Texas Daycare Accident & Child Injury Lawyers

Why Families Across Texas Trust Patterson Law Group

There is no other case like a daycare injury case. The victim is a child too young to advocate for themselves. The defendant is the business you trusted with your child every single weekday. The records you need are controlled by the facility, and the staff who saw what happened still work there. Parents call us furious, terrified, and often blaming themselves. None of that is on you. This is on the daycare.

Patterson Law Group has spent more than 30 years protecting Texas families. We handle daycare and child-injury cases with the seriousness they deserve — preserving records before they're 'lost,' interviewing former staff, working with medical experts who specialize in pediatric trauma, and forcing facilities and their insurers to take responsibility.

The consultation is free. We work on a contingency fee. Every conversation is confidential.

Offices in Fort Worth, Arlington, and San Antonio. Every case is taken on a contingency fee — no recovery, no fee.

Daycare & Child Injury Cases We Handle

Daycare and child injury cases take many forms. We handle them all:

Texas Daycare & Child Injury Law

Texas daycares are regulated by the Texas Health and Human Services Commission (Child Care Licensing). Facilities must follow minimum standards on supervision ratios, safety, transportation, hiring, background checks, and reporting. A regulatory violation is powerful evidence of negligence — and in some cases, evidence of negligence per se.

Daycare claims can include direct negligence (failure to supervise, unsafe premises, inadequate staffing) and vicarious liability (the facility is responsible for what its employees do in the scope of employment). In abuse cases, the facility can also be liable for negligent hiring, training, retention, and supervision.

Statute of limitations is two years under CPRC §16.003 — but for minors, Texas law tolls the deadline until the child turns 18 in many cases (CPRC §16.001). That said, evidence disappears fast. Move quickly even when the legal deadline is years away.

How We Work With You

Our process is simple. You focus on your recovery. We handle everything else.

1. 1
   Call us. Tell us what happened. Free, confidential, no obligation. We'll give you an honest answer about whether you have a case.
2. 2
   We investigate. Police reports, surveillance footage, medical records, witness statements, expert consultations. We build the case the right way from day one.
3. 3
   You focus on healing. We handle every insurance call, every demand, every negotiation. If they refuse to pay fairly, we take them to trial.

Local Offices & City Pages

Patterson Law Group serves all injured Texans from our physical offices in Fort Worth, Arlington, and San Antonio. For city-specific information on this practice area:

Types of Daycare Accidents We Handle

When you hand your child to a daycare, you are not paying for childcare in the abstract. You are paying for trained adults to keep your child safe through every routine moment of the day. When that promise breaks, the harm can look like a hundred different things. Our firm represents Texas families across the full range of daycare injuries.

Drops and falls. Infants dropped from changing tables, toddlers falling from cribs that were not properly secured, children tumbling down stairs that should have been gated.

Choking and feeding injuries. Children fed food inappropriate for their age, staff failing to cut grapes or hot dogs, infants left unattended with bottles, allergens served to children with documented allergies.

Supervision lapses. A child wandering off the property, a toddler left in a bathroom, a baby placed face-down to sleep, classrooms exceeding state-mandated staff-to-child ratios.

Transportation crashes. Daycare vans and buses involved in collisions, drivers without proper licensing, children improperly restrained, or worse, forgotten in vehicles.

Abuse and neglect. Physical discipline, shaking, rough handling, screaming, isolation, withheld food or bathroom access, and in the most severe cases, sexual abuse by staff or other children.

Allergen and medication errors. Peanut, dairy, or other allergen exposure despite written instructions; wrong medication, wrong dose, or missed dose for children with asthma, seizure disorders, or diabetes.

Playground injuries. Broken or unsafe equipment, lack of shock-absorbent surfacing, inadequate supervision during outdoor play, fractures and head injuries that were entirely preventable.

Hot-car incidents. Children left in daycare vehicles or vans, sometimes for hours, with consequences ranging from heat exhaustion to death.

If your child was harmed and you do not see your situation listed, call us. Every case looks different from the inside.

Understanding Your Rights as a Parent in Texas

Texas does not leave daycare safety to chance. Licensed child care operations are regulated by the Texas Health and Human Services Commission (HHSC) under Texas Administrative Code Title 26, Chapter 745. These rules cover everything from background checks and staff training to the exact ratio of caregivers to children based on age. A child care center that violates these standards is not just being careless. It is breaking the law.

You have specific rights as a parent. You have the right to a copy of any incident report involving your child. You have the right to review the facility's minimum standards compliance history through HHSC's public Child Care Search. You have the right to file a formal complaint with HHSC, and that complaint triggers an investigation independent of any civil case you may pursue. You also have the right to request a copy of the facility's policies, staff qualifications, and inspection records.

Daycare workers in Texas are mandated reporters under the Texas Family Code. If they suspect abuse or neglect, by anyone, including a coworker, they are legally required to report it. Failure to report is itself a crime.

When a child is hurt, two tracks can run in parallel. The criminal track involves law enforcement and, potentially, the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services. The civil track is where families recover compensation for medical bills, future care, and the harm done to their child. The criminal case punishes the wrongdoer. The civil case rebuilds your child's future. They are separate proceedings, and you do not have to wait for one before pursuing the other.

Compensation Specific to Child Injuries

Compensation in a child injury case looks different than in an adult case, because the consequences stretch across decades, not years. A broken arm in a thirty-year-old heals. A traumatic brain injury in a three-year-old can rewrite a childhood, a school career, and an entire adult life.

