For a long time, I was loud with police and silent at childcare pickup.
I filed submissions to ministers. I wrote letters to the Corruption and Crime Commission. I sat across from detectives and named names. Then I’d get to the school gate and I couldn’t ask a straight question about who was on shift at OSH.
That is what shame does.
Not the polite version of shame, the useful sort you feel when you’ve done something wrong. The disorganising kind. The kind that tells you you’re too much, too loud, too intense, too weird now. The kind that makes you soften a request you have every right to make because you can feel the room shifting before you’ve even spoken.
We’d just moved into a new neighbourhood when the police closed the case. New school, new friends, and a report that had gone nowhere. The daycare where it happened tried to deny the child abuse squad investigation at first.
So in the eyes of anyone who had heard about it, my credibility was already undermined before I opened my mouth.
I felt alone. I felt embarrassed. I felt like I was the mother other mothers had heard about and quietly made their own decisions about.
So I got small. Not in the fight. In the fight I stayed loud. In the day-to-day, I got small.
I went into a new daycare that had no CCTV. Too many nooks and crannies. I noticed. I thought about asking. I didn’t. I couldn’t stand to be the mother making things awkward again.
That was the real cost of shame. Not that I stopped fighting authorities. That I stopped protecting my son in the ordinary moments. The enrolment tour. The pickup line. The fifteen small questions a parent is entitled to ask about who is looking after their child.
I think a lot of parents are in that gap right now.
You know something isn’t right. You don’t want to be the one who says it out loud. You’ve read the headlines and you don’t want to sound paranoid. You’ve heard someone else’s story and you don’t want to be her. So you don’t ask about the male casual on the roster. You don’t ask about CCTV. You tell yourself the centre would have handled it.
That’s shame doing its work. And it’s working against your child.
One share. One parent. One child safer.
Late last year, something shifted. I was told about male casual and temporary staff moving through my son’s OSH program. The old shame version of me would have taken it in, worried about it, and said nothing. Instead, I said something. Directly. On my own name. And I didn’t spend a week bracing for what people would think.
Around the same time I read Antoinette Lattouf’s Women Who Win. It gave me language for the shift. Before that book, I could stand up for my son in a defensive way, like I was daring people not to like me. After it, I started to stand up because I actually liked myself for it. Advocacy stopped being armour and started being identity.
The reframe was simple, and I want to give it to you because it did more for me than a year of trying to be brave.
Ask yourself what your actual value is. If someone asked you cold, would you say your value is a safe environment for your child, or would you say your value is being liked by the other parents at drop-off? Most of us would say safety. Every time. Without hesitation.
Now look at your last month of parenting decisions. Are you living that? Or are you shaving off the questions and the CCTV asks and the follow-up emails because someone might think you’re the intense one?
I lived two years shaving off. I don’t do it anymore.
Not because I stopped feeling the pull. I still feel it. I feel it every time I ask a hard question in a room that would prefer I didn’t. I feel it when a comment section piles on. I feel it when a friend goes quiet on me.
I just don’t obey it anymore.
Safety is my true north. Being liked by every parent at pickup is not. Once I stopped confusing the two, the shame lost most of its grip.
If you’re the mother who knows something and hasn’t said it, this is your permission slip.
Ask the question. Send the email. Name the staff member you want on roster. Ask about CCTV at the enrolment tour before you’ve signed a thing. Ask about the ratios in the bathroom. Ask why the door to the sleep room doesn’t have a window in it.
You are allowed to be the mother who asked. You are allowed to be the mother who kept asking.
Your child is the one whose safety is negotiable if you don’t.
Legal and Privacy Concerns. Under Australian privacy laws and for personal safety, the author uses a pseudonym and AI-altered imagery. This work features literary and reflective essays expressing a subjective lived experience; it is not a legal or investigative record. All references to harm or conduct reflect the author’s honest opinion and personal interpretation of events. Regarding the matters referenced, police investigations resulted in a finding of no offence detected; this work is an exploration of the psychological interpretations and healing that follow such experiences. While the author is a psychologist, the views expressed here are personal and do not constitute professional psychological advice or a clinical opinion.
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