That is the question.
Allyssa will be three this year and our church's preschool starts at age two. Thankfully the two year old class was full this year, so I got to postpone this tough decision until now. For many moms and dads this is not a hard decision at all. Many parents choose a day care that has preschool curriculum in the morning and day care activities in the afternoon. Others do a Montessori school or other full day preschool program. Some parents choose to send their kids to a half-day class all week or certain days. The options are varied, the parents and children are varied. But if I were to guess, I would guess that most kids go to preschool or daycare or a sitter when they are three and many before that. I might be wrong, but I'm sure if you're curious you can look it up. There is bound to be a statistic somewhere. The point is that lots of parents have their children supervised by someone that it not themselves when they are three. Part of the reason that this is a hard decision for me to make has to do with my own background.
I am the third child of three. None of us ever went to preschool. My mom stayed at home with us until I was about 9 or so. That means that she was a stay at home mom for 14 years before she went back to work. Those fourteen years were prized years to her. She loved being a SAHM. Her love of her children and the profession of motherhood was passed on to me. Not all moms want to stay at home and other moms feel that they don't have the choice to stay at home. I get to though. Before he ever proposed to me, my husband (just friend at the time) and I talked about how we wanted to raise our children (we "dated" for three months, however if you were to ask my husband if we were boyfriend/girlfriend, he probably would have said no that we were just seeing each other, but by our conversations you could certainly tell that we were going to get married). We both decided together that I should stay home with the kids both for financial reasons and because we both felt that the children would benefit from that.
That last sentence is where some of my hesitancy to send my oldest to preschool comes from (although all of that has something to do with it). By sending my child to preschool she will be exposed to things that my husband and I don't think are good. Pushing, shoving, name calling, etc.... While many parents will say that these things are going to happen and that I would be sheltering my child (and fooling myself) if I thought that by not sending my child to preschool she would not be exposed to these things. But, they aren't looking at it from the same angle as I am (and that's fine). My daughter will be three. Three means that she has been on this earth for three years. How long have you been on this earth? Do you see the difference? She is still very much a newbie to the world. A baby. No, not a baby in the sense of diapering or bottles, but a baby in the sense of she still has a lot to learn. By sending her to school when I do have a choice at a young age, am I exposing her to things prematurely? Probably. Definitely. Do the benefits outweigh the drawbacks? I'm not sure.
Kids learn lot of good things in preschool. They learn shapes, colors, numbers, and letters. My daughter already knows these things. For these academic reasons, my daughter doesn't need to go to preschool. She can paste, color pretty well, and do art projects like making wreaths and collages. We do these things at home. She does not have access to other children her age at home. We do go to a MOPS group twice a month and Sunday school each Sunday. She loves to be around children. She talks about children often and asks if we will see them again soon. For this reason, I wonder if I should send my budding social butterfly to school.
Then of course there is the cost. The cost is low, but I honestly don't know where I could cut back to come up with the amount of money that would be needed to send her. We don't have cable or satellite. We don't have a home phone. We don't buy sodas. We go out to eat less than 4 times a month, usually less than 2 times a month, often not even once. These are all the places that experts tell people to look at when trying to cut back. Do we have to cut back to send her? Probably not. Would it mean that we couldn't put that amount of money into savings for our future or for a crisis? Yes. Would that put us in a bad position? No, probably not. Does it still make me feel guilty? Yes. Mommy guilt. The financial side is all about Mommy guilt.
The schooling part it is just about trying to decide what is best for us. And I just don't know.
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