Hank's Place

At YW's daycare they do fun things over the summer, they go on Field Trips and have theme days (eg, bring something with wheels and spend the day rolling around). They also will shuttle kids from the daycare site to the Municipal Pool for swimming lessons. Yesterday YW had his first daycare swimming lesson. He's had lessons at this pool before so he knows the layout and the format of the lessons. When MLWN picked him up yesterday she was informed that he and two other boys had misbehaved at the pool and if it happened again he couldn't go to the pool anymore. YW got the riot act read to him last night: all fun for the summer, field trips, birthday party, etc, depend on his not screwing up at the pool.

This morning I dropped him off at daycare and had a chat with the woman in charge and combined with what YW said about event here is what I think happened. YW had a fine swimming lesson. He went into the locker room to change back into his street clothes and did so. While doing so, and perhaps on his way into the locker room, he and a couple other boys were laughing and being typical 6 year-old boys. They dawdled in the locker room and the woman who was waiting at the front desk told the man who runs the Rec department (which includes the city-run daycare) who went into the locker room to find out what was taking them so long. He rousted them and told the woman who runs YW's daycare site that they were screwing around too much and that one more screw-up and he was banning them.

That's fine, but here's where my feelings of guilt come in. The three boys were almost certainly horsing around (which was wrong), but they had never before seen the man who rousted them. And, in a situtation where a herd of 6 and 7 year olds were changing in a locker room, they had no adult in the locker room to monitor proper behavior. So YW and his pals were horsing around in the absence of adult supervision and some strange man came in and got upset at them. They probably didn't even notice him until he got angry. None of this is to excuse YW; the rest of the kids managed to get dressed and exit the locker room. But if I had known more about the actual sequence of events I wouldn't have been quite so stern last night. One the bright side, YW will probably be a model child at his swimming lesson today.

Update: YW had a glorious day at the pool today. He listened to the instructor in the pool and changed into his street clothes in a timely manner. After lunch when he went back to the pool for a Free Swim event, he behaved appropriately in the pool and changed into his street clothes in a timely manner. Woo!