Originally Posted by Unregistered:
My son's daycare provider purposely makes the room really dark and puts the children in play yards with pillows and blankets so they think it's night time and will sleep for 3-4 hours. All parents at the daycare have complained about their children not sleeping at night, but she does this so she can do whatever she wants to do. Or she often sleeps too while the children are naping (I would love to be able to take a nap at my desk in the middle of my day!! 
...). When I ask her about this she tells me that she won't wake a sleeping child because they get cranky, but isn't this extreme? My son doesn't go to bed until almost 10 everynight and then it's a fight to wake him up in the morning.
All the providers in this forum do is complain, but they all choose to be day care providers!! Everyone has a personal choice on what they chose to do especially when they have their own business. I choose to work in an office environment...I have paper work and stuff that needs to be done and would love a chance to just do it and catch up on stuff...but guess what? all my "main work" comes first. If I don't like it...I could find a new profession. Why do providers act like they're so different? I have to stay after 5 alot of the time or work at home to do stuff that I couldn't get done during the day. I don't want to nor do I like doing it...but I have to do my job at any cost. Appearently day care providers are immune to that and should have the children sleep for hours on end so that they have their precious time to get their stuff done?
I guess I dont understand why the toys/rooms can't be disinfected right after the children leave? How is this any different from a parent who leaves work to pick up their child, but has to turn their lap top on once they walk in the door to finish up something that they needed done that day? (which I have to do daily) We all have a tough job to do...why can't that just be the way it is? Instead of what I see in this forum that parents do nothing all day, don't care about their children and just drop them off at daycare to be a burden on all you providers so you can complain about what you choose to do?
I wasn't going to respond to this post, but I feel like I have to.
Do you have any idea how long it would take for providers to do all of their cleaning after all of the kids leave for the day? If you had even the slightest idea how long it takes, you wouldn't even suggest that providers wait until after the kids leave to clean. That is a foolish suggestion.
As far as your provider goes, if she is sleeping during naptime, take it up with her! Don't assume that all other providers do that, too. Most of us are actually working for a good portion of nap time.
If you can't get your child to sleep at night, then maybe you should examine what your child's bedtime ritual consists of. A nap at daycare shouldn't have that much of an affect as long as it's a reasonable amount of time and the child isn't sleeping too late.
Most of us put in longer days than ANY of the parents of the children in our care. If we didn't try to get as much done during naptime as we could, then our days would be even longer still. Don't make it seem like your situation is the same as ours. It's not.
Lastly, naptime is important for children in daycare. I'm not saying that they need to sleep, but they do need some down time. Consider that.