To choose convenience over facilities for 3 month old starting nursery?

[safetyfirst1]

FTM here and really struggling with a nursery decision for my little one who’ll be starting at 3 months. Posting here for additional traffic.

I’m self-employed so have flexibility with work schedule.

Planning 3 full days at nursery (though realistically 6 hours/day average but have to pay for the full day as the half day hours don’t suit) plus one day with grandparents weekly. The third nursery day will likely be shorter (4 hours) or sometimes skipped entirely - paying for the flexibility to get life admin sorted when needed.

Nursery 1 - The Convenient Choice

5 minutes from home, directly on route to work
£64/day
Staff seem genuinely caring with babies
Good Ofsted rating
Downsides: Converted house that needs some TLC, the nursery is also only 2 years old, limited curriculum info

Nursery 2 - The Premium Choice

Beautiful, modern facilities
Daily app updates (photos, feeding, sleep times)
Comprehensive curriculum
£85/day (affordable for us but still more expensive)
Downside: 15- 20-minute detour each way = 60 minute total extra travel daily there and back for each day he attends.

Nursery 2 is objectively better, but that’s potentially 4 hours weekly just in extra driving. We’re planning to move him to the school nursery at 2 anyway, so this is temporary.

Part of me thinks the convenience will matter more day-to-day, especially in winter, but I’m worried I’m shortchanging him by not choosing the “better” option. Then again, he’s only 3 months - does curriculum really matter at that age?

Any parents dealt with similar decisions? What would you prioritise - convenience or facilities for such a young baby?

Also, are three half days plus one day with the grandparents too much at this age?

Thanks in advance! 💙

That's really interesting. What country are you in?

I would have thought an infants need for close, high-quality care was universal.

Do you have any links to this research? Does it really say that children are better off in nurseries than at home from three months old?! That seems crazy to me!

I am in France.

It's funny that you think children who go to nursery don't have close, high-quality care.

My daughter has been in nursery since she was 8 months old. She's now 2.5 and we still co-sleep and breastfeed. She is very attached to me, her dad, brother and grandparents, ahead on all her milestones, speaks two languages and has loads of little friends at nursery.

I'm in England but this is my experience too. Mine all started at 3 months and have no attachment issues but their nursery is high quality which is the most important part.

Not all childcare settings are made equal, including childminders.

She sounds great!

I of course meant close, high-quality care during the day within the childcare setting . I wasn't suggesting that these children don't receive this care at home!

Do you have links to the research/or a search term I could use to find the research showing that infants in France fare better in nursery than at home? I'd love to read it.

Do you think this is because nursery care is of such high quality? What are nurseries like in France? Staff ratio/type of staff etc.

Does the research account for other factors e.g. the economic situation of the parents using nursery v not using nursery? Or the type of children (I have read, but don't know if this is true, that French schools/childcare settings will exclude children with Autism/behavioural problems, for example)?

I love nursery and aside from the full mat leave withe ach child have always worked and they've always gone to nursery. My eldest 1-2 was so hard for him but he found his stride at 2. (He's under paeds for various bits and awaiting ASD and ADHD full assessment to be fully honest) Youngest struggled the first month or 2 as a 1 yr old but then settled and again I'd say only really benefitted from age 2. Which I think backs upt he literature.

It's a balancing act like all parenting and the newborn stage with my eldest has been the hardest so far with either child. But that's because they need you so absolutely and all the time. While it was hard I didn't want to pass him off either. I have a career I've worked hard for and if I hadn't I might have stayed home longer.

I think what I'm saying is you can see both sides but I genuinely couldn't send a 12 week old to childcare unless it was life or death

Children with disabilities are actually higher priority for public nursery places than other children. I don't know about autism specifically but how often are children under the age of 2 diagnosed with autism? A child would be 2y8m at the very most when they start at nursery in France, and almost certainly well under 2 when the parent applies for a place. Children start school between 2y9m and 3y8m, and obviously public schools can't refuse to educate disabled children. Private schools might, I have no idea.

Children whose parents are on low incomes are also priority for public nursery places. Most of the parents at my children's nursery are very ordinary indeed. One mother who has a very high powered job has twins (having a multiple birth also put you up the list of priority).

I think the ratio in the baby room is 1:4 but it's been a while since I Iast had a child in the baby room so I'm not sure whether I'm remembering correctly. The staff are great, have a lovely bond with the kids, and they do lots of activities.

