Since were working on moving daycares, I wanted to figure out how to export the thousands of photos of my kids they have on file. Turns out most daycare apps don't have a way to mass export them or mass remove them either. (That rases a lot of questions about what these places do with all these photos and videos when you leave)

This (so far) seems to be the way you can systematically download all that content. Sure its a lot of photos, thousands and thousands between two kids since they were very little, but I'd rather have them, prune them, and save them then leave them to exist only on someone else's server.

#NotAnAd

An absolutely horrific event is ripping its way through a daycare chain in my state, which is owned by private equity. The event is so horrific and tragic that I don't even want to link it, not even because it would dox myself; it's just too fucking sad.

When we first enrolled our oldest into this daycare center, private equity did not own it. By the time she was 4, they did. The experience she got was worlds different from the one my son is getting, and this company has been gobbling up daycares across my state. This has culminated in such a lax hiring policy that some freak was able to...

I want to be clear: The above did not happen in my son's daycare, but it is part of that chain of daycares. There are now up to 10 lawsuits from families against the parent company. Some of which are claiming that staff members tried to alert daycare administration about the behavior of this person, only to be retaliated against. I have no idea if DCF was contacted at any point over this persons activity, but daycare workers in my state are mandated reporters.

Since this event, our daycare has been hemorrhaging both leadership and rank-and-file daycare teachers. The crop of people left now are mostly the "seasonal" college students who rotate through the facility every year as the semesters open and close.

Speaking with a former teacher we're close with, we were told that the new leadership in the building is constantly watching the security cameras and issuing retaliatory action against anyone speaking poorly of the facility. One parent relayed to me that in conversation with one of the teachers (a former high school teacher), they learned she has reported our facility to the state five times in the last few months. For things as bad as leaving a child in a diaper for 6+ hours without changing them, as an example.

In our experience, it's apparent that our son has not gotten the same level of care as our daughter once did. They used to focus on social and emotional learning, teaching kids how to regulate their emotions. They used to tell us when they had to put this teaching into practice and why, so we understood how to implement it at home and what she was struggling with. They taught our daughter sign language when she was around 2 years old. They claimed to be doing this with my son, but never did. Likewise, they were far more supportive when potty training, something my son is just getting to the other side of now. Multiple times in the last month he has either come home with a pullup on under his training underwear or skid marks in his underwear. It dawned on me just this week that they must not be watching him or keeping tabs on him in the bathroom... I'm now making a more explicit effort to coach him through wiping after pooping and other good bathroom habits, which I have a strong feeling they are not doing when he is there.

All of this is a result of high turnover. They cannot keep people in the facility at all, and there are so few faces now that I even recognize. The teacher we spoke with told us that it used to be practice that new hires were interviewed by the building director. Now, when people are hired, they are hired by a 3rd party, and no one in the building meets with them before hand.

Most of what I'm telling you is things we picked up on over the past few months but had no connecting thread for. Day to day, some of this stuff just slips past you, or presents like a one-off incident. You get caught up in the day-to-day process. But the conversations with the other parent we're friends with, and this former teacher, though, stitched all these things together in a way that weaved a sad and concerning tapestry of life at our daycare. One that has been declining since before this incident in the other facility.

People will look at what is happening in the daycare at the center of this atrocity and view it as an isolated tragedy and not for what it is, a systemic failure of kids. Private equity doesn't give a shit that these kids and families will be lifelong victims. They will do everything possible to try to protect their assets, their franchise, and their brand name, even if doing so costs them all of that eventually. They'll take their losses, rebrand, merge, and split, but they'll continue to ruin the lives of children.

The part that has me so incensed is the centerlessness of the whole thing. This person is going to spend a long time in jail, but they are not the reason my daycare center is sinking. Private equity is, and there is no one single person you could accost. Just this faceless entity systematically allowing for the ruination of people's kids. Cut the head off it, and it grows another; it keeps lurching forward like a fucking zombie, turning daycares into more private equity. Destroy it, and two more rise in its place. Seek shelter from it, and it subsumes that shelter.

The entire thing is a fucking tragedy. Getting my kid into a different daycare is necessary at this point, but I know it's also going to be sad for him. I have to pull him away from all the friends he knows and people he likes. In theory, it's only for a year, since he should be able to get into Pre-K in my local district. That, however, is run on a lottery system because the district is intent on leaving the program underfunded. Even though they have the physical capacity for it. That's a whole other grievance I have for another time though. I'm sad for him and how this is going to impact him.

