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My heart is terribly broken for these 2 precious Neshamos.
And now I need to do a Cheshbon haNefesh.
And the first place I’m going to look is at the Hishtadlus we make, because the Mesilas yesharim says that when we do something dangerous, besides the inherent danger, there’s an Onesh for not doing the Hishtadlus. Now, I’m accusing anyone here, but this is true even if this case was due to something else entirely.When regulations set impossible standards, people don’t just fall short, they ignore them entirely; when everything is technically illegal, we lose our ability to spot real danger. Call it a signal-to-noise problem, crying wolf, alarm fatige, regulatory clutter or information overload – it makes VERY HARD to know where the real danger line is.
Israeli daycare regulations: they require specific square meters per child, certified early childhood educators, particular building codes, and extensive documentation. Most home daycares and smaller facilities can’t meet all of these – but parents still need childcare. So they operate in a gray area where technically everything is “non-compliant.”
The result? A place missing some bureaucratic requirements looks the same on paper as a genuinely dangerous situation.
Inspectors don’t inspect because they aren’t wicked and don’t want to close down people’s daycare and livelyhood for ‘non-complience’ with the silly parts. I heard this from the son of an inspector, they inspect Gans where they can give a few small fixes and not cause the whole place to shut down, not anywhere else.
Parents can’t tell the difference – I ran a small semi-legal daycare center, where we were about 75% complient with regulations (we had no outdoor space, no video systems and our caretakers weren’t certified) and more often than not people told me that my place was very nice but they couldn’t pay 4 times the price to go to a legal babysitter. They then sent their babies to tiny apartments with tons of kids – was it safe? I don’t know – and thats exactly the problem. For my place I followed standards from other countries, but these small apartments don’t meet the standards I looked at either. So does that mean it was dangerous? I still don’t know – where those countries trying to be perfect or safe?Possible solutions:
For policymakers: Create a multi-tier system – baseline physical & psychological safety that’s strictly enforced, plus optional “excellence standards” for those who can achieve them.
For parents: We need a simple checklist of the 5-7 things that actually matter for safety – things parents CAN check themselves. Medications/chemicals locked up? Fire exit kept accessable? Adult-to-child ratio? Windows secured on upper floors? What is the real square meters per child min? What is the level at which someone could realistically get physically hurt? The level at which someone could get significantly developmentally delayed? Then parents visiting a place know what to look for, not just “is it licensed?”
We need the tools to assess real danger themselves!YWN, you ran an editorial wakeup call, which is a great start. And parents would have more courage if they knew the bottom line.
We need to find the actual bottom line and enforce it consistently.Thoughts?
Isn’t that the A through F rating system used by bureaucrats worldwide?
I think what you are looking for is a range from eligible for premium subsidy, to regular subsidy, to reduced subsidy, to no subsidy but licensed, to maximum allowed in an unlicensed home daycare.
We have such a structure here in NJ. NJ is not typically worth emulating, but it sounds like what you are looking for.
As far as a specific set of tools or what to look for, I think that good judgement is called for, but a specific list would quickly fall victim to Goodhart’s law (when a metric becomes a target, it ceases to be a good metric)
@jerusalemy
I am always amazed by the stupidity of relying on government for safety regulation, when government is dismal at everything they do except taking the public’s money.I appreciate the intent of OP @jerusalemy, but the answer is certainly not more bureaucracy.
I would suggest a private system of certification, like heksherim, that can be communally leveraged by parents very much like any consumer product.
Thoughts?
I think you should get a jobAs more information becomes public about what actually happened versus what was initially reported if it becomes more and more clear that this was a relatively well run unlicensed home daycare, that likely would have been considered legitimate and almost any city in developed world
For example:
Initial report – two dead and 53 evacuated from an unlicensed home daycare– insinuation being that there were 53 children being supervised in a single apartment.Reality – 12 infants were being supervised by two babysitters in an apartment the other 41 children were in other apartments throughout the building either at other home daycares or simply at home under their mother’s care. Because the initial suspicion was carbon monoxide poisoning or some other hazardous material, paramedics and firefighters chose to evacuate the entire building (which was probably the correct choice with the information they had at hand.)
I don’t know anything about these specific babysitters, but I suspect that all 12 parents had done some level of research prior to sending their children and made a good decision with the information they had at hand at the time.
While it is a tragedy, it does not seem to have been necessarily avoidable or preventable with specific policies or regulations. Nobody really considers the possibility of dehydration in the winter. The only thing slightly objectionable was putting cribs in bathrooms and walk in closets, which to your point may be against regulation but wouldn’t stand out to many parents as problematic.
The situation itself is indeed unclear, both sensational reports and whitewashing explanations can be fake. Hopefully, facts will be clarified later on. Savlanut.
I presume those who live there know what the general situation is and can discuss, and I presume that OP knows things first-hand. My suggestions below are not based on facts, just on basic economics, so please correct me when I am off-base.
I suggest that the original problem is social and will not be fully fixed by heksherim or gov supervision. If parents do not have enough money to pay for adequate supervision, it will not happen. Caregivers will have no certification not only because of cost of certification and required limits on number of kids, fire safety standards, etc. Certification probably also means that wages have to be reported, taxed, and benefits reduced, that wages have to be according to some minimal standards, maybe even insurances.
So, one great idea: parents need to get more funds – hopefully, by acquiring skills and getting good jobs. Possibly part-time so that they can learn like Hillel and others.
Another – accept life of poverty, there is nothing wrong with that, but take responsibility for safety of children: grandparents, older siblings, local BYs can all do chesed. Fathers can learn from home with books and zoom calls while keeping an eye on children while showing them an example of Torah learning – or even teaching these children Torah.
I quoted several times already a story of Mitteler Rebbe learning without paying attention to his crying baby that rebetzin asked him to watch (another future Chabad Rebbe). His father, Alter Rebbe heard the cries from his apartment upstairs and came to reprimand his son for not watching his grandson. Interestingly, Alter Rebbe did not offer babysitting services, maybe he considered his own finishing Tanya more important, or he was not on his daughter-in-law’s approved babysitting list. Anyway, get your parents into the same building and go for it.
I heard authorities are now looking to crack down on illegal gans, running some sort of covert search operations.
This is a problem with the mentality in Israeli government.
In other places they would realize that this incident shows that more thought and research needs to be put into the making of the rules so that they are not so discouraging.
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