To ask if you couldn't imagine leaving your baby and then young dc with strangers?

First source I clicked on that she mentions is published by a UK source (Cambridge university) Maybe if you spent more than 30s digging into it you would stop talking nonsense to support your own agenda. www.cambridge.org/core/journals/development-and-psychopathology/article/from-early-care-and-education-to-adult-problem-behaviors-a-prevention-pathway-through-afterschool-organized-activities/71AC59B2D00E399B53EBA19F39A3C598

It’s not forever and it’s not all women at the same time, is it? What is a few years out of say 40-50 years at work?

Now this IS my area of expertise.
You're very keen to say that women taking time out of their career is no problem..... except it is.
Women still do not have equality in the labour market, we aren't in enough of the top jobs and we don't earn as much as men. We are far more likely to work part time too. Why? A major factor is women being seen as the default childcare.
This has a profound effect on your financial security in old age.

There are lots of careers (mine included) that are negatively impacted by career breaks.

Nobody is forcing you to work but less of the 'your career won't be impacted' 'it's only a few years' bollocks.

Where did I say I should? But on the contrary- why should you be funded by the government to send your kid to a nursery while you’re on mat leave and therefore at home, for example? And by the way I wouldn’t even get funding when back at work as apparently I earn too much (but if I paid for childcare I would actually be worse off than some of those who earn less than me).

I lost you there because you're blindly following "studies" on the internet which in 30 seconds I managed to see don't actually apply to UK based childcare.

Why should you be funded by the government to stay at home?

Staying at home with children doesn’t mean they will be mentally stable. DT’s, their cousins and friends all went to nursery from six months old - all happy healthy young adults.
Why have you only referred to women staying at home - do children not have fathers who could stay at home with them?

Oh, now children in nursery are mentally unstable?

Good to see you've gone back to your ridiculous statements after pretending you don't care what others do.

„I've done 30s of digging into that source„

you lost me there

It’s not forever and it’s not all women at the same time, is it? What is a few years out of say 40-50 years at work? Mentally stable children and then adults also benefit the society. What government does is mainly with their own benefit in mind anyway. No government can tell me I should give up this precious time with my own children and have someone else look after them especially as it’s all self funded (we get zero help from the government).

I've done 30s of digging into that source. It's a SM page quoting American journals. Their evidence can't be applied over here, because the way their childcare runs is different to ours.

With more digging I'd be able to find out who funded those studies, and the likelihood is that they would be biased towards keeping mothers at home.

You can make stats show whatever you want. And that means that whoever funds the study usually does so because they want to prove something.

What are the primary sources of this research? What countries are they looking at? US? Canada? UK? Australia? France? Sweden? Norway?

BTW my DD doesn't act out at school. And the school and some other settings are impressed by her social skills particularly when she is interacting with children they find disruptive. I know other children and young adults who are similar who were in childcare before a year and before 2 years.

This is not talked about enough. You only have to look at this thread where everyone claims their baby „got so much out of nursery” to see that people falsely believe nursery is beneficial to babies. Nursery is there for the parents so they can work, it’s not to benefit the babies.

But people are often talking about the whole nursery journey not just the baby years.
My DS was in nursery from 9 months through to pre-school. He was almost 5 when he left to start reception.
He absolutely did benefit from that whole experience and still talks fondly about his time there and he's 10!
It also allows us to work which benefitted the WHOLE family.

Really? What other people do with their children doesn't affect you? You don't think there'd be any impact on your life if every woman with a child under 3 in the country took your advice, left their jobs and stopped paying taxes? I beg to differ!
There's a reason why successive governments have taken steps to encourage parents of young children into work and it's not out of the kindness of their hearts because they think new Mums need to go back to work for a break! It would be an economic and social disaster if every woman gave up work when she had a baby. And no, before anyone says it, it wasn't ok when that happened in the past, because it never did. There have always been working mothers, but now there are working mothers in a wider range of roles. And the world has changed anyway.
If you are in a position to stay at home for whatever length of time and it's what you want to do, then that's great for you and your family. But if everyone did so there would be profound effects. None of us lives in a bubble and I'm pretty sure we would all notice very quickly if all the mothers who work outside the home disappeared.

Compared to 15–30 hours, 30+ hours a week before 4 or so doesn’t give any cognitive benefits but makes children more likely to act out and be angry when they reach school. For children from “middle class and affluent families”, that much time in daycare has about two-thirds the negative effect on behavior of having “a moderately depressed mother”. Children spending long hours in any kind of out-of-home childcare have been found to be three times as likely to have “elevated levels of aggression”.
Note the age and long-hours effects are separate: putting 6-month-old children in daycare for long hours has a particularly large negative effect on later behavior.

