nursery for babies

[clarinetplayer]

to tell my sister that she will miss out on many of the most important milestones in her baby's life if she sends her aged six months to nursery 5 days a week from 8am until 6pm. This is longer than a school day. My sister got very offended when I suggested that being looked after as part of a cohort of 8 babies by three carers was not ideal for her seven month old daughter. She doesn't need to work full time but loves her job and is worried that if she goes pt she'll miss out on promotion. Is it unreasonable to think that now she's a mum she should put her daughter's needs first?

I think that's what my mother thinks she created for us too, and I think when we were all at home and younger it probably was fairly idyllic. However my mother really wasn't a good parent to older children, and as my brother and elder sister left home it all got very claustrophobic, to the extent that my middle sister and I both asked my father to send us to boarding school at 16. It has taken many years to repair the relationship, which is still a bit fragile. Now who knows whether there was any relationship with any of that and her being a SAHM and not working for many years, or maybe it was when she started working (she became a very good part time secondary school teacher) that things got difficult, or it was a menopausal thing. Many different reasons I expect. But watching her make a huge success of her voluntary work, and seeing the pride that gives her (and having people describe her as "formidable" does make me think that perhaps she would have been happier (and thus us too) if she had had more going on than just looking after us.

Anyway, none of her daughters have chosen to be full time SAHMs. I doubt we could recreate their lifestyle even if we tried in any case - we would have had to marry much wealthier men for a start.

I also agree about getting your children to think about their work life balance when choosing career paths. I resented my mother trying to push us towards careers which we could do around children, but it was a a useful thing to think about.