Of dry diapers and program quality
Happy Friday, everyone.
Here’s a question for you if you’re a guide or school leader: do you know, with confidence, that 100% of the infants and young toddlers in your care were handed back to their parents with dry diapers yesterday?
Handing children back with fresh diapers is not something we emphasize in our guide or ops trainings nearly to the extent we talk about, say, presenting Montessori materials or a complex operational topic like staff scheduling. I also suspect that if we have campuses where it happens consistently, it barely registers with parents because it is so routine that it’s taken for granted.
But I’d argue there is a disproportionate impact when it doesn’t happen consistently. Consider just two potential consequences of not returning children with dry diapers, one short-term and the other long-term:
Like many parents, Sheila is planning on stopping at the supermarket on the way home after picking up her 18-month-old daughter, Amie. Sheila arrives at school at 5:50 PM and Amie is the last child left in her classroom. Amie’s guide hands her back to Sheila with a wet diaper. Later, as Sheila changes Amie’s diaper beneath the liftgate of her SUV in the rainy supermarket parking lot, she thinks, “Why couldn’t Ms. Gina have changed Amie’s diaper? She was the only child there at the end of the day and Ms. Gina must have felt how wet she was.”
Fast forward to Amie’s final Toddler milestone meeting. Ms. Gina and the HoS share all the amazing things they expect to happen during Amie’s future time in Children’s House, including the math and literacy explosions they expect during her third year. As she listens to seemingly grandiose claims about Aime reading chapter books and doing 3rd grade math, Sheila thinks, “Do they really expect me to believe they can teach a five-year-old to do division when they handed her back to me with a soaking wet diaper three times last week?”
Attending to children’s diapers might seem unglamorous. Changing a diaper might strike you as lacking the cache of presenting, say, the Trinomial Cube to a child for the first time. But sportscasting and having the child participate, even if only at the level of making eye contact and focusing on the words and actions of the guide, are valuable educational activities. They support not only the child’s development of toilet independence but also language acquisition, focus, and their understanding of cause and effect.
What’s more, every diaper change is an essential and priceless opportunity for quality time between the child and their caregiver. For infants, intimate care activities like feeding and diaper changes occur frequently. They are the comforting, relationship-building anchor points in the child’s day—times when all attention is focused solely on one another and where they are working together with you to communicate and achieve a mutual goal.
Far from lacking glamor or importance, the quality and timeliness of diaper changes are crucial to every child’s healthy development. But, perhaps less obviously, it’s also vital for our relationship with families.
Some parents may not notice or appreciate that their child is always returned to them dry (even if they would notice if the child was returned wet), but many parents will see a guide’s attention to diapering as a concrete example of that guide’s love and care put into action.
Still, you might observe that diapering is something that literally every school and daycare does. It falls under the heading of what I refer to as ‘table-stakes stuff,’1 the sort of routine activity that everyone who cares for small children must do. This might even lead a cynical guide to conclude that because it’s routine, it isn’t important.
Except, as we’ve seen, it is important.
To see why ‘table-stakes stuff’ matters on a deep level, it helps to consider two wrong views of table-stakes:
Table-stakes as ‘parent customer service.’ It’s convenient for parents not to have to do diaper changes that we can do for them. By consistently returning children to their parents dry, we will save those families time and effort. This contributes to their overall quality of life, enjoyment of their time with their children and positive perception of our school and brand. In short, we can surprise and delight our parents by consistently returning dry children to them, and the positive vibes that creates will ultimately lead to happier families who choose to stay with us long-term. It’s the equivalent of ‘service with a smile.’
Table-stakes as an example of ‘non-Montessori program quality.’ Returning children with clean diapers falls under the ‘table-stakes’ category for every facility caring for small children: not just us and not just Montessori schools. And while Montessori expertise might be required to, e.g., figure out why this child is having difficulty mastering a certain phoneme in her literacy work, it isn’t required to figure out that her diaper is wet. Therefore, even if you aren’t a trained Montessorian, you can impact program quality in ‘non-Montessori’ areas (like diapering).
I said above that these views are wrong, but that’s not entirely accurate. Both contain important truths. Focusing attention on things that matter to your customers is a great way to make them happy. And we should know the things that are important to our parents. Similarly, parents value things about our program other than the specific Montessori elements. Delivering on those things is, in fact, valuable to our families.
The ‘wrongness’ of those two views comes from the fact that they treat dry diapers as something independent of our core program, rather than as an integral part of it. Dry diapers are not something we provide primarily because they show excellent ‘parent customer service,’ disconnected from the delivery of the program to the children. We do not, as an organization, believe that there is such a thing as ‘non-Montessori program quality,’ as distinguished from ‘Montessori program quality.’
Rather, what we have is our program. Our program is our product. Parents are our customers (they’re the ones who pay). Children and parents are both important users of that product. And that product is an integrated offering. It’s integrated in that you can’t separate the way the program is designed from the way it is delivered or from the way we speak about it to prospective families. Handing children back to their parents with dry diapers each day matters because doing so is an integral part of delivering our integrated product. Dry diapers are not an ‘afterthought’ that we ‘bolt on’ in the name of pleasing parents or offering a good ‘non-Montessori’ experience on top of a ‘core’ Montessori product.
In a harmonious, well-designed product – like our program – all the elements contribute to the value for the users, satisfying them and giving them ample reason to happily pay. We sometimes fall into a trap of thinking that the most unique and differentiated aspects of our program are the only ones that matter to parents. But the table-stakes stuff – like dry diapers – matters, too. And that’s good news for us because
Having their table-stakes needs met is often a prerequisite for parents being open to the value of the less conventional things we do (think about the parent from earlier who doubts our ability to deliver a 3rd year Children’s House literacy explosion because we can’t get diapering right in our Toddler classroom).
It’s usually easier to diagnose and fix table-stakes stuff than deeper, more complex issues of pedagogy, campus operations or child behavior. In other words, the table-stakes stuff is often also the ‘low-hanging fruit’ for leveling up a program.
What opportunities exist at your campus to strengthen program quality through an emphasis on table-stakes stuff? Could you create a better experience for your diaper-wearers and their families? Could you streamline your campus’ parent communication around Incident, Accident and Ouch Reports? When parents pick up from extended day, are their child’s things (e.g. backpack, outdoor shoes, etc.) always in the same location as the child, or do parents need to go hunting for them?
You may be surprised how much you can improve the product your school offers with attention to table-stakes details like these.
Have a great weekend,
Brian Alspach
VP of Parent Product
If you’re not familiar with the phrase ‘table-stakes,’ it comes from poker. Most varieties of poker require (at least some) players to bet an amount of money before they’ve been dealt any cards, usually in the form of antes or blinds. The idea is that satisfying the table-stakes is the non-optional, bare minimum requirement of participating in a poker game. Likewise, taking care of children’s diapering needs is among the things that constitute ‘table-stakes’ for an early childhood provider.