Care provider admits he doesn’t, and the kids aren’t at all surprised.

Working at a day care center involves spending a lot of time around cherubic smiles and innocent laughter, so you might expect the atmosphere to be incessantly sweet. Sometimes, though, something happens that ends up leaving car providers feeling salty or bitter instead, which is perhaps how Japanese Twitter user @FuckingHoiku (meaning “F**king Day Care Worker) got his online moniker.

But it’s a little easier to sympathize with the frustration his screenname is steeped in after reading his recount of a recent day at work, when some of the children at his preschool asked him the following question.

https://twitter.com/FuckingHoiku/status/1090025110772183046

Four-year-old kid: “Hey, teacher, do you have a lot of money?”
FH: “What? Umm…no, I guess I don’t have very much.”
Four-year-old kid: “I knew it.”
Other four-year-old kid: “Even though you’re a grown-up, you don’t go to work like our moms and dads. You just come here and play all day.”

“So, the kids think I’m a NEET,” FH laments, referring to Japan’s not-in-education-employment-or-training adult demographic that generally survives off the generosity of their parents. “I’m actually a wage slave though…” he continues, once again highlighting that while he doesn’t make a ton of money, he actually does have a paying job.

Mixed in with sympathetic laughter about how kids’ purity sometimes makes them incapable of tact were a few commenters who also work in the day care industry, and have had similar conversations with their kids.

“The kids at my school ask me ‘What kind of job do you have?’”

“One time, one of the ids told me ‘You spend all your time playing instead of working, but if you don’t start earning some money, no one is going to want to marry you.’”

Others offered encouragement to FH, telling him that he should take the children’s inadvertently cutting remarks as compliments.

“I think the kids said what hey did because they see you as someone who’s always cheerful, friendly, and happy to play with them. Looking at it that way, you’re really amazing.”

“I’m studying for a career in child care, and I really respect people like you who have so much enthusiasm for the job that, to the kids, it looks like you’re just playing and having fun.”

But the highest praise came from someone from the group that FH’s kids recognized as having an actual job, as a working mother chimed in with:

“When I get off work, I’m exhausted, but when I go to pick my kid up at day care, the staff is still so friendly and energetic, even after spending all day taking care of the children. They’re always so kind when they great me, and every day, in my heart, I feel ready to burst into tears and get down on my hands and knees to say thank you. I absolutely love you all. You’re amazing, like gods. You’re life-savers.”

So it looks like even if the kids don’t realize how hard FH works to take care of him, at least there are parents that know, and appreciate, what an incredible job people in his position are doing.

Source: Twitter/@FuckingHoiku via Hachima Kiko
Top image: Pakutaso