[Drac]

This study in no way supports your claims that daycare leads to superior mental development vs. home care. It says "if you use a better quality daycare you will get better results". REALLY? Wow, what a great discovery! I can only hope federal dollars were used to conduct this great piece of research.

My comments have nothing to do with judging the OP on her choices in life. Every situation is very different. Daycare quality varies a great deal from place to place in the US. I imagine that, like many things, daycare in Europe and other parts of the world is quite different than here in the US so we may not be talking an apples to apples comparison.

I'm a stay at home father (playing poker with small children around is nearly impossible unless they are sleeping). My kids stay home full time until they are 3, then go to a Montessori "school" for three hours a day, five days a week. This is certainly not like your typical American daycare facility and is much closer to a school. My daughter (1st grade now) benefited greatly from the social aspects of being with children her age. As she had nearly exclusive adult interaction for 3 years she needed to learn how to deal with other kids. I find it hard to believe that her mental development was hurt in any way by staying at home with me. She is at the top of the heap in her class and is much more verbally/mentally advanced than any of the other kids we know that went to daycare. Maybe she'd be in college now if we had sent her to daycare. Damn!

Obviously I'm dealing with a very small sample size (and possibly a small level of bias [img]/images/graemlins/tongue.gif[/img]) but I just don't believe that kids are better off on average spending all day in daycare vs. at home with a parent. I'd really like to see some of these studies that claim this is true. Clearly there are instances of terrible parents and terrible daycare. Let's take out the extremes and find some data to support these claims.