Doherty Family Child Care

I will preface my review by saying that my husband and I take a lot of pride in how we parent our daughter. We have done our research, read books, asked for advice from successful parents, etc. We are steadfast in our belief in raising our daughter without inflicting pain or instilling fear and have, thus far, been successful. She is a happy, confident, and smart 20 month-old girl. She has never been clingy or scared to be dropped off at previous daycares. If anything she was abnormally happy and would wave to us and yell "buh-bye!". My daughter started attending Laugh N Learn Daycare in the beginning of Sept 2014. She would attend only two days week for about 4 hours at a time. Within two weeks, we noticed some behavioral changes and abnormal marks on her when she came home. After the third week of attending the daycare, our daughter started to become very clingy and attached to me, both at home and when we would drop her off at the daycare at the gym. Both of these were extremely unusual for our always outgoing daughter. Upon doing more research, I found that these behavior changes can be indicative of children that have been abused. Furthermore, our daughter started to say "no, no, no!" as soon as we would pull up to Ms. Erin's house. While this did break our hearts to hear, we had no reason not to trust Ms. Erin and associated it with normal adjusting to daycare. On October 9th, when I picked my daughter up, her eyes were swollen. They looked like the eyes of a child that has been crying hard for a long time (this is also what another Yelp reviewer has said happened to her child). My motherly instinct kicked in and I quickly asked what had happened. One of her workers told me that she had just woke up and was crying for five minutes. I started to feel that uneasy feeling as though something had happened to my daughter and they weren't telling me the truth. Ms. Erin offered to show me the video (her house is filled with surveillance cameras) if I came back later. When I returned later that evening, we watched the video starting from when they put my daughter down for a nap and as I suspected, we saw one of her workers treating our daughter and other children in a manner that we feel is inappropriately. Due to the fact that there is an ongoing investigation into this matter, I will not go into full detail, but I will say that we were shocked and concerned enough to immediately withdraw our daughter from Laugh N Learn.