Anyone terrified of nurseries/childcare?

[Lelophants]

This is the SAHP THREAD!

I’m due to put my baby into nursery when she turns one so I can potentially go back to some (very part time) work. I’ve pretty been out of work since my 5 year old was born for various reasons. I’ve started to feel ready to do some paid work, especially now he’s at a good school. The reasons are I’d like to think I’m contributing financially and get my toe into something I can progress with when all kids are older. Plus my sanity.

But every now and then I freak out and get so scared of putting her in nursery! You hear so many awful stories of abuse and I get so much anxiety.

DH is a high earner (and tbh it’s easier if I’m at home with the kids and odd jobs when he’s commuting!) and maybe I should wait until she’s older/ can talk?

But we have no family help and I’d love some time to myself :( DH obviously takes the kids on weekends but he’s exhausted and it’s not the same.

Everyone else I know works at least part time so nursery is normalised. What do you think? Do I just need to get over my anxiety or appreciate this extra year or so?

Personally I didn't like the nurseries we visited - all were staffed by bored-seeming young girls. We found a lovely childminder, really liked the home from home setting, but my youngest also did a couple of days at the brilliant school nursery from just before she turned 3.

@Username197 it is not nasty and offensive it is factual that ‘generally’ nursery workers are very young or uneducated as these are the only groups who would ‘generally’ have to accept such low salaries for such hard work. It is something that needs to be discussed because until we start properly paying nursery staff for the valuable work they do there will be very few people like yourself you are highly educated and love the role because they will not be able to justify working for minimum wage when they can earn more elsewhere

Thank you @Username197 you sound like the excellent staff at DT’s nursery. Well qualified and experienced. Their nursery was a long established family run business with qualified teachers and nurses on the staff. We’re still in touch with the two staff who became our babysitters.

And where did you obtain these ‘facts’?

To meet minimum requirements for registration, more than 50% of staff need to hold a qualification at level 3, which is the equivalent of 3 A Levels.

I appreciate that you may have experienced the very small percentage of poor nurseries, but please do not generalise all in this category. It is very demoralising for people who work very hard to care for and educate the most precious things parents own.

@Username197 if you see my post above you will see that three nurseries in my parents small town have caused the deaths of three children in the past five years. The other 50% of staff need to have nothing beyond a ‘working towards’ a very basic qualification similar to a GCSE. They are often very young girls, this is all very well documented and to pretend otherwise is disingenuous. I am a qualified teacher, I would not work in a nursery for minimum wages, very few properly qualified childcare providers would

Also @Username197 let’s not pretend three a-levels is a high level of education. You would need a degree for pretty much any entry level role, why do we not demand the same for the people who take care of our children

Couldn't have said it better 👏🏼
Well worded message @1offnamechange

Not like the ignorant ones will care though 😀

I am sorry to hear of the tragic incidents that have taken place in your parents town. I can understand this has given you a different view.

However, your post again illustrates your lack of knowledge about nursery requirements. The other (less than) 50% don’t actually have to be working towards any qualification.

You may feel academic skills are important, but some of the best nursery staff are parents or grand parents themselves, or young staff who are enthusiastic and full of energy.

Not everybody is gifted academically, you seem very ignorant to that by minimising that A Levels are not that high. Remember some people in very corporate roles don’t even have that! Unless you have completed a Level 3 qualification and have experience in nurseries, you really are not qualified to comment based on your experience of reading the media. I can categorically state I learnt more through my level 3 than I did in my degree, so no, a degree is not required or even relevant. Most degrees are not even recognised as full and relevant as they are not assessed in practice or specially cover the EYFS.

You seem to be very focussed on the whole minimum wage aspect. I can assure you not all nurseries pay minimum wage. I have earned double what my teacher friends earned at their NQT stage, and even now, around 20-25k more.

@Username197 I appreciate you engaging without being rude, it often doesn’t go that way on these threads but I think we will have to agree to disagree. You can see from the many comments above from ex nursery workers that they would.m not send their child to a nursery and that there is a culture of contempt. This is almost the exact wording used by the judge in the most recent case of a child’s death five minutes from my parents home in a very affluent area of Cheshire. As a teacher and a governess of many years I have engaged with and worked alongside many nurseries and very few if any have been staffed by anything other than very young disinterested girls chatting about their boyfriends and nights out over children’s heads. I have not seen or experienced any of these bouncy enthusiastic young staff you talk about apart from at the gate for pick up and drop off. I continue to mention minimum wage as working with very young children is incredibly challenging, demanding and relentless even if you love it, I earned six figures as a governess and I was very good at it partially because I felt like I was very valued as evidenced by my salary. When you pay people a very low wage they do not feel valued and this often means they do not give the job their all and why should they. Whilst you say you were well paid, as in teaching, this is often those in management roles and the higher up the pay scale they are the less contact they actually have with the children. For many young girls they go into childcare because they don’t have any other route not because it is a vocation. In order to change this we need to demand higher levels of pay and education for nursery staff as is the norm in many other parts of Europe. Whilst I appreciate that you clearly did a wonderful job and it is great to hear I stand by my point that you are an outlier and that the majority of nurseries are not staffed by people like you

There are actually quiet a few of us who have degrees etc and work in childcare the same as nurses it can be a vocation .....but yes pay needs to be better.

@KindOf has already explained why that "study" isn't worth the paper it's written on, but just to add

1. It was Canadian so completely different cultural context than the UK
2. It only looked at childcare provision in one specific area of one specific country
3. It looked at children who were in childcare in 1997. Things have probably changed ever so slightly in the intervening nearly 30 years....
4. It was in the context of canada suddenly introducing incredibly cheap subsidised daycare of 5 dollars per day for everyone, which has been since acknowledged resulted in understaffed and very poor quality care, which has since been improved and which bears no resemblance to the highly regulated childcare industry in the UK in 2024
5. It actually acknowledges that children in high quality daycare "have better cognitive performance and fewer behavioral problems" than children who don't go at all
6. the children who had negative outcomes spent a significant percentage of the week daycare. It acknowledges that for those in less than 10hrs a week the outcomes were negligible to those not in daycare at all
7. again, because it's in northern america in 1997 with much lower maternity leave than now, the children there might have been in daycare 5 days a week from several months old, that is not standard in the UK
8. it accepts other studies have found daycare has a positive impact on children

tl;dr - find me some studies in the uk within the last few years and maybe you'd have a leg to stand on....

not really sure what you're trying to say...?

I'm not denying that the mother would have been the primary caretaker throughout most of history, but with very large families, no labour saving devices and often a job outside the house as well (whether hunting-gathering eons ago and then in agriculture, or in a factory or as a live-out servant post industrial revolution), most lower and middleclass women wouldn't have had time to sit around teaching their kids their ABCs and doing crafts- they would have been either let loose to play or loosely supervised by older siblings. And the upper classes would have had their kids looked after by nannies.