MOM Thinks Baby Is Safe At DayCare, Until She Sees Photo Of Her
A nursery should be a place where parents can leave their children in a safe environment without fear of harm or danger, a place where you expect the people you leave in charge of your baby to provide them with the same affection you would give them. At least, that is what we all hope for. However, sometimes what we expect and what actually happens is very different, giving rise to things as frightening as the one we will relate in this story.
Deirdre and Jonathan Jones were a young married couple from Central Kansas living with their infant daughter, Allora, who was just six months old. Deirdre was an up-and-coming lawyer specializing in human rights, while her husband was in business, working as the accountant for a major food company in the area. They were a completely normal couple with an ordinary, quiet life that didn’t stand out from the rest. Their story would have nothing special, and we would have never needed to tell it to you, if it were not for the strange and disturbing event that these first-time parents had to live through with their newborn baby girl. It was an unfortunate accident that could have ended in tragedy had it not been for the quick action of the authorities and the subsequent protest and awareness campaign carried out by the couple at a national level. But before going into details, we need some context and to know how these parents came to have to take such drastic measures to protect their daughter’s life and that of many other children of her age who were just as exposed as she was.
Deirdre and Jonathan met at the University of Kansas while Jonathan was finishing his PhD in international business economics and Deirdre was a senior in law school. Both were bright students who excelled in their respective professions, had the same values, and wanted the same things in life: to have a successful career, get married, and raise a family. That’s probably why when they met, they knew they were destined to be together. They even had the same tastes in food and entertainment, so there was nothing they couldn’t agree on. So, when just a year and a half after they met they announced to everyone they were getting married, no one was surprised. Perhaps they were too young to take such an important step, but it didn’t seem that way to them.
After the wedding, which was a small religious ceremony with just over forty guests, Deirdre and Jonathan bought a beautiful house in downtown Kansas. It was the kind of house any American family with children would want to live in. Their new life as husband and wife started out as a real fairy tale. Jonathan got a good job as an accountant for a major company in the country, while his wife became a respected lawyer who fought to protect those in need. They both made a great team and loved their life. However, they knew they needed to take their relationship a step further and fulfill another of their big dreams: to become parents.
“I want to be a mother, Jonathan. I don’t want to wait any longer. I want to start a big family with you, and I feel like we’re ready to take the step. I think we always have been. We’ve been putting it off for fear of getting it wrong or not being good enough, but I know we will be. I know you’ll be the best father my children can have,” Deirdre said to her husband one night as they were having a quiet dinner on the terrace of their home.
“I want that too, honey. There’s nothing I’m more excited about than having a child with you and watching him grow up in this house. Let’s do it,” said her husband, smiling and kissing her sweetly on the hand.
It didn’t take long for their wishes to become parents to come true, as just four months after that conversation, Deirdre announced to her husband she was three weeks pregnant. The pregnancy was uneventful, and at four months’ gestation, the doctors told them they were going to be parents of a baby girl. The couple was very happy about the news and hurried to prepare everything for the arrival of the new member of the family, little Allora.
Deirdre had a really easy pregnancy, which allowed her to lead a practically normal life until almost the last month. She didn’t stop working in the office until the doctors recommended her to rest in order to cope with the last weeks and the moment of delivery. However, Deirdre found it harder to stop being productive than you might expect for a new mother, and her husband had to beg her to rest until their daughter was born.
“You can’t keep working more than eight hours a day or go to court in your condition. Look at you, you’re about to give birth. I don’t want my daughter to be born while the judge is ruling. Honey, listen to the doctors, and if you won’t listen to them, at least listen to me, okay?” Jonathan pleaded with his wife with a certain tone of reproach for his wife’s inability to prioritize her well-being and that of the child that was about to be born.
Mrs. Jones eventually complied, and just two weeks later, they happily welcomed their daughter, Allora. The delivery was perfect, and the baby girl was born in perfect condition. She was a beautiful baby with dark eyes and curly hair that her parents fell in love with from the first moment they met.
The first months as first-time parents, however, were not as easy as they thought and caused their first marital crisis. Allora had a lot of colic that caused her not to sleep well at night. She wouldn’t stop crying, and that made both Deirdre and her husband end each day and each night exhausted, without the energy to face their respective obligations the next day.
“We can’t go on like this, Deirdre. We need to get some sleep. It’s clear this parenting thing isn’t going as smoothly as we thought it would, and we have to accept that the time has come to ask for help. I know you don’t like to do it; in fact, I don’t think you’ve ever asked for help, but there’s a time for everything, honey. We can’t go on like this. We should take the child to a daycare center,” Mr. Jones proposed to his wife, hoping to find a solution that would allow them to rebalance their lives.
At first, his wife refused to leave the child in daycare, but after spending two more weeks with barely any sleep, Deirdre had come to terms with the fact that they needed help urgently and that they should allow others to care for their little girl so they could rest and work safely.
