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When I sent my daughter to childcare, it felt like a personal failing: like I couldn’t be bothered to look after her. So I try to limit her hours as much as I can. I still feel guilty.

Is childcare good for kids?Credit: Ryan Stuart

That idea, I suspect, is widespread: that parent-child relationships are the best way to help children develop, and anything else is second-best.

But it turns out there is a gulf between how we think about childcare and what the evidence says.

High-quality childcare is good for kids, experts say. More is probably better.

Indeed, the childcare systems with the best outcomes for kids are run by the Nordic countries – where the expectation is that kids will be in childcare full-time from a young age, says Dr Dan Cloney, senior research fellow at the Australian Council for Educational Research.

When childcare is high-quality, “you could be in seven days a week, you’d be doing really well,” says Professor Karen Thorpe, head of child development at the Queensland Brain Institute.

There are a bunch of good reasons parents send their kids to childcare. We’ll focus just on child development.

When your child is younger than one, the “ideal circumstance” is keeping your baby at home to maximise the ability to breastfeed and bond with parents, says Thorpe. But Australia offers only 5½ months of paid parental leave, leaving many parents unable to........

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