Happy Saturday, Wentyl!

This week parents across the country were rocked to hear one of our biggest childcare providers, G8, will close 40 services.  And high-placed industry sources are warning this could be just the tip of the iceberg.

Focus is now on the embattled for-profit provider given that the occupancy rate at its 395 centres has slumped over the past year - they're now just over half full.

Alleged child abuser Joshua Dale Brown worked at G8’s Creative Garden Early Learning Point Cook in Melbourne’s west, which is one of the centres set to close. His high-profile case is still going through the legal system but the hit to the company's reputation appears to have been substantial and sustained.

The shock closures come as close to one in three of the company’s services nationally have had conditions placed on their operations and one in five have been issued with enforcement actions. The list of centres G8 says it will “suspend” includes 12 services in Victoria, 12 in WA, seven in NSW, five in Queensland and four in South Australia.

A day earlier we published a full national list of the childcare centres that are not meeting standards. But the real disgrace here is that some haven't been assessed and rated since 2018. If regulators don’t know how underperforming centres are going, what confidence can parents have that their children are going to be safe? 

Also this week we examined whether a parenting influencer should have left her baby unattended while she had a massage in Bali, and whether it was no-nonsense or counter-productive parenting when this mum forced her son to smash his PlayStation 5 as a punishment.

And we covered the alarming fight club trend in schools, debated whether “weak” parents are to blame for poor discipline in schools (a 98-2 landslide in our poll on that story!) and bemoaned teens who “can’t find the laundry basket”. As Clare Rowe lamented, too many modern teens can effectively juggle three screens, but can’t do their own washing. 

Have a good week and enjoy these and the many other terrific stories below.

PS: The laundry basket is in the laundry, where it’s been for YEARS.