I took my little one to a small daycare group for a few hours once or twice a week (she was three or four). Just so she could play with some kids, and I could go out and get things done - shopping, errands, haircut. I was a stay at home mom and completely isolated, no neighbors or relatives with kids, no relatives to babysit! There we were stuck in the house together 24/7, and if you’ve never been in this situation, you have NO idea at all how incredibly tedious and stressing this can be.
I LOVE my SIL just as much (and occasionally more than) my own siblings. No conflicts there. I simply don’t agree with her decision.
I spoke to my sibling last night and said "I thought (niece) was only going to daycare until (SIL) was cleared to pick her up? I was told they plan on sending her as long as they can afford it because it is easier for everyone.
Okay…
Took my niece to day care this morning and we had a nice trip singing and laughing. I am just keeping my mouth shut.
This.
Taking care of kids is a LOT of work, and it’s next to impossible to get anything else done with an active toddler underfoot. And the OP’s SIL has an infant AND a toddler to deal with. I’m going to cut her whatever slack she feels she needs, short of abuse or neglect.
You aren’t going to agree with a LOT of people in your life and pertaining to child rearing. However, it does not mean you’re right. You have your opinion, so leave it at that. I’m especially sensitive to NON-parents deciphering between how a child should/should not be raised. This doesn’t appear to be abusive, it just rubs you the wrong way for some reason. I highly recommend staying out of it, and don’t confront her about what YOU think is right/wrong for her family. Believe me, no matter how sweet or understanding she is, your opinion will not be taken lightly. Mothers already have a crapload of guilt about EVERYTHING. Believe me. That being said:
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It’s not screwy (not MY choice per se) but it’s HER choice. It’s ok. Accept it.
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Yep. Just shut up about it.
When my daughter was an infant, my son was a toddler - and a climber. I went back to work, so I was only home with her for maternity leave - and for most of that time he was in daycare so I could sleep when she did.
There was one point though when I had her on the breast and he was home. I was sitting on the couch and I could see him in the kitchen. I moved my daughter to the other breast and looked back up - my son was on top of the fridge! In less than two minutes, he’d pushed a chair over to the counter, climbed onto the counter, and from there onto the top of the fridge. (Remember Baby Huey in Roger Rabbit?) I yanked her off the breast, set her on the floor and got him down.
Keeping a mobile toddler safe while doing the feeding and changing required for an infant can be tough.
I am just amazed by the attitudes here. The Celtling loves her school, and is cared for by loving folks who support her social and intellectual development. She is also quite the little extrovert, and loves having other kids to play with.
She gets music and reading classes, a huge playground with equipment I could never afford to duplicate, and excellent nutrition. She is exposed to other languages and ideas, and learns all kinds of things that I don’t know.
If I won the lottery tomorrow and didn’t have to work, I wouldn’t leave her there ten hours a day, but I wouldn’t take her out permanently either. Kids need other kids, and I have no intention of producing a gaggle for her to play with. 
I wish to goodness my Bro an SIL would send their kids to daycare. They have five boys who basically spend the day beating on each other. SIL can’t possibly keep up with them all, or round them up for organized activities, without the help of the oldest, who is a full-time babysitter whenever he is there. Bro is out of town on business whenever he can finagle it. :mad:
If they are all clean and fed and make it to bed at a decent hour I’d say she’s doing great. But man I’d love to see those kids get the kind of intellectual and social development that Celtling has received.
I’m kind of surprised at the lack of implicit family support in these situations. If you need to spend some time focused on the baby/needier child, that’s fine in my opinion. Ditto if you need rest. But paying for daycare?
I dunno, I guess myself and my fiancee had the privelege of having families that looked after each other’s kids. Did I go to daycare? Sure, sometimes. But having family members that can do it for free helps out a lot.
Maybe she has post-partum depression and this is the best thing she can do to keep things together long enough to take care of her infant.
