Chavez, Vivian Monica

At first she seemed like she was a pretty decent babysitter. She had been taken care of my baby since he was three months old. He is now two. The babysitter was never going above and beyond, like teaching him ABCs or how to count, but we believed at the time she was keeping him safe. Honestly there was a time when we got there that he would run away from us (like all kids do when they don’t want to leave) because he was having too much fun. But then in the last few months everything seemed to change. First, somebody must have complained of her mistreatment of or endangering children because she was caught by social services of leaving a child unattended in a car for a few minutes while she went back in the house where she was no longer in view of the child. And the paperwork I was given stated social services was investigating a complaint, which to me means that something like that must have happened before and somebody witnessed it. We kept a copy for proof. That alone made us realize we should switch but we thought we had at least a little bit of time to find someone else since she wouldn’t let another complaint occur for fear of being shut down – so we assume she would be on her best behavior and we would use this grace period to find another babysitter. But then we started noticing other weird things: like our boy started hitting himself when either my wife or I said he did something wrong. We also noticed that our child no longer ran away when it was time to go. Instead he would put whatever he was playing with down and slowly come to us (not smiling) and put his arms up ready to leave. We knew something was wrong then, and I told my wife that we need to stop denying our instincts. That's when she told me that our boy cried as he neared the babysitter house for drop off. Now my boy is known to sometimes cry when getting in the car seat; but before that day he never cried getting out the car seat. When my wife told me that, I took off work early and grabbed my boy from there even though I had no other babysitter yet. Regardless, he was not going back. Now that I have a new person watching him at her home care facility, even she says there have been signs of mistreatment and he has trust issues. He also stopped hitting himself shortly after leaving Vivian's care. When I informed Vivian via text that I feel something happened that made my boy uncomfortable around her, she never denied or attempted to explain what happened. I truly believe this home care person should be thoroughly investigated by the proper authorities before handling any more kids.