making me feel like I didn't have grounds to be struggling. Once again, I sat shocked.

She asked me a few times during the conversation what I expected her to do. I reminded her that childcare was her job, the job I had paid her to do, that she had ensured me she could do to help guide my kid. Her response, which she said several times, was "I can't diagnose him!"

She had never had an experience like she'd had with my kid, that she was "terrified" of him. She told me her afternoon teacher had given her an ultimatum - "him or me." Once again, my son is 4, and the fit he threw (and the one other incident he'd had, where apparently he threw sand at a teacher - something I was not told about at the time, but Sabrina also shamed him for during this meeting) was very normal behavior for a 4 year old in a bad mood. She was so disappointed to see him go though, she said, because he was "sooo smart and has soooo much potential." She also fiercely told me she "loves him." So, why did she give up on him then? Once again, the only answer I can find is that she is a salesperson, not a childcare provider. If Sabrina is terrified of this kind of interaction, surely she should not be in the childcare industry. I have many friends who are teachers and daycare providers who are horrified at her actions, and a dear friend who was a Center Director at a Kindercare in Wichita for many years - when I relayed my interaction with Sabrina to her, she said "Man, if I had a dime for every time a kid threw a chair, or tried to run out the door…" Both of these things were the worst my kid got that evening - once again, at a time where Sabrina only seemed to be upset because other parents saw her not able to handle a kid's behavior.

She was condescending, interrupting, sharp, and nasty throughout the conversation. I truly couldn't believe in a professional setting that I was having such an experience, that this woman who I was paying to care for my child was trying to play some messed up mind games with me. I felt like I was having a fight with a sorority girl, an entitled antagonistic millennial, like I was on one girl's egoistic soap opera that I wanted no part in. This woman, to be clear, is my peer in age, so her general mentality is not a mystery to me, unless she has some severe trauma in her past that she was projecting onto me in this instance.

At one point the only thing I could think to try and understand her motives was to ask if she was a parent, and she ignored the question. Not because she didn't hear it, because she ignored it.

She told me that if I had come in there and apologized to her, that it would have been a different conversation. She felt that I came in defensive and showed her no sympathy. Of course I came in defensive, I received a hostile voicemail from her at work at 5PM saying several times "I think this is going to have to be his last day" with a heated tone, when he'd only been there 3 weeks. I was blindsided and had no clue what I was walking into. She said he'd been hitting other kids with chairs while their parents were coming to pick them up, that he'd thrown stuff around in her office, thrown things at her, that he'd tried to run out the door. Of course this is terrible and ridiculous, my son was strongly disciplined for his behavior that day and I work with him tirelessly to end this kind of rebellious, aggressive, disrespectful behavior. I am very communicative with him about all of this. But he is a 4 year old, and it was 5PM on his 3rd & last day of the week into daycare, his new daycare where he'd only been for 3 weeks, in a brand new place, with a woman (and maybe several women) who clearly wasn't reacting like a true educator would to him.

I have spent my professional life studying emotional intelligence and behavior in myself and in others, and I focused on interpersonal communication in college. The manipulative tactics that Sabrina displayed in this incident were apparent, offensive, and highly troublesome given her position.

Sabrina recommended at the end of the incident that a smaller class size was the right idea. She only recommended this after I asked what she recommended, feeling bereft and confused and disrespected and defensive, not even really trusting her judgement at that point, but feeling desperate. She also asked me if she'd see us Monday - this, after beginning this interaction my telling me she was kicking my son out, is one of the more startlingly obvious aspects of her salesmanship in this moment. After all that, the mocking and the shaming, she was still trying to make a buck off of me.

I don't discredit her feelings, I know my son can be exhausting and this was a bad tantrum, and I don't discredit some of the good suggestions she made - but I do discredit her in her position to be an aid to parents and to children with strong needs. I don't understand how she could have logically acted that way, so I can only attribute it to an emotional outburst. It was offensive at best, and I have already recommended to other parents that they never send their children to this center or any other center where she works. She should be ashamed of herself, and I doubt she learned anything about emotional connection and sensitivity from the experience - I believe she truly judged my parenting, judged my son, and viewed me as something she didn't like before I even walked in that room. Her comment comparing my single parenting experience to her own mother's struck me as a moment where she must have felt I was an entitled white girl - then again, I can't quite fathom what was in her head, because I truly was blindsided by this, having thought before that she was a true childcare professional, which clearly I was wrong about.

When I took my son out of this center, looking for his items in his cubby which was nowhere to be found, he kept saying "she ripped off my picture." My heart broke for him - these people shamed my kid before I even got there, which is disgusting and is a great example of how childcare services in this country are less than acceptable.

To top all of this off, I received a call from Kindercare's Corporate office last week, telling me I had a $63 balance I needed to pay off. I was informed I had a $63 registration fee I'd never paid. I am of 100% confidence that Sabrina did not tell me about this registration fee, because I would have included it in my first check. I paid $155 per week for three weeks at this center, and the $63 fee is only outstanding because I wasn't aware of it. This is infuriating, to say the least, to receive a plea for money from this company after all Sabrina put us through. If I could afford a lawyer, I'd sue her and the center directly.

This "Family Education Center" is no advocate for families if that woman doesn't receive some immediate and effective sensitivity training and deep, deep lessons in maturity and familial relations, as well as what should be the basic understanding of any childcare professional how to deal with highly sensitive kids growing up in the information age. I feel disgusted with the actions of this center, and hope someone in that place can learn that this kind of low-churning disrespect and disregard for human relations in corporate childcare is toxic and unacceptable.