While leaving a child that young may seem strange, I bet a couple of generations back it wasn’t. In an old school lots-of-kids-and-a-farm scenario, Mom would have a breastfeeding kid with her at all times, and a huge piles of housework and fieldwork to deal with. Any kid old enough to walk was going to be put in the care of older siblings (and you get stuff like six year olds “watching” two year olds), grandparents, neighbors with kids of a similar age, or just left free to roam as part of the pack of neighbor kids. You can bet any given two year old on the farm was not being perpetually entertained by their mother.
Why are so many people on this thread assuming I am not a parent? I am a parent of two children. My first had to go to daycare since I was a single mom at the time and my second stayed home because it never occurred to me to put the child in daycare if she was able to stay home until she was three or four. (I think preschool 3 was her first year of organized care.) They are both older now.
I think you should become extremely passive aggressive around your SIL. When you are over at their house, go out of your way to do everything you can for her, since she apparently can’t take care of two kids, she must have limited capacity for normal everday activity. If you see her lifting things step in. Say the house looks okay considering. Ask her how she’s coping. Stuff like that.
Let us know what kind of reaction you get.
I’m in the “don’t judge” crowd. What is easy peasy for some people is horribly difficult for others. I’m a stay-at-home Mom of two, and my daughter has been going to mothers-day-out since she was 1…one day a week for the first year, two days a week for the past two years (ages 2 & 3). My son (age 1) will be starting in the Fall. Maybe some people can power through without getting regular breaks, but I can’t. I need those few hours a week of freedom to keep my sanity, which obviously is better for the kids. And my daughter *loves *“school,” so there’s that, too.
The combination of a two-year-old plus a newborn is incredibly difficult. When I had my son, I was literally paralyzed with fear at the idea of trying to care for the both of them at the same time. [URL=“Please Help (Postpartum Depression/Anxiety) - Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share - Straight Dope Message Board”]the thread I started at the time. Now, I had obviously had bad post-partum depression, but how do you know your SIL isn’t dealing with the same fears, just maybe on a lower level?
Even when I started feeling better about the situation, I spent a lot of those first few months just sitting in a chair, cuddling my kids. I wasn’t physically able to do much more. Because newborns, really, are either being held or they’re lying in their crib. So when you’re holding baby, what do you do with a clinging, attention-demanding two-year old? For that window of time, my daughter definitely was being better served when she was at school, playing in organized activities, interacting with other kids and her beloved teachers, than sitting at home with me, watching Sesame Street over and over again because that’s all I could manage some days.
It’s the airplane oxygen mask thing–you put the mask on yourself first because you can’t care for other people unless you take care of yourself first. That’s not being selfish.
I think then the relevant question would be: Do your brother and SIL give you unsolicited advice about how you raise your kids, and if so, is it appreciated? If the answer to the first question is no … then I’d assume they follow the rule of “treat people how you want to be treated”.
I read everyone saying about how hard it is for my SIL. I can’t imagine so many people thinking it is okay for a children that just turned two to spend 50 hours a week in day care with strangers. She is awoken in the morning, taken to care, picked up at 5:30, home at 6 and bed by 7:30. Obviously this thread has not changed my opinion, only my resolve to stay the heck out of it. I am still feeling this is totally NOT okay and can’t be good for my niece. Half days or one or two days a week? Sure, All day every day indefinitely? Nope. My mother even volunteered to watch her two days a week but that wasn’t enough. I understand that some parents do not have a choice but they do and I believe they are choosing wrong. Toddlers don’t need to be outside the home for most of their waking lives.
My SIL is a wonderful person that would do anything for anyone but I think she is putting insecurities about her parenting abilities ahead of her first born child and I don’t like it. Fortunately, I don’t have to. Just keep quiet about it.
That is actually an interesting question and the answer is yes, they do. Both my sibling and my SIL are educators and are pretty much constantly giving unsolicited advice about everything from homework schedules, schools, teachers, age appropriate activities..etc. That is really the type of family we have anyway and their advice is usually helpful and always appreciated. This issue is a bit more touchy though because they will take it as a criticism and not advice.
Didn’t you just say that your first kid had to go to daycare because you were a single mom at the time? How did that kid turn out? Okay? Completely screwed up because they were surrounded by [scary music]STRANGERS[/scary music]!?!?!?