When we build a damages model for a child, we account for:

- Current medical expenses, including emergency care, hospitalization, surgeries, imaging, and follow-up specialists. - Future medical care, often projected by life care planners across the child's full life expectancy. This can include ongoing therapy, additional surgeries as the child grows, durable medical equipment, and home modifications. - Developmental impact. Many serious daycare injuries, especially head trauma, near-drownings, and prolonged oxygen deprivation, affect cognitive development, speech, motor skills, and behavior. We work with pediatric neurologists, neuropsychologists, and developmental specialists to document what was lost. - Educational and vocational losses. A child who needed special education services, occupational therapy at school, or who cannot enter certain careers because of permanent injury, has measurable lifetime economic losses. - Parental loss of services and consortium. Parents are entitled to recover for the time, care, and companionship they have lost when their child is seriously injured. - Special-needs costs. Adaptive equipment, accessible vehicles, in-home nursing, residential care, and the cost of raising a child whose needs will never look typical. - Mental anguish and physical pain, both for the child and, in fatal cases, for the surviving family.

Settlements involving minors in Texas typically require court approval and are usually structured to protect the child's funds until adulthood, often through a structured settlement, court registry, or special needs trust. We walk parents through every option so the money does what it is supposed to do: take care of the child.

Steps to Take After a Daycare Accident

When something happens to your child at daycare, the next forty-eight hours matter. You will be shaken. The instinct is to trust that the daycare is handling it. Here is what to do anyway.

1. Get your child medical attention immediately. Even if the injury looks minor, take your child to the pediatrician or an emergency room. Some of the most serious injuries, head trauma, internal bleeding, abusive head trauma in infants, do not show obvious symptoms in the first hours.

2. Ask for the incident report in writing. Texas-licensed daycares are required to document injuries. Request a copy before you leave. If they tell you they will send it later, get the promise in writing.

3. Photograph everything. Your child's injuries, the room or area where it happened, the equipment involved, your child's clothing. Re-photograph injuries over the following days as bruising develops.

4. Request video footage in writing, today. Many daycares record common areas. Footage is often overwritten within a few days. A written preservation request creates a record and can become important evidence later.

5. Write down names. The staff present, the director, other parents who may have seen something, the person who told you what happened. Memories fade quickly.

6. File a complaint with HHSC. You can do this online or by phone (1-800-720-7777). HHSC will open an investigation independent of any civil claim.

7. Do not sign anything from the daycare. No release, no waiver, no statement. If their insurance carrier calls, you are not required to give a recorded statement.

8. Call a lawyer who handles child injury cases. Early evidence preservation is often the difference between a strong case and a hard one.

How We Investigate Daycare Negligence Claims

Daycare cases are won in the records. Most of what matters happened before your child ever walked through the door. Our investigation digs into the facility's full operating history.

We pull the full HHSC licensing file, including every inspection, every minimum standards deficiency, and every prior complaint, substantiated or not. Patterns matter. A facility cited multiple times for ratio violations or supervision failures is not having a bad week. It is operating a system that was statistically likely to hurt someone, and that someone turned out to be your child.

We examine employee training records to see whether the staff involved actually completed the CPR, first aid, child abuse recognition, and minimum standards training Texas requires. We look at ratio compliance on the day of the incident, because a center operating short-staffed is operating illegally, and that fact alone can establish negligence.

We obtain criminal background checks and Department of Family and Protective Services central registry checks. Texas law requires daycare operators to screen every employee and every adult living in a home-based operation. We have seen cases where a simple required check would have surfaced a disqualifying history, and the facility skipped it.

We secure video footage through preservation letters, often within days of being hired. We interview former employees, who are often the most candid witnesses about what really went on inside the building. We work with pediatric medical experts to connect the injury mechanism to the care your child received, or did not receive.

The goal is not to argue that something bad happened. The goal is to show, with documents, that it happened because the facility cut corners the law does not allow.

Filing Deadlines and Special Rules for Minors

Texas gives children meaningful protection on filing deadlines, but the rules have edges that surprise parents. Here is the framework.

The base statute of limitations for personal injury in Texas is two years from the date of injury under Texas Civil Practice and Remedies Code § 16.003. For adults, that clock is strict.

For children, § 16.001 tolls the statute during minority. In most personal injury cases, that means the two-year clock does not begin until the child turns 18. Your child has until their 20th birthday to file most claims in their own name. That sounds like a long time. It is not.

Two things you should know.

First, evidence does not wait. Video footage gets overwritten in days. Staff turn over. Memories fade. Records get lost or destroyed. By the time a child is old enough to make a claim themselves, the proof of what happened to them may be gone. Filing early is almost always the right move.

Second, parents have their own, shorter deadlines. Claims belonging to the parents, medical expenses paid on the child's behalf, loss of services, mental anguish, are generally subject to the standard two-year deadline with no tolling. Wait too long, and parents can lose their own claims even while the child's claim remains alive.

A note on Chapter 74: if a daycare injury involves medical providers, for example, a nurse on site, or an emergency response by medical staff, parts of the case may fall under Texas's medical liability statute, which carries different notice requirements, expert report deadlines, and damage caps. These cases require careful early analysis. The wrong assumption about which statute applies can end a claim before it begins.

The safest course is simple. If something happened to your child, call us. A short conversation costs nothing and protects everything. We handle daycare cases on a contingency fee — you owe nothing unless we recover for your family. Llámenos hoy. Se habla español. (817) 784-2000.

Frequently Asked Questions