Nursery or kindergarten?

11/13/2013

When mater­ni­ty leave comes to an end, an urgent ques­tion aris­es — to send the baby to a nurs­ery or to find a nan­ny for him? More­over, the choice that you make should take into account not only your inter­ests, but also the inter­ests of your baby. After all, for any child, it is the moth­er who is the most impor­tant per­son in life.

What awaits you if you decide to send your baby to a nurs­ery? First­ly, there he will be pro­vid­ed with con­tact with peers — nurs­ery groups are formed today, start­ing from the age of one and a half. It is this option that you can con­sid­er a good alter­na­tive, because your child is pro­vid­ed with reli­able care, and besides, it is bud­getary. But such estab­lish­ments also have dis­ad­van­tages. For exam­ple, groups con­sist of a large num­ber of babies, which means that var­i­ous dis­eases will spread rapid­ly here. Of course, you should not expect colos­sal atten­tion from edu­ca­tors to your child specif­i­cal­ly — all because of the same over­crowd­ing of groups. In addi­tion, it will not be easy to get into kinder­garten, because there is a dense queue in pub­lic kinder­gartens.

The sit­u­a­tion is slight­ly dif­fer­ent with pri­vate kinder­gartens. Although pri­vate nurs­eries should be cho­sen with spe­cial care, after all, it is not uncom­mon for the staff of such insti­tu­tions to be formed from peo­ple who do not have a spe­cial ped­a­gog­i­cal edu­ca­tion. In addi­tion, pri­vate nurs­eries should be locat­ed in a spe­cial insti­tu­tion, and not in a con­vert­ed apart­ment. You should care­ful­ly study all exist­ing reviews or com­mu­ni­cate direct­ly with the par­ents of those chil­dren who are already attend­ing the insti­tu­tion of your choice. Any odd­i­ties you find should be a rea­son to look else­where.

If you are very wor­ried that some­thing might hap­pen to your baby while the teacher is busy with oth­er chil­dren, then you should find a nan­ny. Of course, an out­sider will not be able to replace the baby with com­mu­ni­ca­tion with oth­er chil­dren, but the nan­ny will even­tu­al­ly become a per­son close to your fam­i­ly. The risk of fre­quent dis­eases in this case decreas­es, but the child’s life will be less event­ful, and he will not receive the skills of orga­nized activ­i­ties in a chil­dren’s team (the same mati­nees, for exam­ple).

What­ev­er choice you make, do not for­get that for the baby any change in the sit­u­a­tion is stress­ful, so you will need to pay increased atten­tion to him at a time when you can be around. Only feel­ing the sup­port of the moth­er, the child will be able to adapt to the changed envi­ron­ment.