Nursery Route

Just read a interesting piece of news on Times last week that a quarter of all nursery places (160,000 ) were empty in Britain last year despite the best effort of Labour government trying to get mums return to work, Only 7% of kids in nurseries are under one, and these make up only 2% of all British babies. And only one in 10 families use nursery school full time. Apparently, British mothers with young babes (under one) are shunning away the nurseries. The article claims it has seen the decline of have-it-all generation.(then there was some comment saying it's not have-it-all, it's more do-it-all with the high cost living, people need 2 income to survive).

This week I came across this article ,which made me rethink about my intention to put Daniel in a nursery when he is about 8 months old. The Britain-born, Australia-based parenting guru Steve Biddulph, who has recently stirred a lot of debates in Australia regarding childcare options on his website , has explained why it is right to keep young children's (under 3) care at home in his newly-published book Raising babes. He warned that 'babes growing up in nurseries are at risk of turning into antisocial, depressed and aggressive adults, incapable of creative work or of forming close relationships in later life. '; Also “one in five children put into nursery too early develops mental health problems”. His arguments lie in:

"Babies need to be loved, and one or two or three close adults are best. When researchers study this using videoed interaction over many hours, mothers and grandmothers, fathers and so on, have hundreds of little exchanges a day, where the baby seeks and gets a smile, a bit of chat, is noticed and responded to. Paid carers in even the best nurseries miss these interactions more than two-thirds of the time. The empathy region of the growing brain of a one-year-old baby doesn’t grow well if it isn’t being cuddled, chatted to, and finely responded to. Even the chaotic, muddled and messy family situation does this interaction better than the Ofsted supervised nurseries with their 140 goals and “curriculum”.