Plenty of children are cared for at home until they are ready to start primary school aged 4 or over. However, there are plenty of benefits to attending nursery. For example, Kathy Sylva, a professor of educational psychology at Oxford University, has said that children who start attending nursery before the age of 2 go on to form better relationships at primary school.
Here are some more plus points. Nursery helps children to be confident in relating to other adults and being in a learning environment. This environment supports them in developing skills such as knowing when to ask to go to the toilet and washing their hands.
Children will also gain experience in sharing and taking turns without throwing a tantrum. Going to nursery helps them develop their social skills and learn how to make friends before they arrive at school.
If both school and nursery are local to your home they may even have some friends already, which will help them settle in quicker. Nursery practitioners will be able to give your children the best possible care whilst you do what you need to do to be a great parent, whether this is going to work, doing a food shop or simply having a well-earned rest. Deciding what age is right to send your child to nursery is a very personal choice, depending on when you need to return to work and what you feel is best for your child.
As long as you choose a good nursery, your child will be well looked after and will continue to develop in a happy and healthy way. The bottom line is that every nursery follows the guidelines and introduces at least one new activity for your child per day.
These activities include but not limited to:. Nurseries usually follow a predictable routine, this includes meal times, naps, indoor and outdoor activities.
There is a good reason for this. Children tend to feel most comfortable and in control when the same things happen at the same time each day. In the UK, nurseries actively support potty training as soon as the child reaches two years of age. Every nursery would have special built-in little toilets or additional tiny seats. Besides, they will teach your child some basic needs, such as washing hands after painting, eating and walking; sleeping alone, finding a tissue for the nose and tidying up toys.
Your child will be involved in lots of arts and crafts that require concentration and the ability to focus on an individual task. Nurseries tend to keep their kids busy.
It is great preparation for pre-school too. During the day your child has tons to learn and achieve participating in a variety of projects and activities; exploring playgrounds and taking field trips. An active toddler is likely to remain active later, so it is important to encourage activities both indoors and outdoors. At home, it is very easy to turn on the TV to give yourself some time off. Play is vitally important as your children will develop muscle control, balance, and coordination.
It is true to say that kids get sick more often at the nursery rather than at home. There is a reason for that — kids interact! Children benefit immensely from mixing with other children and will, therefore, be more prepared and better equipped when it comes to starting school. They will also adapt easily to a learning environment, have greater social skills and they will feel more secure in a different environment. A nursery will also help your child develop confidence in relating to adults.
Understanding what is expected of your child when being at nursery, he will have a good idea of how to behave. And finally, nursery or any other type of childcare will benefit you as a parent, as well as will benefit your relationship with your child.
And while they are our everything, we should have our own space and a bit of ourselves. Learn more about the benefits of being a working mum. Surprisingly, I have noticed a huge difference in how I felt with my baby after we started the nursery.
Not only I was more relaxed, but I also tended to spend more quality time with him comparing to be a home-stay mum. Parents feel more relaxed after having a break from their children, which can only be a good thing for you and your child. We wish you and your baby to have the best experience with your childcare! Check our best selection of toys and essentials for kids. To get more support from parents and family travelers, join our Parenting Support Group.
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There is never any pressure to buy anything, we just like sharing things that make our life easier and help you find them if it is something you are looking for. Please, see our full disclosure here. The simple question of whether full-time nursery care for under-twos is good or bad for the child is not simple in the least. Academics and childcare experts not only disagree on the answer, but also on whether we have enough evidence to be equipped even to hazard an answer.
A glance at newspaper coverage of research over the last few months offers a bewilderingly diverse set of conclusions — everything from studies that suggest that nurseries can benefit toddlers, to research that parents can return to work months after the child's birth without any adverse effects, and warnings that excessive exposure to nurseries can result in greater risk-taking a euphemism for drug and alcohol use as a teenager.
For parents, who are perhaps already swallowing back feelings of guilt at the prospect of handing over their child, the territory is difficult to navigate. Beneath the contradictory headlines there is a solid base of evidence that suggests that putting a child under two in full-time nursery may have some adverse emotional and behavioural effects in the long term.
These effects are modest and are accompanied by some, equally modest, positive effects on language and cognitive skills. The relatively small statistical impact makes it hard for a parent to assess whether group daycare really poses a significant risk for their child, but even the shadow of a possibility that it might lingers in the mind and makes the decision very fraught.
But it isn't just parents who have to wrestle with this data. The last government worked hard to push mothers back to work, and oversaw a huge expansion in all forms of childcare.
There are about 15, nurseries in the UK, and the number is growing. After grandparents, day nurseries are the most popular form of childcare for working parents who have children under three. The new government has yet to set out in any detail proposals for the early years of childhood and on parental leave, but an understanding of this debate will be crucial in determining whether to prioritise daycare or paid leave or childminders.
Although the pile of research has grown over the last three decades, the capacity of the subject to provoke fury and unease has not waned. As one academic explains, when you are talking about "how best to look after the most vulnerable, smallest, tenderest members of society", it is natural that the debate is highly charged.
The research also showed that good-quality childcare had a positive effect on cognitive and language development. Should these findings influence a parent considering nursery care for an under-two?
Perhaps not, Belsky says. It's a probability not a certainty. The probability looks small, the effect is modest, not big. You might conclude therefore not to worry about it'. For policymakers, however, he argues that the conclusion should not be disregarded. He continues: "Let's imagine these are small effects. But let's imagine a reception class of 30 children in which two-thirds of them have small effects that make them a little bit more aggressive and disobedient Are those teachers going to be doing more time managing and less time teaching?
Are those playgrounds going to be less friendly? Are those neighbourhoods going to be affected? It's all the cars that do it. People are so ideologically opposed to these findings that instead of being thoughtful about them, they respond as if there is only one way to think about them — small, don't matter, ignore," he says. He is resigned to the way that parents, policy-makers and fellow academics recoil from his findings. The guy who first linked Aids with homosexuality back in the early s was accused of being a homophobe.
The same kind of idiotic, kneejerk, ideological reaction occurred here. People think I'm against daycare. What I say is, if the weather man says it is going to rain tomorrow, is that because he is against sunshine?
People feel very defensive about this area. Belsky has been accused of catastrophising, and it's probably true to say that not all of his colleagues would agree with his account of his professional victimisation. It is remarkable how scratchy, if not positively disparaging, many of the experts in this field are about their colleagues' work.
Kathy Sylva , another American academic now based here, who has been involved in two major UK studies designed to assess the impact of nursery care on children here, comes to different conclusions.
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