Honestly, it’s bizarre that you’re still on about this. Is this guilt about your first kid bubbling up? Because it’s not normal to be this judgmental and annoyed by the totally normal parenting decisions of your sibling and sister-in-law.
[theremin music]STRANGERS![/theremin]
Again, what do you mean, strangers? Unless the daycare drops by Home Depot to pick up day laborers to care for the kids, we’re not talking about strangers, we’re talking about her caregivers. The kid probably thinks of the daycare workers as every bit as much her family as her family is; she probably thinks of them as much more her family than you are. It’s not that she’s cared for by strangers every day, it’s that once a week a stranger drives her to her second family :).
As for judging the daycare by the girl’s reaction to it every day, that’s a bit bogus, too. Every day when my wife drops our daughter off at daycare, Ms. Dorkness’s heart is broken by the tot’s wails of anguish and insistence she doesn’t want to go. And every day when I pick her up from daycare, I practically have to drag her out the door because she’s having too much fun.
It’s not the daycare that the girl dreads: it’s the transition. Kids, as a rule, hate transitions.
If you want to judge your SIL for making her kid have a couple of transitions every day, go for it. But that’s a bit less dramatic than judging her for putting her kid in the care of strangers.
Finally, may I point out that Diogenes is agreeing with you on a parenting judgment? Something to think about.
As I said before, I agree, I would have absolutely no problem with it if it were a couple of days or mornings, but (although I still feel inclined to give her the benefit of the doubt) 50 hours is… a lot. Not something I would choose if I had any other alternative, certainly. Then, there’s this:
Okay, this? Makes no sense. Is your SIL not aware that as long as she is paying the daycare they will save her spot even if she doesn’t use it? If your mom is willing to watch the kid 2 days a week, and they think this is better than sending her to the daycare (which I totally think it is if for no other reason than that she doesn’t have to be in a car for an hour a day, which doesn’t sound like a whole lot of fun even if she does love you a lot) I don’t understand why they don’t just continue to pay the day care for five days and just inform them that the kid won’t be going on Tuesdays and Thursdays (or whatever).
Unless she thinks the daycare does a better job than your mom. Which, honestly, I could see myself thinking about my mom (who is awesome, but has the bad habit of considering she knows better than I do, whereas the daycare is more likely to be amenable to my control-freak tendencies).
But if her issues are really what you describe in the OP (losing the daycare spot and not being able to handle both) I don’t see why she wouldn’t take your mom up on it. What does she say when you ask why not?
I respectfully submit an alternative perspective. Becoming a parent does not magically make anyone an expert at parenting. There are horrible, awful, clueless parents in the world that do revolting things to their children, and I, as a non-parent, am quite comfortable pointing out that what they are doing is wrong. After all the terrible parenting I’ve seen in my lifetime, no way is anyone going to convince me that parents automatically know best. It’s not like they make you take a test or anything.
As for the OP, AFAIK there is no evidence that putting a kid in daycare is damaging to his/her development even if there’s a stay-at-home parent. It’s probably actually better for the kid’s psychosocial development to be in daycare, not to mention all of the health benefits of being exposed to all those germs. So I’m not too outraged. I guess it does make me wonder why she bothered to have a kid, though.
You’d really rather have your mother-in-law watching the kids than daycare? What if the mother-in-law also doesn’t approve of the mom’s lifestyle (like the OP) and constantly makes comments? What if she lets the kids watch TV all day and feeds them chocolate? Or she could be Mary Freakin’ Poppins, but you can’t just say that it’s crazy to let a mother-in-law take over long term care of a kid. With a daycare, you’ve made a contract with a child care professional. A parent-in-law could have a change of plans or attitude at any time.
Until I became a parent, I shared your exact viewpoint. However, the reality of being a parent is much harder (though much more rewarding) than anyone can ever explain. At this juncture, it is very hard to take anyone who does not have kids seriously when it comes to kid advice.
When you do have kids you also realize that you will screw up. In fact, much of the time you feel like you are screwing up even if you are not.
So, while having kids does not make you an expert, not having kids certainly makes your opinions less valid in my view.