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Comment by hnlmorg | Hacker News Reader

Exactly this.

There are so many benefits to day care for the children. It’s hardly the prison camp people make it out to be.

I don’t know if these negative comments are because HN in general dislikes the wider educational system, or if it’s because they dislike governments handing out “charity” to help less affluent families. Maybe a touch of both? But daycare can actually be a really rewarding experience for children.

So much so, that I have parent friends who one of them is a stay-at-home parent and they still send their child to day care at least one day a week to help the child’s independence, social skills and comfort when away from home. And they’ve found their child has been better for the experience

Edit: and the fact that I’ve been downvoted within seconds of posting this shows how ridiculous people are on here when it comes this topic.

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There probably are some pretty bad daycares out there, with overworked and burnt-out caretakers. But yeah my friends with kids mostly say the same thing, their kids love it.

For me at least, it's a general dislike of the wider educational system. My parents taught me to read, play chess, multiply, and write in cursive before elementary school. I didn't really learn anything at preschool or kindergarten, and I imagine daycare would be worse for my educational development. Maybe it's useful for social development? but at least for me I was always pretty independent (even in kindergarten) from the other kids. Not in an isolated way, I just preferred doing my own thing.

This might be a difference between the US and UK?

Preschools in the UK have curriculums they have to follow. That includes maths, reading and writing too.

I’m not going to comment on preschools in your country, but in the UK the kids who attended preschool are IN GENERAL the stronger students, socially, emotionally, and academically, when it comes to starting infants/ elementary school. Particularly in the less affluent areas. Though there might be some selection bias here too due to the kinds of parents who can sand their child to daycare verses those who cannot.

In the less affluent areas, I'd expect children not attending daycare to just not be getting anything at home. Presumably their parents are both working and cannot afford daycare. In the more affluent areas, I'd expect children only don't attend daycare if their parents prioritize their children over their jobs, and so they'd be getting much more positive attention than in a daycare. But, of course, we'd have to see a study differentiated by socioeconomic status to see what is actually the case.

We prioritized our kids. In the end, what worked better for our kids was for us to earn enough income to send them to really nice daycare/preschool for several hours a day.

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