Parents are worried about day cares giving their kids melatonin
Parents, doctors and lawmakers say daycare workers shouldn't give melatonin to young kids without permission.
Laura Putnam never thought her sons would receive melatonin supplements at day care.
She enrolled them at Apple Blossom Childcare in Falmouth, Maine, when they were 1 and 2 years old. She said she hasn’t given them melatonin and hasn’t granted anyone else permission to give them the supplement, which mimics a hormone produced in the brain that makes people sleepy.
But in August, Putnam said, she learned from a former employee at the day care center that he and others had given melatonin gummies to children, including her older son, who was 4 years old at the time. She said she saw text messages between the former employee and the day care center’s owner about melatonin use.
Putnam asked her older son about it. “He said, ‘Oh, it makes the babies go’ — and then he made a snoring sound,” she said. “He told me he got them when he was younger and they made him very sleepy. And then I asked if his younger brother got them, and he looked at me and said, ‘Yes.’ And I said, ‘How often does he get them?’ And he said, ‘Every day.’”
Putnam showed her younger son a photo of a bottle of melatonin gummies. “He immediately saw it and said, ‘That’s’ — and then he inserted the name of the day care provider,” she said.
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