Am I being unreasonable to think that good care with one carer at home is better than good care at a nursery?

[gotogirl]

I haven't namechanged, because I am not ashamed of asking this. It is a genuine question.

Following the thread from the mum who wanted appreciation of her parenting skills for having a good-sleeper / well-behaved 3 year old - i know it is contrary to MN netiquette to start a thread re a thread, but this is a related topic, not the same one.

Anyway, that mum suggested if it is all down to luck, she may as well pop her DD into nursery and feed her fruit shoots....cos being lucky, this "adverse" things would not affect the outcome. So, she clearly put "nursery" in the adverse category.

A few people picked her up on this and said nursery is not evil etc.

[Bear with me, this is long, I know]

My question:

does anybody genuinely feel that nursery is as good as or better than being cared for by single carer in home environment?

My thoughts: that the OP from other post is eriously misguided in thinking nursery = adverse environment. But, but....

I struggle to think that nursery is going to be better than one-to-one care at home unless home carer is ill / depressed / incapable etc.

Let's get to the point:

Am I being unreasonable to think that good care with one carer at home is better than good care at a nursery?

BTW, my kids are not cared for one-to-one at hom; I work and this is not possible. but i found what I fgeel is next best thing. I myself do not think it is superior care to what they would get if I were able to become SAHM. But economic reality dictates work for me.

ssd - a week has 168 hours, so the majority of the time the child is still with the parents, even if the kid's at nursery full time.

I our case, my daughter doesn't go to bed before 9PM so we have plenty of playtime after work/nursery together.

I find your posting rather patronising.

in a truly equitable society women and men would be able to work with their babies with them! and throughout history that has been the case until extremely recently.

Research into brain development is fascinating, but you need to remember that the human brain is plastic - in the sense of being able to reorganise itself to cope with all sorts of oddities. It's only very recently that we've developed the capacity to scan brains and realise quite what variation is out there, unapparent to anyone outside until someone has a scan.

Someone can function perfectly well despite their brain looking very odd structurally. There are people with severe hydrocephalus who are absolutely fine - one person who happened to be scanned was a professor at, IIRC, Oxford. He was in the top few percentage of clever people, but had such severe damage any doctor looking at the scan would have predicted that he would have major learning difficulties to the extent of being unable to communicate or care for himself.

I have a personal interest in this, as until I was scanned, no-one had any idea I'd had hydrocephalus as an infant or in the womb which had resolved itself. I have been left with enlarged ventricles.

Yet at the point when I was scanned, I had a decent range of O- and A-levels, a 2:1 and was doing very nicely thank you in a professional career. And have carried on just the same. Although the reason I was scanned was that I'd started having seizures at the age of 28, the neuro-surgeon (a consultant at a tertiary centre, so knows his stuff) said it may well be unconnected - and I haven't suffered any intellectual decline as a result of developing epilepsy, fortunately.

Well then most of continental Europe's children should have grown up with attachment disorder then. Because children there have been going to nursery since they were very small for the last twenty years.

bursting, listen to yourself. You can believe attachment theories. I do practice attachment parenting funnily. And use ft nursery. To say that nursery attendance not equals one-to-one and therefore potentially attachment disorder is pig-ignorant (yes, spicemonster used the right word).

So what happens to babies in large families looked after by a busy parent who cannot also provide one-to-one. Attachment disorder alert, right?

Speak to a social worker who sees the abysmal conditions that actually cause attachment disorder, before you go around bandying terms you could not possible understand.

elf, you do make me laugh. Nursery attending babies spend their time at home asleep? If ONLY!

spicemonster - that's a ridiculous, ignorant comment. "Continental Europe" is not a single entity - childcare provision varies wildly from country to country.

France and Belgium have high rates of crèche use, but only a minority of children get a place in a crèche, even today.

There are well recognised, acknowledged problems with crèche use for very young babies here in France. Using a crèche is the lesser of two evils, not a child-raising dideal.

edam...thank god there is some plasticity! it means that children are adaptable and to a lesser extent so are adults. children will latch on to any suitable caregiver....they are extremely adept at doing so. that doesn't really address the question though.

therapy can and does help people with attachment issues, to the extent that their brains have sometimes physically been changed by the process. this is long hard painstaking work though. surely better to get it right in the first place.

babies in the workplace would be one solution. and those of you that couldn't countenance such a thing have really swallowed the modern western patriarchal model whole. flexible/home working would be another. adequately valuing caregiving both paid for and that done by parents and relatives would be a third. what doesn't help in the slightest is a govt policy based solely on getting mothers out to work as quickly as possible and paying lipservice to paternity leave and flexible working. it stinks.

It depends upon the quality of the care the children are receiving at home tb(brutally)h, the level of interaction they get with other children etc.

hollow laugh

Yes, let's all take our children to work I'm sure when I'm training a load of accountants earning £1m+ a year, they wouldn't object to my 2 YO running around in the background because they realise that the mother/child bond is critical.

FFS get off your lentil-weaving high horses. This is the sort of bullshit that justifies not giving women responsible jobs because their brains will turn to sentimental mush the moment they pop one out.

Leomniedelf - no the keyworker isn't me, and I don't expect her to be. My daughter still loves going to nursery and stretches her hands out to her in the mornings. (In the same way that she races over to me or her dad when being picked up in the evenings).

And the whole "who she loves, birthed her" badabing, is rather lentilknitterish in my opinion.

I haven't birthed her anyway, she was cut out of me after 6 hours on the drip still didn't make a difference. And she was in her dad's arms the first 45 minutes of her life, when I was still being stiched up. I'm sure someone will happily tell me that this has traumatised her too.

In the end, you can be dedicated parent and work full time. She gets all the affection she asks for, is still being breastfed at a year, hell, sleeps half the night in our bed, and is in general happy, open, loving and fun.

Now tell me that I'm a bad parent.

it depends on the support that the caregiver of a large family has. how many adults are available to those children on a consistent basis. i've never said that good attachment cannot happen in a nursery environment. i've said that in the main it is less conducive than other forms of one on one caregiving.

please try to be less defensive...i'm not attacking the choice you've made.

I'd be happy for dh to take my dcs to work, whilst I swan around at home.

I did not say it was ideal Bonsoir. And I don't think I mentioned France specifically, did I? Europe is a bit bigger than just Belgium and France and, on the whole, group childcare is more common there than in the UK.

I am merely saying that it's reductio ad absurdum to suggest that FT nursery care leads to attachment disorder.

why does it have to disintegrate into personal insult? spicemonster, i'm neither thick nor ignorant of what i'm talking about. the fact that we disagree does not make it so. and there is something very wrong with a world that denigrates and laughs at the notion of parents and children being allowed to stay together while the parents are working imo.

bursting, I am not attacking your choice either. I am questioning whether you have swallowed some theory du jour that justifies your own decisions hook line and sinker without any real understanding of the conditions that do actually cause attachment disorder.

I suggest you research further. Become a social worker. Foster/Adopt a child WITH attachment disorder. You will then fling those terms around middleclass families with more care.

spicemonster - I was pointing out to you that your sweeping generalisation about childcare and Continental Europe was grossly imprecise. Most of Germany (Europe's largest country) has very little in the way of institutional childcare, for example.

And, while you might not like to believe that there are problems associated with institutional childcare, here in France (where the state crèche was invented), the problems and issues are widely recognised.

Sweden and other Scandanavian countries are excellent examples of excellent early nursery provision around for decades. Would be quite happy for more quality nursery care.