Thanks to the pandemic, our kid has been at home with a nanny during working hours most of her life save for a few months at daycare. She's now two and a half, and we would like her to have social interaction and structure, but feeling like the cons of switching to daycare outweigh the pros. Interested in hearing your experience if you haven't sent your kid to school before pre-K.
We were team daycare pre-pandemic, but switched to a nanny after daycares shut down in Mar 2020, and haven't looked back. Our nanny is lovely and reliable. Our child is developing typically, and is happy and engaged. She's learned a second language from our nanny, and is almost fluent. She meets other kids with their nannies on outdoor playdates at the park almost every day for several hours when the weather is decent.
Other parents have advised me to switch to daycare/full day preschool soon for the social interaction and education, and we also figure she has to go to school and learn how to navigate a structured environment sometime, but we're reluctant to give up the good situation we have.
We're also not thrilled with the idea that we'd be without childcare whenever she's sick (which will be often, I am sure), or when daycare closes for positive Covid cases. We have no family nearby, so dealing with that while working full time will be less than ideal. Both my spouse and I are already stretched pretty thin at work.
I'm personally also not in love with the idea of her wearing a mask 8-9 hours a day and interacting with people who are also masked at this stage of her development (please, no discussion about pros and cons of masking).
Plus, now we can't visit daycares in person, only virtual visits, which makes it hard to get a gut feeling of whether the place is the right fit.
On the other hand, it is sometimes stressful being an "employer." While she has a playgroup with the nannies now, the kids her age will inevitably start going to daycare as they grow up and she'll end up playing with much younger kids. Our nanny may get bored doing the same routine for yet another year (my thinking, not hers). And a nanny can always quit with short notice which will leave us scrambling. Finally, daycare would be much less expensive.
We considered 3 hours a day preschool with our nanny taking the remaining hours as a middle ground, but that will only work if our nanny finds another family to fill the missing hours, which is a big if.
If your child was not in daycare/preschool until, say, 3.5 or later, did you regret not sending them sooner? I'm interesting in hearing from stay at home parents who did this, as well as parents who used nannies or nanny-shares instead. |
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