I just needed to get this out of me. It's been eating me up for days.

Asking in advance.

My kid is showing me their Pinterest and it’s unhinged. Mpreg art of two of the avatars from their math learning software at school. Hatsune Miku as the Lorax. Michael Jackson everywhere. It’s incredible.

All of their friends have it. I am confused and amazed all at once. The shitposting is strong.

Jim Henderson, photographer

“Cuban Family, from a personal project I shot in Havana, Cuba.”

How have y'all approached this with your own kids, and are there any resources out there you would also recommend? To date, my spouse and I have given our kid restricted internet access because of all the fucking AI slop and reactionary content that so many algorithms try to shove into the mouths of their users. I think the latter is especially relevant as it pertains to raising a boy in a patriarchal society and I obviously worry about the prospect of him stumbling across and consuming content from pond scum like Andrew Tate. And honestly even shit like Mr. Beast.

Sometimes it's challenging because he seems to have a number of friends who appear to have unrestricted access to everything, including the internet, and I think that bums him out a little. We want to give him more freedom in that regard, but we also want to be smart about it. But I do understand that some things may be out of our hands one way or the other and he might have to learn some things for himself with this increase in internet access.

Obviously part of internet competency is also just being safe and not giving out personally identifying information, don't click on suspicious shit that could be malicious, etc., so we do plan to teach him about that as well.

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/57280

When ByHeart infant formula was linked to a nationwide outbreak of infant botulism last fall, the company encouraged its customers to switch to another premium whole milk formula made by Nara Organics. Now Nara Organics, which has promoted the “thousands of tests” it runs on every formula batch, is recalling all of its whole milk organic powdered infant formula after the Centers for Disease…

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Designer

Propaganda Office of the Ministry of Health of the Central People's Government (中央人民政府卫生部宣传处)

Date

1954, December

Publisher

Zhongyang weishengbu weisheng xuanjiao qicai zhizaosuo (中央卫生部卫生宣教器材制造所)

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/8246456

Ah yeah more money than I will make in a lifetime, ez to start a family nowadays!

Key findings

• The 18-year cost of raising a child grew to $303,418 after tax exemptions and credits, according to a LendingTree analysis, even though the cost of the first five years dipped slightly. That's an average of $16,857 annually over 18 years, up 1.9% from a year ago. However, annual costs in the first five years decreased slightly from $29,419 to $29,325 (or 0.3%), driven primarily by a dip in day care costs.
• Hawaii is the most expensive state to raise a small child, with annual costs for the first five years reaching $40,342. Maryland and Massachusetts follow at $36,419 and $34,247. Conversely, annual costs are lowest in Mississippi ($17,148), Alabama ($18,019) and South Dakota ($18,622). All three states have infant day care costs below $10,000 annually, helping them rank among the cheapest states to raise a small child.
• Fourteen states saw the annual cost of raising a small child rise at least 10.0%, including four with growth of 20.0% or more. Annual costs rose in 39 states and the District of Columbia. Nebraska (27.4%), Montana (24.5%), Maine (24.4%) and Wisconsin (23.3%) all saw significant year-over-year growth in the annual cost of raising a small kid.  - Families in six states are projected to spend more than $300,000 raising a child over 18 years, with Hawaii leading at $412,661, followed by Alaska ($365,047) and Maryland ($326,360). By contrast, projected costs are lowest in New Hampshire ($201,963), the District of Columbia ($202,115) and South Carolina ($204,213). Kansas and Alaska saw the largest increases in projected 18-year child-rearing costs, each rising 23.5% from last year's report.
• Families spend an average of 21.9% of their income on the basic annual expenses to raise a small child, down from 22.6% in our 2025 analysis. The percentage is lowest in the District of Columbia (13.9%) and highest in Hawaii (27.4%).

This looks like a really interesting read. I stumbled on this book because my wife is reading about the Author's developmental theory for her student development masters. His theory of child development has a real striking resemblance to Dialectical Materialism at a cursory glance. The author after writing this book went on to help establish Head Start. Which is just another example of social programs in the west being created as a direct result of experience with the Soviet system.

This book compares the childhood development of kids from both the USSR and the US in the 1960s. Anna's Archive has a few PDFs of the book in various editions.

Adding it to my growing reading list.

