To think nurseries are not safe for young babies

Not to be goady but in my circle lots of people do have a choice whether to send their children to nursery 50+ hours a week and do it anyway.

To be fair, a nursery that's even open 50 hours a week is unusual. 8.30-5.30 is standard where I am

Not to be goady but in my circle lots of people do have a choice whether to send their children to nursery 50+ hours a week and do it anyway.

Im not unsympathetic to people who have no choice. We work shifts around ours so we only have to use 15 hours/week and are lucky to be able to do so (along with driving bangers and not going on fancy holidays) but in a lot of my friendship and working groups people could make other choices, but don’t.

Do I feel guilty that I have to send my young children to nursery? Yes

Would I feel even more guilty if we couldn’t afford to pay our mortgage and were subsequently homeless if we didn’t send them to nursery and one of us stopped working? Yes, I imagine I would

I don’t CHOOSE to send my children to nursery, I have no choice if we want to pay the mortgage, eat, etc. You make it sound like everyone has a choice in whether they send their child to nursery.

I agree with you too. I know some children who thrived at nursery from a young age. In my home country ML is only 4months so what do people think we do with our children, millions of them?
It's also a necessity at times, what do parents do if they do not have the luxury of being home?
I would prefer a nursery over child minder. Something about other people who can visit her home puts me off.

What I would say though, and this is something that will be unpopular BUT I would not have a nanny who doesn't have children of her own. I've had 2 and a friend and my sister as well had the very same experience. Awful.

I don’t want to do that tbh. Let’s be realistic and acknowledge it would fuck many women’s careers/job security and finances. It would always be the women wouldn’t it as well. The men wouldn’t be falling over to take the second year off.

I don’t think of it as fortunate as such- we were just willing to sacrifice certain things to make it work. We could have opted for 9-5 jobs and have all our evenings and weekends together etc but instead we have worked opposite days/shifts for the last 10 years. Meaning we miss a lot as a couple as well as missing things like Christmas as a family.

There are 100s of deaths of children at schools every year. The majority are cardiac arrest or other natural causes, but a fair amount are accidents.
Frankly nowhere is 100% safe.

And the other thing is that people can and do have good experiences. My kids got a huge amount out of their nursery and we are all really glad it was a part of our lives. We still have relationships with some of the staff members.

Its really off to make mothers feel bad about using child care while at the same time so many people are voting to slash budgets and the benefits bill.

No thanks. I don’t want to stay at home for 2 years.

I don’t want potential employers to hesitate to employ women because we all know that it would largely be women taking up the offer to stay at home for 2 years. It already exists to an extent with maternity leave which is shorter.

Maybe there needs to be a complete rethink on this entire issue.
So nurseries aren’t the best places for under twos. ( in some /most cases )
Maybe then, instead of spending millions subsidising childcare, the government pay parents to stay at home for 2 years & look after their own children?

I’ve been trying all morning to type this as eloquently as you 😂”no judgement but it’s just not the best, thought you should know” is just so patronising and unhelpful, and clearly designed to put working mums in their place 🤦🏼‍♀️

These two cases were heartbreaking. The reason they are in the news is that it is very rare though in reality it should never happen. In all things there are good and bad. I have witnessed a CM who was so so lovely with the parents but when they had dropped off the child was so uncaring with the child. Again a rarity but yes it happens. I am fortunate to never have to use childcare and I understand how difficult it is for parents to use the right one.

Yeah I mean it’s not particularly helpful for people to be all “ohhh but nurseries are not the very best for your child and it’s important that you are aware of this head tilt”

fact is, a lot of parents have to work. That’s it. That’s the post. There is no option. I’m quite sure most parents would prefer to stay at home but for most people it’s not an option.

So quoting articles that tell us it’s “not optimal” to have an under-1 in nursery is no use to us. It literally serves no purpose other than to make us feel a bit more shit.

Oh for goodness sake. All kids are different. I wondered if my son would ever learn to chew! His nursery managed not to kill him though!

Spoiler: he did learn to chew

On the guilt issue, unfortunately most of us don't have private incomes and/or rich spouses and therefore have to work to keep a roof over our heads, so we need childcare.

