Daycare and Camp Injuries in Maryland: The Duty of Care — and the Waiver You Signed
Summer is here, and so are the registration packets: the camp forms, the daycare enrollment agreements, the trampoline park iPads — each with a paragraph in small type saying you agree not to sue if your child is hurt. Most parents sign without reading, assuming either that the waiver is meaningless or that it is ironclad. In Maryland, the truth is more uncomfortable than either assumption, and families should understand it before an injury, not after.
The duty of care: high, and measured by the child
A daycare, camp, or youth program that takes custody of a child owes that child reasonable care under the circumstances — and the circumstances include everything that makes children children. Supervision appropriate for a fourteen-year-old is negligent for a four-year-old. Maryland's childcare licensing regulations — staff-to-child ratios, training requirements, safety standards — supply concrete benchmarks, and a program's violation of the safety regulations that exist to protect children in its care is powerful evidence of negligence.
The recurring fact patterns are sadly familiar: a toddler who wanders from an inattentive group and is hurt; playground equipment in disrepair; water activities without adequate lifeguarding; a known-dangerous interaction between children allowed to continue; heat illness on a summer field day. In each, the questions are the same — what supervision did the standard of care require, and was it actually provided?
The waiver problem: Maryland enforces them — even for children
Here is the part that surprises people, including lawyers from other states. Many states refuse to enforce a parent's pre-injury waiver of a child's claims, reasoning that a parent cannot sign away rights that belong to the child. Maryland went the other way. In BJ's Wholesale Club, Inc. v. Rosen, 435 Md. 714 (2013), the Court of Appeals of Maryland — the state's highest court — enforced a parental waiver signed as a condition of using a store's free supervised play area, after a young child suffered a serious head injury there. The Court held that a parent's execution of an exculpation agreement on a child's behalf is not automatically invalid, declining to use the State's parens patriae authority to strike it down, on the reasoning that Maryland law presumes parents act in their children's best interests when making such decisions.
So in Maryland, that signature can be enforced. But enforced is not the same as limitless. Under Maryland's general law of exculpatory clauses — set out in Wolf v. Ford, 335 Md. 525, 644 A.2d 522 (1994) — a release is no defense where:
| Limit | What it means |
|---|---|
| Intentional harm or extreme recklessness | No waiver excuses intentional misconduct or conduct amounting to gross negligence or wanton disregard |
| Ambiguity | Waivers are construed strictly against the drafter; a clause that does not clearly cover the negligence at issue does not bar the claim |
| The transaction affects the public interest | Certain relationships and services are too important for liability to be contracted away |
| Grossly unequal bargaining power | An adhesive waiver extracted where the signer had no real choice may be unenforceable |
And a waiver signed for one entity does not protect a different one: the camp's release may say nothing about the bus company, the facility owner, or the equipment manufacturer.
Parents should also understand what Rosen did not decide. It arose from a commercial play space, and it addressed the waiver before it, not every waiver in every context. Whether a particular release covers the particular negligence that hurt a particular child remains a document-by-document, fact-by-fact question — which is exactly why the waiver should be read by a lawyer, next to the incident facts, before anyone concludes the case is over.
What this means for injured people in Maryland
- Never assume the waiver ends the case. Whether it was signed, what it actually says, whom it covers, and how badly the program departed from the standard of care all matter. Serious departures may fall outside any waiver's protection.
- Preserve the paperwork and the scene. The enrollment agreement, the incident report, staffing schedules, and photographs should be gathered immediately.
- Licensing records are discoverable. A program's inspection and violation history often tells the real story about supervision.
- The child's claim has a long clock — but evidence does not. Maryland's limitations period for a minor's claim generally does not begin to run until age 18, but witnesses scatter and video is overwritten in weeks, not years.
We handle child-injury cases with the seriousness they deserve, and we read the waiver before anyone concludes it means what the program's insurer says it means.
If you or a loved one has been hurt, call Posey Lebowitz at (202) 524-0123 or send us a message for a free consultation.
Part of our DMV case law archive, compiled in 2026 to reflect the archive of some of the most important decisions in injury law.