Nursery care is harmful - guilty parent here.

[fifitot]

www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2010/may/08/oliver-james-daycare-under-threes

Thanks Oliver.

The comments below are quite interesting though.

I am reading affluenza at the mo and I can only concur with the views of dorisbonkers. He appears to come up with a theory and pick evidence to suite it; where it doesn't fit he comes up with alternative explanations rather than questioning his original thesis.

OP please take anything this man (another ex-Etonian!) says with a pinch of salt. if you work in the field, then look at the evidence yourself or find a decent review. He clearly has an agenda.

He also rather demolished his credentials by whoring appearing on Sky after Princess Diana was killed and Michael Jackson died giving his sage opinion on their mental states.

On television.

Never having met them.

Again, sAF, I would love it if you could just copy and paste all your posts onto the Guardian website. I'd love for him to see them

james is author with agenda and books to sell who sells peddle spurious research as fact

the irony of a rich author evangelising to others who work, about what to do isnt lost

affluenza is both trite and shite,quite an achievement

I enjoyed the neuroskeptic response. Child psych isn't really my thing other than as a parent but yes am sceptical about the research base.

Haven't read the whole thread, so apologies if this has been covered.

Over the past 15 years I have worked in roughly 20 day nurseries (did supply nursery nurse work for a couple of years at one point)

I have never worked anywhere that I would be happy to leave my dc for long days.

My ds1 went to nursery for a couple for mornings a week when he was 18 months onwards though. Studies showing the detrimental affect of nurseries usually base their research on children being there full time.

I also dispute that Ofsted will give you a good idea of what the setting is like. As others have said, the nursery can be scruffy with wonderful care, or beautiful with not great care. My dd goes to a preschool now that has no outside space at all, so does terribly on Ofsted reports.

But she is only there for 2 1/2 hours a few times a week, and she spends a lot of time out in the garden at home.

You have to do what is right for you and your family as a whole, but please don't think that if you are paying through the nose for child care that it is necessarily any better than other care.

Each to their own, but there are many options I would investigate before I would even consider a full time place at nursery.

Agree with a lot of these posters - I actally like a lot of what Oliver James says but he has the luxury of a successful "freelance" career where he gets paid for banging out 500 pages for the Guardian et al. All well and good to have principles when you dictate when you work and prob have inherited wealth that paid off your mortgage (don't get me started!)

Most people need to work and can't afford the luxury of a one to one nanny (his prefered option if you HAVE to go out to work). He loves Denmark and how they approach child care but then Denmark doesn't have one of the most expensive housing markets in the world......

Why do I feel that 35 years of femimism seems to have simply made women feel guilt about all the choices they have......

Sorry random thoughts not necessarily related to nursery care but for what it's worth, my DD goes 2 days a week and at least they do some creative play with her unlike her mother who spends most of the time when not at work cleaning the house like some deranged 1950's housewife

I usually find Oliver James' column interesting. I would say that when my DS started nursery at 11 months it was too young for him to get any benefit from being there, but at the same time I don't think it did him particular harm either. Now he is getting older, 2.7, I think there are some benefits.

I'm so glad to read most of the replies on here as articles like his make me shudder.

Im looking at nurseries at the moment, and will admit I'm hyper-sensitive about the whole issue! But I really don't have any other option apart from losing my job/house etc. Probably in that order too.

The neuroskeptic blog link points out all the logical flaws in this article quite neatly, so I won't repeat that.
One thing that occurred to me - how can we be sure that the rise in cortisol on day 1, 5 and 9 in childcare wasn't caused by a combination of being in childcare and somebody taking a blood sample from a 15 month old?! Anyone who has seen a child have a blood test at this sort of age will be well aware that they seem to find it a rather stressful procedure... and I wouldn't let anyone do it to my child purely for this rather poorly planned piece of research!

that's an excellent point, smiley.

DS would be highly stressed by having blood taken, esp if I wasn't there to hold him.

Don't know the details of the research, but surely they would have taken blood from children NOT in nursery too, in order to make the comparisons in cortisol levels?

