Enrolling a six week old in childcare?

There's a sign outside my son's long day care centre that states that care is available for children aged 6 weeks to 6 years. It is a beautiful, professional and loving environment, my son's centre. The staff are just so genuinely caring. Even giving us their home phone numbers when Jack was sick for a long time with pneumonia last year. We are lucky to have secured a place for him there when he was 14 months old.

I look back at when he was 6 weeks old, and cannot quite see any situation where I would have placed him in centre based care. At six weeks I was still dealing with the daily battle of breastfeeding, a touch of PND and the standard issues of settling a newborn. So there was no way in hell I was going back to work. However, I had the luxury of a husband who was able to support us while I stayed at home getting used to our new family member.

It wasn't always this way. When our second daughter was born, eleven years ago, my husband was studying full time, and I was the breadwinner. I returned to work and study when she was 10 weeks old. Just 4 days a week from 10am to 2pm. But every minute that she was there racked me with guilt that I feel to this very day. To think of somebody else comforting my new baby made me feel redundant, and less of a new mother than the other Mums in the street pushing their newborns in prams. They would talk about their tiredness. How they hadn't slept all of the night before. I was going through the same thing, only I wasn't sleeping because I felt so guilty for leaving her.

My older daughter was two and a half at the time, and ready for a couple of days a week in kindy. But I must admit that if I had felt that there was any choice, I would have stayed at home with them. Survived on bread and water. And just dealt with having no money for a few months. At the time I really felt powerless. There was no baby bonus back then, so there were bills to pay and no money coming in to pay them. So I really had no choice.

I feel for those women who have no choice. It is so hard to hand your baby over to someone else and walk out the door. However I applaud our government (and I never do that!) for giving families a helping hand in the early months by offering a one off payment to help out. It is a far cry from the $600 that I received with each of my children. Looking back, I know it would have given me an extra few weeks with my baby.

We're not really seeing the effects of early care placement of newborns... yet. I hope that this helps some to make a decision. It may seem practical to enrol your unborn child into care during your pregnancy. But please give it some time to think about whether it is necessary and beneficial. Could you really live with that decision for the rest of your life? I know it has not been great for us. But it all depends on what resources you have available to you, and whether not working will greatly impact the quality of your life.

If I could go back and change one thing in my life, I would be a poor stay at home Mum, rather than a guilt ridden, working, studying Mum with no baby for 20 hours a week.