My girls were at a SureStart Centre and it was the most amazing, beautiful space with the most wonderful staff.
I can honestly say I trusted everyone from the receptionist to the dinner lady (who used to make plantain and dumplings for the kids and would not let mine leave without an extra dumpling to eat on the way home).
Sure Start centre should be reintroduced.

That was my view too. I couldn't have afforded a nanny but I thought childminders could easily be overwhelmed, being on their own with several children. There are some checks and balances in a nursery, just from the fact there are several adults there. I didn't switch to a childminder until the summer before my son started school.

Such a wild generalisation.

The nursery we use has a max of 12 babies (3-18 months) with 5 staff members. They try not to go above 10 babies per session but still have the 5 staff, so a ratio of 1:2 usually.

There’s two gardens and it’s next to the beach so they’ll take them down to the beach as well as other outings.

The babies play in a nice big room, with plenty of toys and soft play type apparatus, then an adjacent cot room.

Obviously sometimes there’s kids crying when I go to pickup but on the whole the kids are relaxed and it’s such a calm environment. My LO gets very very red when she’s upset for hours afterwards so I can tell if she’s been crying in the past hour or two, and she’s never shown any sign of upset. She’s just smiling and chatting to the staff and when I had her over in the morning to her key worker she immediately snuggles into her for a big cuddle. The staff are the same who worked there when DD1 was in the baby room.

Genuinely think the nursery facilities are much nicer than our house, certainly the garden is 😂

If that is not a nice environment I don’t know what is!

Honestly, there's no need for everyone to tear strips off each other. Different childcare set ups work for different people.

My kids went to nursery. I probably would have had a slight preference for a childminder initially, but in my area I wasn't impressed with the ones on offer. Our nursery was fantastic. But for other people that decision will be different.

This depends on the CM. Our second CM would keep my son in a pushchair during the school runs even though he loved to walk, claiming it kept him safer around traffic. It was a residential street, not even a busy road.

I think they’re safe but I don’t think they’re a nice environment

Also worked in nurseries in the past. Some good some really not. The large chains seem like money making businesses without care for the children and not many requirements for who they employed. Basically they needed to staff them so employed anyone. I found the individual privately owned better to work for. I would never have sent my own children to a private nursery. The babies in my care were well cared for and I made sure everyone working for me knew there were high standards. The stories in the news disgust me that the alarm was not raised sooner. I have come across staff that had zero patient and were really in the wrong job. I would choose a well regarded childminder personally.

As pp said, you'll get stick for this. But it's because many put their babies in nursery and will feel targeted.
I've heard from quite a few nursery teachers how awful the environment is for younger babies / toddlers and lots of them are miserable. A mum in my baby group was just telling us how she is struggling as her little one (started at 12 months old, is now 16 months) spends most of the day crying and the nursery teacher even told the mum off for picking her baby up so late (5pm).

No, I'm not judging families who put their babies in nursery. Just repeating what I've been told by multiple nursery workers.

You see, offence can be taken at anything, if you are so minded.
If a baby is the second or third child then they will obviously spend tine ‘tagging along’. The ‘real families’ was to distinguish between a birth family and the childminder’s family group, not to imply that one child does not comprise a real family.
But I suspect you knew that.

We had 2 childminders and the issue you mention:

-Our son was taken in the pushchair every day to pick up the CM’s own kids from school

-We had to take lots of time off work for the CM to take her kids to medical appointments

The other issues we had were:

-One quitting suddenly and leaving us in the shit

-One having tv on all day, not encouraging development eg spoon feeding instead of letting him use cutlery

-Sending my son home all the time for nothing, eg even when GPs said he was fine. Trying to diagnose autism without any medical training

-Constantly sending wrong invoices. Forgetting to give us all dates of their annual leave

-Incident where my son was badly scratched by their pet

I live on a street with a childminding couple and personally know 3 people who have removed their kids from their care due to bad issues.

We moved our son to nursery and it’s been amazing, and will send our DC2 there from 11 months. Don’t worry about sending your kid to nursery :)