For every study there is another one that either contradicts it, or dismisses the original's suggestions - in this case the same bloody newspaper! The article suggests (nay, categorically states!) that it is better for a child to be looked after by relatives than go to a nursery - "relatives" invariably means grandparents, and according to another article on the Guardian website (www.guardian.co.uk/education/2009/feb/10/grandparents-childcare-pre-school) this in itself is detrimental to the child's intellectual development.

Basically you're damned if you do, damned if you don't.

Whatever your opinion, you can find some research to confirm it - so for all of these 'childcare is bad' articles there are many confirming how GOOD childcare can be.

I haven't read the article, it would make me so mad, but its sadly just another tool to make mothers and parents feel bad about their choices.

It's important to make informed choices - look at the research and weigh it all up. When choosing childcare for my ds, I felt that from what I had read children under the age of 3 do not need peers they need one on one care in a home environment, preferably with their mother. Now I did go back to work, but it informed my choice about which childcare to go for and I felt creche was not an option. But I know that the best thing would have been not to go back to work at all, and I still did it, part-time.

It's not about making us feel guilty but about informing people who are making these choices now and in the future.

I found the article less offensive than some of the comments at the bottom. Lots of mums do not have the option of either giving up work or using grandparents to mind their children, and the smug attitude of some of those folks did make me feel a little . My Dses 1 and 2 went to an excellent nursery (Ds1 still goes). Neither boy has had any behavioural problems apart from some normal stroppiness. The carers there are wonderful. Children are not left to cry and neither is bad behaviour left unchecked. I have seen carers comforting crying children, talking to them, playing with them, singing to them, rocking them to sleep. I walked in once to see 5 under 2s completely entranced while somebody blew bubbles for them. There are up to 8 under 2s in the "baby room" and 3 adults. When ds3 goes there he will have more of a share of an adult than he does at home with me and his 2 brothers, who are there to play with the kids and are not also trying to do a milion things round the house.

As for the childminder over nursery debate, Ds1 was going to a childminder 1 morning a week and I had to put a stop to it. He is 4 so a little older, but I had such issues with his behaviour after he had been to her, he was a little horror! After he has been to nursery he is lovely, and Ds2 was fine too, not clingy or tearful or aggressive, but after he had been to her he was rude, defiant and not pleasant to be around. I was also horrified to learn that she parked them on the sofa to eat their lunch in front of Cbeebies. I know that would not happen at nursery. I'm not saying all childminders are like this but not all nurseries are awful.

Just read some more nutty comments (go and do something useful tabby!!!). I can honestly say that me working did make a difference and it wasn't part of any capitalist con. When I was on maternity leave with DS1 we nearly lost our house and when we ran out of heating oil at the end of February that year we couldn't afford to get any more so our house was cold and nobody could have a bath without major pan boiling.

I've always thought Oliver James was a highly suspect 'authority' since he wrote an absolutely shite, reductive, sexist and simplistic article about why men were all 'hard wired' to find very young blonde women (rather than anyone else, ever, in any circumstances) most attractive....it really was the most irritating and rubbish aritcle and I thought then he seemed quite a misogynist who paid far too much attention to his own cliched predujices.

Incidnently, I'm a trainee psychologist and in my course we have been taught that the blurring OJ makes between 'correlation' and 'cause' is a serious error - e.g. correlations between cortisol and bad behaviour DO NOT demonstrate that cortisol CAUSES bad behaviour - to imply so just ignores thousands of other possible variables as several other posters have said. Dickwad.

Haven't read article as it will just annoy me...plus its in the Guardian, ugh...

I've heard of this guy before and he's a pretentious knob with an agenda and I wouldn't take anything he says on childcare, childrearing etc to heart.

We all do our best with the choices and resources we have, why bother upsetting yourself reading this sort of drivel?

I had a very bad experience at a nursery.

No separate sleep area, DD (6 months) who was sleeping for total of 4 hours in day at home didn't sleep was exhausted... she had constant nappy rash as they changed nappies only at set times (unless they noticed poo), workers unqualified and smoked in their breaks. And yes there was sceeaming, 12 babies and 4 staff..

I accept that many nurseries are much better and that some have no choice. I have another friend who gave up work as the only nursery she could practically use was not good either.