3 women at an Illinois day care were arrested for giving melatonin gummies to 2-year-olds in their care before naptime.
The story sounds mostly funny to me as melatonin is a natural antioxidant your body makes when its dark as a signal to the brain to start shutting down into sleep mode. It’s not a sleeping pill chemical or anything you can overdose on or hurt yourself with – it’s a natural calming aid that aids rest. It’s not a drug, not a prescription, not something that causes psychoactive hallucinations or liver damage or any kind of organ failure or distress. Of course, whether its harmless or not, I wouldn’t be okay with a childcare provider giving a supplement to my kid without asking, so that part is a problem – but something to be arrested over?… Why? What crime could this possibly fall under? The charges reported so far just say “two counts of battery and two counts of endangering the life of a child”, and this dramatacism is where I got to a “wtf?” enough level to where I had to find a way where this made sense.
This photo of the daycare taken from Google Maps’ Street View appears in a lot of the reports covering this story, along with the mug shots of the 3 women (which I’ve chosen not to include in my own reportage here because it seems unfair that they are being vilified as child abusers when they’re really only guilty of being poor-judgement chuckleheads), which are both stylistically things you include in serious crimes – not a story that amounts to “daycare helps kids take naps”.
The scene of the crime
The only side effects of melatonin I could find were the effects it is meant to have on the body (drowsiness, dizziness, tiredness) and perhaps a head or stomach ache. It’s allegedly possible to be allergic to melatonin and develop swelling or skin rashes, so that part makes more sense, but with no instances of any such damage (which I think would be extremely rare given the nature of the supplement), idk what the freakout over is exactly. And yes, there was a freaking of outs. In addition to the arresting of the workers (aged 32, 19, and 25), the story of the arrest was on dozens of national outlets all reporting the case as if it were an actual case of battery and child-life endangerment when it clearly isn’t.
That makes the story worth logging as its the ignorance of the supplement fueling the sensationalism of an alleged danger, when at best it was just an inappropriate move that was worth somewhere between a strongly worded reprimand and a firing. A criminal record, not so much.
PS: You can buy melatonin gummies @ Amazon here
