Childcare and Casinos

Herald Argus LaPorte, Indiana

Editorial: Child care at casinos? Strange bedfellows

Gambling casino. Child-care center. Put the two together and they seem an oxymoron.

But putting the two together is exactly what some casinos are doing, including the planned Four Winds Casino in New Buffalo, Mich.

Casino officials maintain that an onsite child-care area enhances the safety of kids while their parents or guardians are gambling. Reading between the lines, we would assume they mean that such babysitting facilities would put an end to unseemly stories of children left in hot or cold vehicles in casino parking lots while their folks were off playing -- stories that create bad publicity for casinos.

“We are brought on as an amenity (so that) families with children under 12 can enjoy the facility,” Laura Roehl, vice president of marketing for the Kids Quest line of child-care centers, told The LaPorte County Herald-Argus for a story published Dec. 22. Kids Quest facilities operate in 18 U.S. casinos.

But as others pointed out in that story by H-A reporter Derek Smith, there are differing sides to these dice.

As in -- what kind of message do parents or grandparents send to kids when they essentially dump them in a casino child-care center for hours while they go gamble?

And as in -- more importantly -- what kind of shape are these parents or guardians in when they climb back in the car to drive their kids home?

One H-A editor likened it to putting a child-care facility at a bar.

Kids Quest doesn’t check on parents’ conditions when they come to pick their kids up.

“We’re not the police,” Roehl told The Herald-Argus.

“We encourage parents to remember their responsibility to ensure that their child enters safely and has a safe, sober ride home.”

That’s expected of those same parents who made the questionable decision to leave their kids at a casino child-care facility in the first place.

This is no solution to certain gamblers’ neglect of their children. It’s just some casinos’ way of making it more palatable.

Comment: this is a really interesting question and well worth considering. Gamboling has become a recreation for some people, and as long as it is a recreation, how does it differ from leaving a child for other recreation?

Recreation, like anything else, changes or should change when there is a family involved, and for the most part, does.

Yet we all know that recreating in the mode of a single person without responsibilities means chucking those responsibilities for a certain amount of time. The question is how much time and how often should that occur? The answer is probably fewer times than it would take to open a childcare facility. So who are we really talking about here? We are talking about opening a childcare facility for those who can't go without. Then the questions about child safety and child neglect should come into play. If someone has to say, "We're not the police" then it has some really terrible possibilities.

Of course, this is all my opinion.