Lifestyle

Babysitter Fired After Splash Pad Video Goes Viral

by Valerie Williams
Updated: 
Originally Published: 
Image via Facebook

Babysitter lets 7-month-old sit under bucket full of water at a splash pad resulting in the infant being doused

As parents, it’s difficult to make that leap of faith and trust someone else with your child. Imagine finding out the person you trust isn’t as worthy as you thought. That’s the reality one mom is dealing with as she found her infant the subject of a very disturbing viral video — that resulted in the mom firing her babysitter.

According to NBC4i, Indianapolis mom Brittany Dixson discovered a video being passed around Facebook of a baby being doused with gallons of water at a splash pad was actually her own child. “My newsfeed was lit up, there’s was posts everywhere like whose baby is this?” She soon realized it was her 7-month-old daughter, Annora.

Dixson says, “When I first saw the video it was just like why would you put a child underneath so much water at once?” Which is an excellent question. Here is the video where we see the baby sitting underneath the giant bucket of water right before it pours all over her.

To her credit, the babysitter does swoop in quickly to remove the little girl, but it’s definitely disturbing that she was under there to begin with. Anyone who’s been to a splash pad knows how those buckets operate, and it’s not a place for a tiny baby to sit.

As Dixson notes, it can obviously be dangerous for a small child to be under water like that due to risk of dry drowning. She decided to take her daughter to the emergency room to make sure she was OK. “She could have inhaled so much water once she went to sleep that night she could have actually drowned in her sleep because the water would have been trapped in her lungs. But she didn’t have any water in her lungs or anything like that but he said that was a major possibility and he’s glad that I brought her in.”

After seeing the video, Dixson fired her babysitter. “It’s terrifying to think that somebody could do something to your daughter, somebody you trust to watch your daughter at any moment of time.” And before you call her rash, there was even more to this scary story.

After the concerned mom messaged the person who took the video on Facebook, she found out about other things the babysitter did at the splash pad that day. When the mom opted to fire the babysitter, she was armed with information. “You allow that to happen, you allow to let her walk on her barefoot on the hot cement, you swing her high up on the swing multiple times.”

Yikes.

Of the confrontation between mom and babysitter, Dixson says, “She was basically apologizing to me the whole time telling me how she’s so sorry, she really didn’t know that was the bucket that had the most water in it that dumped on her.”

Here’s the thing, though — accidents do happen. Mistakes are made. But once you have it in your head that your child might not be safe with their babysitter, it’s hard to shake that feeling. It might seem like Dixson is being unreasonable or overreacting, but that’s kind of impossible to do when it comes to your kids and their safety.

It’s hard enough going to work every day worrying about how your baby will do without you around. Seeing something like this happen when you’re not there to help them is obviously very upsetting. Though it’s likely this babysitter wouldn’t purposely try to harm Annora, she slipped up in a way no mom could ignore.

This article was originally published on