MIKHAIL SAMKOV. CHILDREN SINGING, 1971-72

Spiro Kristo - The Children (1968)

"The revolution has always been in the hands of the young. The young always inherit the revolution."

—Huey P. Newton

So I informed you people of my recent conundrum. My solution ended up being that I had a discussion with the child about the fact that there are adults who want to hurt children who lurk the internet, and what kind of information she should be wary of handing out on the internet (Incidentally the person the child handed out their number to was another child, the kid had vetted this on their own before handing out their actual phone number, which is pretty cool. Also both kid's moms have now spoken so that's double cool). I then promised the child that I would never tell anyone anything that they tell me in confidence. Which I mean I guess I already did kinda, but it feels different because I am sharing it anonymously. I then said I would tell their mom that it was time to talk to them about what they were allowed to do on the internet so nobody would get in trouble in the future.
Well someone got in trouble, and that someone is me. Because the girl told her parents what she did during that conversation, and they panicked and told the institution, and everyone agreed that I had been negligent because I had only told them to have a conversation about internet safety and not told them specifically what happened. Even though they found out literally two days after I did.

Now the worst didn't happen. The kid still has her phone. But it's now basically 90% spyware and parental control which is gonna do a fat load of good since nobody bothers to check it and the parents immediately wanted my help in getting around parental controls to use a third party chat feature anyway. While still being mad at me for not telling them. But also she's not allowed to install google messages because they don't know if they can monitor that?!? The whole thing is a mess, but at least no one got hurt.

So I have two kids, 11 and 14, and I think they’re actually older than any of the other kids that other users on this website might have. Like a good communist, I made sure to brainwash my children when they were young, and I even homeschooled them for the first three years of the pandemic. Eventually they asked to go back to school and I couldn’t really stop them. They’ve actually had a great time there, they’re doing really well and they seem very popular, but especially my older kid has been having such a good time that he started doubting that America was bad, and has just kind of been drifting into liberalism, although I could still get him to say cool things like free Palestine, which liberals won’t usually say. He also developed a serious interest in sports, sadly just watching rather than playing, and I don’t know where that comes from because neither of his parents are really interested in watching sports, but seemingly it’s what everyone at his school loves. He was also repeating a lot of the usual liberal nonsense to me about China and the Soviet Union.

Anyway, over the last couple of weeks he’s become pretty obsessed with Epstein, and has been sending me lots of TikTok videos about the usual Epstein-related things, and yesterday he just suddenly told me that ”maybe the commies are the good guys because at least they aren’t eating children.” He stopped arguing with me about China and the Soviet Union, and seems slightly more interested in getting a more left perspective on these and other similar subjects. I don’t know how long this will last, but it’s just a minor hopeful sign. I know that most liberals and conservatives are just kind of doing their best to focus only on how Epstein implicates their enemies, rather than the system itself, but some people at least might be shaken out of the capitalist ideological paradigm.

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/25719

Two weeks into January, the director of a St. Paul child care center called a family to ask why their daughter had been absent on-and-off since late last year.

“We reached out to just see, ‘Hey, what’s going on? Is your child sick?’” said Angela Clair, whose child care center serves more than 70 children.

The girl’s mother answered the phone.

“ICE is in our neighborhood every single day, and I don’t want to leave the neighborhood to take her to school, because I’m afraid that myself or my husband will be taken,” Clair recalls the mother saying.

Clair called back a week later to check on them, but the family still didn’t feel safe bringing their child to school. The family relies on the Child Care Assistance Program, a federally-funded, state-managed program that subsidizes child care for low-income families. The family would no longer receive the subsidy if the child missed 10 days in a row or more than 25 days of school in a calendar year.

With the girl’s absences creeping towards 25, Clair had to un-enroll her.

“It’s just unfortunate because mom does not want her to not be in school,” Clair said. “But also knows it’s just not safe right now.”

Minnesota is entering the third month of “Operation Metro Surge,” in which thousands of immigration agents are sweeping the state, arresting immigrants — including many who are in the U.S. legally. Agents have shot three people, killing two U.S. citizens, and sparked widespread protests and efforts to track and observe agents’ actions.

Parents and children have been detained on their way to school, prompting several metro-area schools and districts to offer online learning options to vulnerable families. Volunteers — mostly parents — are taking shifts during dropoff and pickup to keep eyes out for ICE.

The absences are impacting early childhood education, too — and have big-picture implications for child care providers, who are often running on low margins already.

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