This was around our third year at daycare. I ran into a mom I'd never seen before on the way in. She was carrying the same daycare bag, so we naturally said hi — "oh, same daycare!"
Chatting casually, she suddenly said, "I think I might switch daycares." Turned out her kid's name had been typed wrong on the name tag.
"Why's that a problem?" I asked. She said one teacher takes care of three kids — how do you mess up a name with that few kids? To her, it meant the teacher just wasn't paying attention.
I nodded along first — "yeah, I can see why you'd feel that way." Then I told her my own experience. My kid's bag has gotten swapped with another kid's bag before. Even three years in, another kid's photo once ended up in my kid's bag. It's just a simple mistake. Teachers are human too.
Think about it for a second. What does it actually take for one teacher to look after three kids? Feeding them, putting them down for naps, calming them when they cry, taking them to the bathroom — and somewhere in the middle of all that, making name tags and sorting photos. Can one mistake really be proof of not caring?
I used to be sensitive about small things too. But at some point I realized something more important: how you work through a mistake together matters a lot more than the mistake itself. How you respond to a slip-up decides what your relationship with that teacher looks like for the next three, five years.