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I'd be SO upset if I walked in and saw that!

We've never picked DD up with a dirty face so I never even thought that they wouldn't clean their face!

I suspect your friend is exaggerating.

Kids with runny noses are constantly running. You'd have to be on them all day long in order to ensure that they had a clean face before their parent arrived, and if you do that with one kid, it means you don't have time to do it with another. Same with pink eye. As soon as you wipe it up, there's more. It's unrealistic to expect kids in daycare to be 100% clean all of the time, especially if there's only one teacher for 4 kids and they are all sick (which is likely since they are all just sharing germs with each other constantly).

I would be pretty upset about that. But generally speaking during the winter months, snot crusted, runny nose is pretty common at pick up. If it's really bad, we do say something.

Generally, yes, they do clean her face/hands, but there are a lot of kids and they are all snotty in the winter time, so I understand if kids are snotty and there is just one teacher. I don't let it bother me. Heck, I wipe H's nose all the time and she usually has snot dripping back down right after I wipe it if she's got a cold.

@mediagirl: I would think that because pink eye is SO incredibly contagious, they wouldn't want to touch the goopy part with anything...including a wet paper towel or tissue. Even if they wash their hands really well, one touch to another baby could mean that baby is now exposed to pink eye. So in that case, I would let it slide.

I also agree that no matter how much I wipe my baby's or 3.5 year old's nose, it's constantly running. I would make their little noses so sore if I wiped every few seconds.

With that said, yes, our day care wipes faces. Both LOs are always really clean when we come pick them up. If your friend is concerned, it might be worth a mention to the teacher or director instead of stewing about it.

@mediagirl: I don't think it's normal for that level of grossness. LO1 has been to 4 centers now and only 1, the first one, had a somewhat consistent problem with this stuff and in that case, it was indicative of the overall sloppiness of the center--poor communication with us, messy faces, teachers not doing a great job, etc. So we switched her.

On the other hand, LO went to a Bright Horizons (a huge corporate chain) using the back up care plan while I was on maternity leave, and I noticed her particular teachers there were SUPER about keeping the kids clean and tidy. LO never even had so much as a food stain on her shirt at the end of the day, and they often re-did her hair after nap time. Her hair bows and everything were always perfect at the end of the day, which is above and beyond what I expect.

I loooove our daycare but there are def times that I think they could do a better job cleaning lo's face. But, it's never quite as bad as described here, just some dried snot (I pick lo up at 3, right after nap, so there isn't much time to wipe her between wake up and pick up though they do change her diaper) or when she was littler and ate purees there would be some fried on her face. But that's a really small deal to me since I love everything else about our center and lo is thriving there

I'm not very picky about wiped noses, so I don't notice particularly.

But for something that was too contagious to touch, a teacher would take the child out of the room to be picked up by a parent rather than not care for them. (For the older kids, a teacher waits with the child on a bench in the front hall and read some books. I've never had to pick up one of our kids as an infant for sickness, but I would imagine they might take the baby to the director's office to wait, where there is some space to sit on the floor with the baby.) Leaving a kid with crusted-over eyes seems cruel to me

DD is not in daycare but heck, when she has a runny nose even I can't always keep up with all the snot. And she is the only kid I am looking after!

I can also understand the argument and reasoning of wanting to minimize a daycare providers exposure to highly contagious pinkeye. I'm sure they don't want to spread that around the entire center.

They all have runny noses this time of year so I don't expect him to be squeaky clean when I arrive. I would not like to see evidence of lunch on his face plus old snot and eye gunk at 6pm but if it's a couple of hours worth I'm okay with it. It was cold outside today and they were all outside when I got there and the runny noses were out of control. With a 1:5 ratio I really don't expect to see clean faces!