The luxury of being able to stay at home with a baby until school age is no longer achievable for everyone as many of us need to work just to put food on the table.
This leaves us with no option but to choose childcare for our little ones, yet despite strict regulations some are better than others. I’ve chatted with a lot of parents recently and every one of them seemed concerned about the amount of illnesses picked up in day care. Not only is this awful for the child, and the parents with the subsequent sleepless nights, it can become very expensive and also jeopardise jobs as you take time off to compensate.
It’s a fact that once your baby starts childcare they will be susceptible to more coughs and colds but how many is too many?
When Percy was in a nursery she had so many illnesses she spent more time out of childcare than in. It wasn’t until my older daughter also stayed there for a morning that we discovered why.
My daughter witnessed:
Percy eating chalk that had been on the floor and trodden on by every baby and child, yet when she asked the child-minders they told her it was natural.
• Percy eating soil that had recently been weed on by a cat yet once again this was deemed as natural.
• Children eating off the floor as there were not enough highchairs.
• Children with runny noses for hours, which they’d wipe with their own hands and spread everywhere, they weren’t cleaned until parents were due.
It may seem fussy and with ducks, chickens and land, we’re not exactly OCD about cleanliness, we love messy play but this definitely contributed. Now she’s with a child-minder, she has very few coughs and colds’, showing just what is actually normal. 3 or 4 a year is fine; one a week is ridiculous, so if your baby is contracting many coughs and colds, try being a fly on the wall for a day.