My son had a childminder before he got a place at nursery and she was lovely, kind and caring but it was just not as stimulating an environment. Both my children have really benefited from being around lots of other children and having organised activities every day. There was a limit to what the childminder could do, particularly having two children to look after who were on different nap schedules. She moved my son on to one nap a day when he wasn't really ready, purely because the other child who was 6 months older was on one nap a day, and if she hadn't done that they would never have been able to get out of the flat during the day. (At nursery there are always babies napping so they can respect the child's natural rhythm.) Even when they did get out, it was never anywhere exciting. Sometimes when I have an odd day off during the week I take my kids to the playground and seeing the childminders there always makes me so glad I managed to get both my kids into nursery.

Another point to make about nursery in France is that the timing isn't really within the parents' control. They take babies from 10 weeks old but mostly only in September. So children who start very young tend to be born around April/May/June. If they're born any later than June they aren't old enough for nursery in September and then they probably won't get a chance until the following year. My January baby started in September and that worked really well. So there probably aren't that many babies actually going to nursery at 3 months old, but more due to timing than anything else. Both the childminder and the nursery told me the settling in period is much easier when they start before 6 months because older babies tend to get much more separation anxiety.

Either way, most children here have been in some form of childcare since they were 3 or 4 months old because that's when the maternity pay runs out. And there just isn't the same cultural expectation that a woman just forgoes her income for upwards of 6 months every time she has a baby. (It would also be considered weird by most employers.) If you believe what you read on Mumsnet, you'd expect French children to be anxious, emotionally stunted and not properly attached to their parents. But it's simply not true.

I think it's helpful to put forward an alternative perspective on these threads, because it's not kind, or helpful, or in fact true, to tell a woman planning to return to work after three months that she is damaging her child.

You wouldn't see it that way if you lived in a country where it is totally normal to go back to work when your child is three months old though. This is what I am trying to explain. It's entirely cultural.

I definitely found that both my children benefited from nursery well before the age of 2. It was useful seeing the contrast between my son and my daughter in that respect, even if I wish my son could have skipped the childminder stage and gone straight to nursery like his sister did. The difference really was night and day for us.

In fact, I think the public authority responsible for early years care has come to the same conclusion because they put in place a system where the childminders can take their children to a public nursery once a month just so they get occasional exposure to different children and different toys.

I'm telling you I come from a background where people are either staying at home parents or go straight back to work but I'm also telling you what I felt with newborns a d therefore what I did. Also what studies show.

Convenience as long as they don't compromise on care which it sounds like they don't.

They don't need facilities or a curriculum at that age.

Where's that then?

I'm 42, I'm from Ireland and literally everyone I know back home falls I to the 'going back ASAP to not end up on stat mat pay because I have a career or staying home for few years. Also there's not the same nursery culture where I'm from in the countryside so anyone who goes back their mum and mil usually then has the kids because they've been sahm their whole life. Not possible for my family as my mums dead and mil was still working full time (although we don't live in Ireland and she's not Irish) so I do think those who can leave a baby with close family they trust and who love their baby are in a really enviable position.

As I say though despite working hard for my career I couldn't have gone back after 3 months, frequent hospitalisations would mean if have lost my job anyway. It was still a massive issue after I went back at a year with my eldest.

All I'm saying is I couldn't leave a 12 week old baby in a nursery. It feels incredibly wrong and cruel

I'm not sure I agree it totally cultural, there is a fair amount of research (although obviously its difficult to drawer firm conclusions). I'd love to see some of the research from France that shows nurseries are better than staying at home/one on one care.

And presumably, it cuts the other way. If you lived in a culture where maternity pay was better/the culture was different then you would find the idea of putting your baby into nursery at four months old less than ideal. It makes sense that culturally/at a government level they promote the narrative that suits them. This is certainly what we're seeing in the UK, there is massive push towards using nurseries now. I fear that it's not that the government has access to this elusive French research, but rather that it suits the treasury to have parents back to work asap/as little maternity pay as possible.

Generally, countries with extended parental leave have more positive outcomes than those where parents return to work almost immediately.

Whereas I felt going back at 3 months was the best choice for me and my DC. It helped my mental health and made me a better mother.

I don't believe my DC would've been better off with me at home full time.

