Quote:
Originally Posted by quasi
There are some huge advantages to having a parent stay home with the children for sure, there are also some advantages to sending a child to daycare primarily the early interaction with lots of kids and learning a school like environment at an early age.
|
I'm a big advocate of sending kids to daycare - the social aspects of daycare are so valuable. While my daughter won't get the same love at daycare that she would being at home with her parents or grandparents the skills she develops at daycare are SO important and not something any of us at home could offer her.
I suppose the ideal would be that she goes to daycare 3-4 days a week while my wife or I take the extra day (or the grandparents) but as it stands sending her 5 days a week beats having her home 7 days a week in terms of her growth.
My sample size is small but I've watched my nieces and nephews get a wide range of care and the results are really obvious - daycare plus highly engaged parents make a MASSIVE difference to a child's development. Being a highly engaged parent is really hard to do every day though - parenting is likely the hardest thing you'll ever do and being on all the time is so hard (heck, I can barely keep it up 2 hours at a time).
Then again the care I got when I was a child was nothing to write home about (it was what you'd expect with 2 working class working parents who were new to Canada) and I turned out fine.