"ft nursery from a young age can work very well indeed. If you know what to look for"
I'm sure nursery 'works well' if what you are looking for is reliable childcare which is open all year around. Doesn't change the fact that most babies in these nurseries are having to share their main carer with 2 or 3 other babies of the same age, and that their carer may well be very young and fairly transient. Some nurseries have a stable staff. Many don't. Many have a core staff which is stable, but are reliant on agency staff to fill in the gaps.
When you visit a nursery you see what they want you to see. Same with OFSTED inspections.
On a personal note, I withdrew my dd when she was 1 from a very well thought of nursery - part of a national chain. I'd gone to pick her up and been told she had very bad nappy rash. I thought it was odd as she hadn't had any problem when I'd dropped her off that morning. By the time I picked her up 8 hours later she had two sores on her bum. I went home and thought about it and realised what had happened was this: that she'd been left sitting in a shitty nappy for about 4 or 5 hours, and that the reason she'd been left was because nobody had been near enough to her during that time to realise that she'd crapped. I was devastated. She's a lovely affectionate child who would never go an hour without a cuddle and a chat at home. I kept thinking about her roaming around this nursery alone while her key worker spent the whole day trying to settle in a new child who was crying a lot and who wouldn't be put down.....
Blueshoes - there is no 'knee jerk' 'anti nursery' response here. Most people who have strong feelings about this issue have spent a lot of time thinking about it and have good reasons for believing what they do. I really don't think it's fair to turn this into a debate about competitive parenting - it's a really important issue that we all ought to take seriously.
Also, your comments about the impact of high levels of cortisol on developing brains is not just relevant to children exposed to extreme neglect and abuse. Sue Gerhardt acknowledges that strong attachment and responsive parenting does ameliorate many of the more damaging affects of high levels of cortisol on the brain, but she doesn't say that this makes institutional group care the optimal form of care during those vital early years.
Re: having an 'attachment parenting agenda'..... do writers who support the status quo (which in this country means bottlefeeding from about 4 weeks, babies sleeping in separate rooms, and institutional group care for toddlers) have a 'detachment parenting' agenda? Or do you see the status quo as some sort of norm against which the sort of practices Sue Gerhardt's books seem to promote as optimal should be measured against?
What impressed me most when I read 'Why Love Matters' is how subtle and complex the whole issue is. I came away thinking that even though most loved babies are robust and adaptable, their experience of care in those first few months and years does affect them in ways we can never fully understand or see.
On my part since withdrawing my baby from nursery I've thought about it a lot, and now can't believe that I was prepared to hand my precious child over for the bulk of her waking hours for months at a time, to someone who was little more than a stranger to me. That I didn't really know anything meaningful about the people who were spending more time with my child than I was...... And to (sorry to say this - I know some nursery nurses are very highly trained, but.....) people who were mainly very young, quite poorly educated and earning a very low salary. Because that's the reality of nursery care for most children in this country.