Well there is research showing it is damaging especially for under 1s.
https://criticalscience.medium.com/on-the-science-of-daycare-4d1ab4c2efb4

First, here are the effects of 15–30 hrs of daycare a week, broken down by age.

• For ages 3+, there are few downsides and substantial advantages. Daycare boosts both cognitive skills (literacy and mathematics) and social skills as measured in the first few years at school.
• For age 2, the findings are more mixed. This is the best age to start in terms of boosting later cognitive skills, but children are more likely to act out and be angry when they reach school.
• For age 1, childcare may improve cognitive skills a little, though certainly less than starting at age 2. But it also has even larger negative effects on later behavior in school.There is no boost to social skills.
• For children aged 0–12 months, daycare likely damages cognitive skills and children’s later behavior at school is even worse. There is no boost to social skills.

I agree.

Maybe overall it's not beneficial or detrimental. I can see my child has benefitted from it. Being a COVID baby, (and an "only") there were very few baby groups running when she was small, so it has helped her with socialisation etc. that she wouldn't have gotten being at home with me until the groups started up again. And if I'd been at home, DHs income would have literally covered the bills and nothing else, so even things like messy play, painting etc would have been limited as we wouldn't have had spare cash to buy the resources.

Some babies may also be at a detriment for a variety of reasons if at nursery. On balance, there's not positive or negatives on babies. It's likely an average.

Which basically feeds into the thing most of us have been saying, that everyone's experience is different, it's theirs and they're all ok. No one is intentionally damaging their children, they're just making choices based on what their needs & lives are, and adjusting them if necessary.

It’s also not damaging for them like you were so insistently claiming upthread.

For someone who apparently now doesn’t care what other people do with their kids you seem to really care.

But the important thing is it isn't to the detriment of babies which so many people seem to believe it is. And while it may not be seen to be beneficial, I do believe my son who has been at nursery from 10 months has benefited from it due to the fact they do more activities with him and a new range of experiences from him that I wouldn't do with him at home.

Plus he benefits from me going to work to help keep a roof over his head, clothes on his back and food in his tummy which is the biggest benefit of all.

• in a good childcare provider the research shows that the impact on babies is neutral . It's not beneficial but it's not detrimental either.

The nursery my DD went to had no staff under 22. The two youngest staff when she was there were degree qualified, lived within walking distance and were doing it as a stop gap for a year. One went abroad and other has moved on to do other things in education.

The nursery I live next door to used to mainly had very young bored staff. However in the last two-three years they are clearly employing staff who aren't under 25. Their staff turn over appears to have gone down as well. (Some of the staff have children who go to primary schools in the local area and their children are older than my DD.)

The professionals mentioned so often on this thread, aren't professionals. I've worked in nurseries. Usually young girls with a qualification thats easy to get. Paid very little. Overworked too. Doing a job a lot of them shouldn't be doing.

But that clearly isn't everyone's experience.
The nursery we used had staff who were a range of ages, had continuous professional development and very little staff turnover.

I have friends who used different providers but their experience was similar.

The professionals mentioned so often on this thread, aren't professionals. I've worked in nurseries. Usually young girls with a qualification thats easy to get. Paid very little. Overworked too. Doing a job a lot of them shouldn't be doing.

I don’t feel comfortable with it personally, which is one of the reasons I decided to be a SAHM. This isn’t an option for everyone though so sometimes it’s necessary.

Something I've always found interesting....

I work at a university in a department which offers childhood studies and early childhood development degrees. The academics running these courses are the people doing the research into child development. All of them used childcare.

A colleague summed up the research for me and said:

• the quality of childcare is key.
• in a good childcare provider the research shows that the impact on babies is neutral . It's not beneficial but it's not detrimental either.
• children aged 2+ do see benefits from good childcare settings.
• poverty is the biggest issue with regards outcomes for children

She also said that parents should be mindful of who has carried out the research they are using to inform their choices. Some research is carried out by pro family/marriage/religious groups with the intention of promoting traditional family values.

I've actually seen people post such research on similar threads to this in the past, when you dig a bit you can see that the research is intended to keep women in the home.

I've given up replying now. I'm genuinely ok with my choices for our family, and she clearly isn't with hers, which is why she needs to keep telling us how much better hers are. Even though until she was on mat leave for the second time, they were actually the same as ours...