The thing is though, the maternity pay isn't better in the UK, for the most part. I managed to spin mine out to 20 weeks on full pay, which is better than most women in the UK get. I then did three months on part time parental leave (which is slightly worse than stat mat pay) and filled in the remaining days with accrued holiday and bank holidays, which took me up to about 8 months.

I actually somewhat naively assumed that taking a year's maternity leave in the UK meant getting a year off on full pay. I didn't realise until I was on Mumsnet that that isn't actually the case, and that most women are only on statutory maternity pay (or nothing at all) for quite a lot of their maternity leave. So really, the difference between France and the UK maternity leave is not so much the pay, it's more the fact that in the UK women are expected to stay off for the full year regardless of how little they are getting paid for that time, whereas in France women are like, "Well, yes, obviously if I were rich I'd love to stay at home for longer, but unfortunately I have bills to pay!" The idea of saving up to stay at home for months on end without pay just doesn't seem to cross their minds. So I do think it is largely cultural.

I will have to see if I can find some of the research I looked at when I was thinking about all this stuff, it was a few years ago for me now. But I think what I have learned is that when research from different countries says such wildly different things, it is unwise to trust any of it. For example, in France, the women who stay at home with their babies tend to be women who weren't really working in the first place. They are often poorly educated, on low incomes, don't speak French as a first language etc. So I also wouldn't necessarily trust French research which reports better outcomes for children who went to childcare at three or four months old, because the ones who do have working mothers who are better able to provide for their children in other ways. It's really difficult to control for all the relevant variables in any research of this nature. To give another related example, research carried out in the UK or other countries with more of a culture of natural childbirth seems to suggest that the use of epidurals increases the risk of other interventions. But in France, there's no evidence of that. Is it because women here tend to have an epidural even when they are having an "easy", straightforward labour, whereas women in the UK tend to have one when they are being induced or otherwise having a long and difficult labour? Is it because they do a lot more of them here and so they have more and better trained anaesthetists who do literally nothing else and don't tend to mess them up? Is it for some other reason? Who knows?

So yes, it's really difficult to compare apples with oranges. But logically, if the scare stories on Mumsnet were true, you'd expect to see a lot more negative outcomes in countries where most children are in full-time childcare at a young age. But we don't.

What might help to put things in perspective for @safetyfirst1 is that before she knows it, her baby will be a year old, and she would have been back at work anyway, even if she had taken a year's maternity leave. My children are happy, healthy and securely attached, and I don't believe they would be any less so if I had taken either more or less maternity leave. But I can provide for them now in a way I wouldn't have been able to if I had taken my foot off the gas career wise. We are about to spend an eye watering amount of money on activities for both of them next year, as well as a big family holiday of an exceptional nature, and we don't have to worry about how to afford it. We also don't have to worry about how to pay our mortgage, or budgeting for food (which means my kids get high quality but very expensive meat, fruit and vegetables), or buying whatever books they want or whatever costume or coloured outfit the school has suddenly decided they need for next week. I think the effects of having a more privileged life will outweigh any benefit they might have gained from having me at home for a few more months at an age they don't even remember.

That sounds difficult. Again, maybe a cultural thing, if so many families have a "village" to look after their babies, I can see how that would seem like a better option to using paid childcare. Mind you, my parents would definitely have needed a crash course on things like safe sleep and choking hazards before I'd have let them take care of my children on their own!

@MissScarletInTheBallroom the thing in the UK though is that the employer must give you a job at the end of the 12 months mat leave. That'd an enormous difference.

I live abroad and it wasn't about pay. You lose your job after 12 weeks (my employer is generous and gives you 24 weeks). This includes any time taken before birth. That choice to stay home and still have a job in 6, 8 , 10, even 12 months time is incredible.

As others have said, 3 months is too young for nursery in my opinion. I would imagine option 1 would be better to reduce the time that baby is in the car if you have no option to delay your return to work or hire a nanny. Truly though 3 month olds need 1:1 care - ideally from their mother to promote attachment, bonding and breastfeeding. Of course fathers and relatives can also be really involved but a baby under 6 months really does need a lot of care and attention that nurseries cannot adequately provide.

It's the same here though. You can't be fired for taking parental leave. You can take up to 3 years I think, it's just that you only get 400€ a month.

I agree the US is different.

