Is 4 months too young to send baby to daycare?
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Anonymous
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My wife wants to send our child to daycare at 4 months so that she can go back to work. If she waits an entire year she’s worried they won’t hold the job for her and she’ll have to start over again, and she likes her team. She works in education administration earning around 40k/yr. I make 250k. So we don’t depend on her salary and most would be eaten up by daycare costs, which would be about $1500/month in our area for an in home daycare. I’m okay with daycare but worry that 4 months is too young for our daughter as I’ve seen most advice suggest starting at the 1 year mark.
Interested in hearing people’s thoughts on this. |
Anonymous
| We sent ours at 3 months. It was fine. They were well cared for. We both work OOH. Lots of families do this and the kids turn out the same as other kids. She is right to think about keeping a job she likes. |
Anonymous
| No. |
Anonymous
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Both of mine started daycare at 3 months, as the only maternity leave I had was FMLA (12 weeks). It's hard, but it all worked out fine. Their daycare providers were lovely people, and in the long run it was good for me to go back to work.
One of my kids is in college now, and the other in high school, and I've seen zero issues from their early daycare. I'm not convinced that there's a huge difference for the baby between starting at 4 months vs a year. The kids who started later had more separation anxiety from what I could tell. I think the early separation is harder on the parents than the baby. |
Anonymous
| Both my kids started daycare at about the same age. It worked out well. |
Anonymous
| I started my oldest at about 5 months and he wasn't the youngest in the room. It was a lot harder on me than it was him. He's a happy healthy first grader today. |
Anonymous
| Both of mine started at 4 mos. It’s a great age to start daycare. They were pretty robust at that point but separation anxiety hadn’t set in yet. Babies who started later had a much harder time adjusting. |
Anonymous
I actually had the experience of doing it twice due to COVID shutting down my kid's daycare for a long time and it was harder on my kid at closer to 2 (when we restarted post COVID) than at 6 months when he started initially. |
Anonymous
| 4 months is completely fine. The research on daycare is problematic to say the least. Talk to a kindergarten teacher and ask them which kids they think started daycare the earliest. They will not be able to answer accurately. |
Anonymous
| Ours started around 4 months and was totally fine. No separation anxiety, and honestly, not even sick that often, which we'd been told to expect. A happy, healthy baby. |
Anonymous
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I think that starting around the first birthday is the hardest age for the kids. They are at the height of separation anxiety, and while most infant settings follow kids leads, most toddler settings have pretty strict routines. While that's for a good reason, toddlers in groups are like herding cats, and structure is the only thing that makes it workable, but still it's hard for kids to go from 1:1 attention and their own schedule to group care at that age.
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Anonymous
| Totally fine |
Anonymous
| Mine started at 8 weeks. It was fine. |
Anonymous
Same here. He doesn't remember whether he went at 3 mo., 4 mo., or a year. Listen to your wife. |
Anonymous
+1 |