Uses of Wireless CCTV in the Childcare Arena
If you are a working parent, you probably have a desk littered with photos of your precious child, perhaps a mouse pad with his or her photo on it, and a wall calendar with her or his likeness. Quite often during the day you may wonder how your child is doing, if she is missing you, if he is having his lunch and drinking and his milk, and overall you will want to ensure that she or he is safe and well cared for in your absence. While experts time and again advise parents to make unscheduled visits to the daycare centers that look after their children during the workday, this is quite often an impossible proposition to a parent who has to keep a job in order to put food on the table.
Additionally, keeping in mind that many daycare providers are operating out of their own homes, there is always the awkward feeling of invading somebody’s residence when a parent shows up unannounced and unexpected. Granted, if you are taking your children to a home daycare provider you know that you have every right to drop by unannounced at any given time, but you probably will not be able to help the way you feel.
A new innovation that is sweeping the childcare centers in the United Kingdom is the installation and usage of wireless CCTV in the childcare arena. Closed-circuit television, or CCTV, refers to the childcare center’s use of television cameras, which are set up in strategic places around the rooms where the children are during the day. The images these cameras pick up go to a set of monitors, which are oftentimes connected directly to a computer. Other times, it is webcams that are hooked up to the Internet directly or to a video server which will display the images captured on a website. Parents may access the website that displays the webcam images via a secured site that requires password access, and so they will be able 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 at any given moment.
Yet what about the daycare providers – do they applaud the use of CCTV technology in their centers of operation? As a matter of fact, they do! You will be surprised to find out their reasons:
In a day and age where the awareness of predators that target children grows, and where every day brings more news stories of teachers who are found out to be perverts, it becomes increasingly difficult to ensure that children are indeed safe. Children or parents may misunderstand interactions at centers. This could lead to accusations and allegations of child abuse, neglect, or molestation when in fact none existed. CCTV technology in the childcare arena will provide the backup a childcare operator will need to take an unbiased look at an allegation and see if there was indeed an improper situation that took place, or if instead the parent may have walked in on a game that was completely innocent – which can be proven by showing the tape leading up to and including the moment the parent walked in on a questionable incident. For example, a child who is being toilet trained will require adult assistance in wiping. While this is intellectually understood by parents and caregiver alike, a parent may take exception to the help offered by a childcare provider when it is 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 that this help is given, but a parent who is a bit too quick on the trigger may not see it this way. CCTV will exonerate the childcare provider and help the parent to gain a bit of a reality check.
Bumps and bruises are evidences that learning experiences are taking place in childhood. Yet if you have parents who question the bruises a child has received while in your care it is hard to answer thusly. For this reason CCTV technology will ensure that parents will be able to 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 on the deck.