I don’t think it’s wise to disregard a whole load of scientific research that is in agreement about the basic needs of babies and how environmental factors can impact them. It’s overcomplicating an extremely basic relationship between baby and parent (usually mother). Scientifically speaking, the best place for a baby is with one consistent attachment figure (unless there is abuse or mental health issues). I am not saying this to scaremonger or to make women feel terrible about choices they don’t really get to make anyway. It is not their fault that we live in a world where postpartum women are not treated correctly. But I think brushing the science under the rug because it’s uncomfortable or feels unfair means ultimately children miss out. As I said before, we need to live in a world where a scientific argument is more valid than a personal one (e.g my kids are fine so it must be fine). I am not saying this is the case in your situation, your children sound very happy and fortunate, but as a teacher and also among my own adult friends, an awful lot of parents have zero idea how hard their kids are finding life so I always struggle with the “my kids are fine” line!

I think it would be way better for everyone to say WTF is going on here - we (mostly women) are doing an important job during those months/years of childcare, can we please recognise and celebrate that. It shouldn’t be some privilege for the rich or sacrifice. It should be normal. But sadly we (women) contribute way too much to GDP and literally hold up certain industries so it’s not a popular political position.

There are many ways we can repair parenting mistakes (that we all make) with our children. Attachment can be worked on and healed. But if we ignore things that might negatively impact our children, like not having a consistent, responsive primary carer when they are very little, we cannot do that repair work with them. Surely it is better to recognise the compromise that we’re being forced to make, work on repairing it within your own family and keep advocating for a better deal for families that doesn’t compromise the needs or wishes of mother or the child?

I mean, that all sounds great in theory but I'm not sure how it's supposed to work in practice.

Is the taxpayer really going to top up the mother's salary for however long you think she should be at home with her children? I doubt it. It would be unconscionable for bin men on £25k to pay higher taxes so that a woman on £100k can stay at home for a full...year? Two years? And yet that's what would need to happen in order for long paid maternity leaves to be possible without the woman taking a huge financial hit. (And even then, she'd still have lost out on career progression.) What you seem to be suggesting is a return to a tradwife style society where women raise children and men are the breadwinners.

Even if you could clearly demonstrate an undeniable benefit to children from staying at home full time with their mothers until X age, even when controlling for all other factors, how can you be sure that those benefits aren't being eroded in other ways? For example, by having a mother who is financially dependent on their father and at higher risk of abuse? Or for girls in particular, not having female role models to show them the benefits of working hard at school and pursuing a career, because really what is the point if they're supposed to give it all up to have children?

I don't want to raise my daughter (or my son, for that matter) in a society where men earn money and women do unpaid labour just because some research might suggest a small advantage to children from staying at home with their mothers for the first few years. Not when I know it is perfectly possible and indeed normal for the children of two working parents to thrive.

I'd also add that in France they made school compulsory from the September of the calendar year in which the child turns 3 (so the youngest are only 2y9m when they start) and the main reason why they did this was because they noticed a huge development/attainment gap between the children who went to childcare as toddlers and then school at 2/3, compared to the ones who stayed home until they were 5/6, which is when it used to be compulsory. Now, again, it's difficult to distinguish between correlation and causation here, because the children of highly educated, high flying, well off mothers all went to childcare as soon as maternity leave was over and school as soon as they could, whereas the ones staying at home until 5/6 tended to have mothers who were far less high flying, and often didn't speak French at home. But the fact remains that they decided that after the age of 3 children were so much better off in a formal childcare/education setting than they were at home with their mothers that they made it obligatory. They also believe this is true at a younger age, which is why people who are on low incomes and even the unemployed are a higher priority for public nursery places than women like me. I didn't understand it at first, thinking, "But I have a job! Surely I need a nursery place more than someone who doesn't have a job!" But the government considers that the child of someone who doesn't have a job would benefit more from being at nursery than mine would. Because I am more likely to read to my child and do interesting activities with them at home, apparently.

I can see why you see it as a trad wife attitude but I was careful to say that a baby needs a consistent, responsive primary carer. This doesn’t have to fall on women who don’t want to do it. As a couple, you are equally responsible for the emotional wellbeing of your child. Any mention I made of mums related to how/where the pressure currently falls. I don’t want an assumption that I want all women back in the kitchen to sidetrack the chat. I am not in any way supporting or suggesting a trad wife life (unless that’s someone’s dream - if it is, that’s not my business, you do you).