“All right, honey, we’ll take the child to a nursery, but she’ll only stay for a few hours. Just long enough for us to get some proper rest, and then I’ll pick her up and we’ll take care of her. What do you think?” Deirdre suggested to her husband while they were having breakfast after another long, sleepless night.
Of course, her husband accepted his wife’s plan and didn’t object to any of her conditions. The couple decided to leave little Allora at a nearby daycare center, a mere twenty minutes from their home, which everyone had spoken quite highly of and which seemed to meet all the established safety and cleanliness standards. Unfortunately, they would soon discover that none of this was true.
During the first two months of taking the baby to the nursery, everything seemed to be going well, and the couple was very grateful to be able to rest properly and enjoy more time alone. Their relationship as a couple had suffered greatly after the birth of the baby girl, so these new moments of intimacy helped them to reconcile and regain time to listen to each other. Unfortunately, just three months after taking Allora to daycare, the couple’s happiness turned to anguish, and the peace that they had longed for disappeared with a single phone call.
It all happened in April 2018, when Deirdre and Jonathan Jones received a mysterious call from the Kansas Department of Children and Families, the DCF, informing them that they had received some photos of babies wrapped in sleeping bags from daycare centers. One of the daycare centers they had reported through those photos was where they had dropped off their daughter. The DCF told them that they had a very disturbing photo of their six-month-old daughter, Allora, who was in the daycare at the time, and that they needed to come to the office quickly to certify that it was their baby.
“We have reason to believe that your daughter and other children being cared for at that same daycare are in grave danger. Please come to our offices as quickly as you can to confirm that the baby in the photos is your daughter. We need the parents’ testimony in order to move forward with the investigation of this case,” said the DCF agent to Mrs. Jones. The urgency to resolve the matter as soon as possible could be heard in the voice.
Mrs. Jones felt her heart stop after hanging up the call. She and her husband jumped into the car and sped to the DCF offices. There, her worst fears were realized as she saw a little girl in one of the photos the inspector was holding. It turned out that one of the new daycare workers had reported that her daughter, among many other children, had been placed in a sleeping bag face down, with the bag pulled tight with a headband. Apparently, the daycare center had recently changed owners, and the new people they hired were not always qualified to care for such young children. Some of them had not even had any training that would allow them to be in charge of children, something that was against the law, which the daycare center did not bother to check. Fortunately, one of the more senior workers managed to realize what was happening and was not afraid to alert the authorities to what she had seen.
After confirming that the baby in the photo was Allora, the Joneses immediately removed their little girl from the daycare and filed their own complaint against the center. However, they were not the only ones who received an alarming call from the DCF that week, as up to twenty other daycare centers were found to have children tied up in the same way as their daughter. The case became a real scandal, and the news of the children tied up in sleeping bags soon appeared in all the local media.
Deirdre Jones agreed to give an interview to 41 Action News, in which she explained how they felt about what was happening at the nursery and the importance of taking immediate precautionary measures to protect the babies.
“First, I thought it couldn’t be my baby. She looked so tiny. She’s lying on her stomach as usual, but she looked uncomfortable. She was tied up and helpless. She can’t roll over, can’t sit up, and if she coughed, she would probably choke. I felt very scared for her. She’s been in that daycare for two months now, and I thought she’d be fine there. I trusted these people to take care of my little girl, but now it’s clear that I was wrong,” she stated.
The mother also took advantage of the interview to express her indignation and send a message to the authorities to intervene and create new laws to prevent such an event from happening again.
“Sleeping bags are often used. I was given one to wrap Allora in when she was in the hospital. Sleeping bags are safer than blankets if used correctly. If they’re not used correctly, they’re not safe. Common sense would tell you not to strap a sleeping bag to a baby’s back and lay them face down, but laws are not always common sense. The laws need to catch up. What’s being done? How do you make this illegal and not just an error in judgment? Through training and strict control of the staff that work in these centers; there’s no other way to put an end to this problem,” Jones said in front of the cameras with the usual determination that she, as a lawyer, used to show in all her cases.
After the interview and the multiple complaints carried out by all the affected parents, the DCF carried out an in-depth investigation in which up to four daycare centers in the city were closed. For her part, Mrs. Deirdre did not cease in her efforts to get the regulatory authorities to change the current legislation to ensure that the children in the nurseries were safe and well cared for. Her fight went viral on social media, where she accumulated hundreds of thousands of followers who supported her and praised her courage to raise her voice against an inefficient system.
It was not easy, and she had to deal with many inconveniences, but after several months of struggle in the courts, the lawyer and mother Deirdre Jones obtained the approval of a new statute that would ensure the control of accredited personnel for the care of babies in nurseries. The courage she showed to guarantee the safety of her daughter and of the rest of the babies whom, like her, thousands of parents leave every day in the care of complete strangers is the proof of justice that continues to exist.
