A TV team smuggled an employee into a daycare center and she filmed something horrifying. An expert explained that this can have fatal consequences for children.
Munich – In Germany, the staff shortage is particularly serious in some areas. There are also major deficits in this regard when it comes to childcare. According to Study by the Bertelsmann Foundation As of October 2022, there will be a shortage of up to 383,600 daycare places nationwide in 2023. If one wanted to create these missing daycare places, 98,600 additional positions would have to be filled with skilled workers. An undercover investigation by RTL has meanwhile uncovered questionable conditions in a daycare center. Whether these are also related to possible overloading of daycare employees can only be assumed.
Undercover research by “Team Wallraff” uncovers questionable conditions in the daycare center
In any case, an expert was horrified after investigative journalist Günter Wallraff played him video recordings from a daycare center that, according to the TV station, is located in southern Germany. For the “Team-Wallraff – Reporter Undercover” format, a journalist mingled with the educators as an intern. And experienced scenes worth discussing, which she captured in sound and images with a hidden camera.
In one case that the undercover reporter filmed, a child can be seen crying on the video footage. According to the TV station, the boy, who was one year old, was placed on a mattress on a windowsill. The toddler cries constantly and doesn’t seem to calm down. The staff of the facility, loud ntv.de “a private daycare center for children under three,” seems rather uninterested, and the crying toddler is largely ignored. The employees are more busy with their smartphones or eating. A teacher simply says to the one-year-old: “That’s what it’s like when you don’t sleep enough.”
Expert horrified by video recordings from German daycare center – “Children are very likely to develop abnormalities”
For the child and adolescent psychiatrist Lutz-Ulrich Besser, the behavior of the educators is absurd. “Letting an overexcited, crying child whine and cry and whine on the windowsill and occupy himself with his cell phone and his own food – that has nothing to do with what we know today about modern, attachment-oriented pedagogy,” said the specialist Psychiatry and psychotherapy in the RTL format: “That is very worrying.”
Another child aged two can also be seen in the video recordings. It cries and just can’t calm down. Which obviously gets on the teacher’s nerves. She threatens to take the child “up to the bedroom” if he doesn’t stop crying. “You could hum and no one will hear it,” she says to the little boy. A behavior that is completely incomprehensible to the expert. “Such patterns of over-excitement, which are responded to by pressure and anxiety-triggering aspects, are burned in,” warns child and adolescent psychiatrist Besser: “These children are very likely to develop if this cannot be compensated for by a very loving parental home. Abnormalities.”
“Absolutely harmful for the children” – child and adolescent psychiatrist condemns “physical violence” in daycare centers
And another boy, also two years old, seems to be pushing the teachers to their limits. The child appears to be behaving abnormally in the video recordings, and some teachers express the suspicion that the two-year-old may be mentally handicapped. But instead of giving the child the attention and care he needs, the two-year-old is treated roughly several times. Shortly before naptime, a daycare teacher throws the toddler onto a mattress.
Later, when all the children are supposed to go for a walk, the boy doesn’t sit down as the teachers would like. A teacher holds the little boy in a sitting position and holds the child with her arms and legs so that he cannot run away. Besser is stunned: “Physical violence doesn’t belong in the upbringing of children at all. I have to accompany a child, but I can’t put him in a position of fainting.” The expert continues: “That doesn’t mean that the goal doesn’t remain that we now want to go for a walk together. But the way to get there, to force it through violence, is absolutely harmful for the children.”
Lawyers for the daycare center that was filmed deny the allegations – the TV team sees even more abuses
The lawyers of the daycare center where the RTL journalist worked as an intern and that Video recorded, are now defending themselves against the allegations. “No child is consciously allowed to cry, neither for a period of a few nor for a period of several minutes,” it said in a statement to the TV station. According to this, “no one works there with threats” and “no one would attack a child”.
It cannot be said with certainty whether the scenes shown are just an isolated incident or not. However, the journalists from “Team Wallraff” called for improvements in the processes involved in hiring employees and documenting grievances in daycare centers. According to the report, the undercover reporter did not have to show a copy of her ID card before her internship. In addition, the research for the program showed that in the majority of federal states no statistics are collected to document special events in daycare centers. Meanwhile “Team Wallraff” also uncovered unspeakable conditions in a retirement home. (kh)
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