And you’re right, this would take a huge shift in society. Men feeling able to take more paternity leave (which is moving in the right direction in the UK), employers understanding why a longer gap from employment might enable their employers to then come back on more hours with better mental health or women and men taking two years off in total, one after the other so it’s truly shared leave. It’s not an easy shift economically but I don’t think that means it isn’t something we should think about, push for, figure out. Especially as the current system is definitely not working for a lot of people. As it stands, the majority of women are going back part time and expected to ‘have it all’ because of childcare being available. There’s still a pay gap. There’s still inequality.

And yes, of course there are factors that make a child being at home not ideal. I think I mentioned abuse and mental health as times when someone else should be involved. But the vast majority of children would still benefit from one consistent, responsive care giver over a day care set up so that should inform policy/parental decision making.

Being financially dependent on your other half (man or women) should not be this terrifying moment in a relationship. If you have chosen to have a child with that person, you should feel pretty confident that they are a good, decent human being that your child can depend on. Obviously this is not the reality for a lot of people but I don’t think raising our children to not rely on someone in that way is a good thing. What if they are unwell and take time off for that reasons. Are they to believe they’ve failed because they need to depend on someone and work as a team? Or if you want to retrain and try another career? Should that not be an option because you must remain financially independent? I think the teaching to young people (men and women) should be to focus on finding someone who is really safe and secure so they can be adventurous rather than to exist in a world where they can only trust themselves. I think young women should grow up to see that you can work hard, get your career, climb as far as you want, have children if you want to with someone you can depend on, care for those children when they are tiny, go straight back into the workplace and enjoy another 20+ year career. To me, that is something to be very proud of rather than embarrassed about. To me it’s as amazing as the next person who chose not to stop working. But the difference is the impact on the child. We work for the majority of our lives, I find it crazy to suggest 3 years (for example) is a massive deal. In reality, it is a big deal because of how the world is but thinking about it logically, it shouldn’t mean as much as it does to anyone’s job when we work for 40+ years.

And yes, in terms of academic attainment, there are definitely benefits to nursery. I agree the research on this is clear. But the need for children to have certain skills (reading) over their emotional development and wellbeing isn’t a win for me. Again, with the state of the world’s mental health, I think we’d be better off having worse reading in reception (which would be fixed) and better emotional wellbeing (which often isn’t being fixed). Perhaps then the mental health crisis wouldn’t be quite so awful and maybe we’d have fewer people bemoaning their husbands on here!

Thinking back when my DS was in the baby room at nursery he had his own keyworker. It was her that used to put him down for naps , feed him, etc. She was there the whole time he was in the baby room ( which had max 8 under 2s) and 3 staff. So how is the keyworker different as a main carer during the day than a parent?

@PinkBobby To be clear, I'm not talking about reading before starting school. French children don't start learning until the fourth year of school (age 5/6) which is the year it used to become compulsory. They found that children who had stayed at home until that age were behind in every conceivable way and not ready to learn to read at age 5/6, and that the gap in their development had a lasting impact throughout their childhoods. That's why they made the first three years of school compulsory and changed public policy to incentivise the kind of parents who were keeping their children at home to use public nurseries before age 2/3.

A mum being able to focus 1:1 on a baby is relatively new in human history though. Yes, many would have got six or so weeks of “confinement” to bond with their baby and probably not even leave their home whilst extended family looked after them. But a woman with a 3 month old in the past was also looking after its multiple older siblings, doing hard physical work to get the basics to feed the family (lets not forget how physically tough it was to have to grow, catch or make everything yourself) and helping older or disabled extended family members too. Probably alongside their sisters and female cousins so could take it in turns to share out the babies. Babies were tied onto boards and hung on a nail to keep them out of the way at some points in history, or slung on their mother’s back so she could work.

And what about baby twins or triplets now? They’re not getting much 1:1 time. Neither is a baby who has older siblings who aren’t at preschool/school yet.

As I’ve already said upthread, a high quality nursery with a great keyworker in the baby room (and onwards) is like having the support of an extended family.

Only better because you know they’re obliged to follow safe sleep and feeding instructions, and follow guidance about responding to cues etc instead of Auntie Mabel or your MIL thinking they know best.