Term starts in a few weeks and I am only now starting to look, which is about as late as a person can leave this.

Nothing is decided. My wife and I have not agreed on it, I have not agreed with myself on it, and the honest position is that we do not know whether our little boy is going at all.

We are considering it because our schedules have closed in on us, because there is a lot happening at once, and because the arrangement we have been running is starting to show its cracks. I wish we did not have to think about it. But we do.

Which sent me looking for an answer to what I assumed was a simple question.

At what age should a child start nursery?

I expected a number. Eighteen months. Two years. Three years.

I did not get one.

First problem: the words

Four terms get used interchangeably here and they do not mean the same thing.

Daycare is the one Kuwait does not really have, and I miss it. When I was studying abroad, I dropped my eldest off, he stayed the two hours I was there, and I collected him. No uniform, no schedule, no commitment. It solved a problem without asking you to restructure your life around it.

Nursery, or حضانة, is group care for the under-threes. Meals, sleep, play, nappies, a routine. Care first, with some learning attached depending on the place.

Preschool is for children from around three and is more openly educational, though a good one is still mostly play rather than sitting at desks.

And then Montessori, which is worth explaining, because almost nobody using the word here means anything by it.

Maria Montessori was an Italian doctor who opened a childcare centre in a poor district of Rome in 1907. What she developed is not a vibe. It is a demanding method. A fixed set of materials used in a fixed sequence, each designed to be self-correcting so the child finds the mistake rather than the teacher. Mixed ages, usually across three years. A long uninterrupted work period, around three hours, where nobody is moved on by a bell. The adult observes rather than instructs. No grades, no stickers, no prizes.

That takes a trained teacher a year or two of study to run properly.

Now the marketing part. In 1967 the US Patent Office ruled the word Montessori is generic and cannot be trademarked. Anybody can paint it on a sign tomorrow and owe nothing to anyone. In the United States, of roughly four thousand schools using the name, only about a quarter have any affiliation with a Montessori body at all.

So here it has become a status word. We didn’t put ours in a حضانة, we put him in Montessori. As though it is a higher tier of place rather than a method a nursery either follows or does not.

Ask the follow-up questions and it usually collapses. Are the ages mixed. Is there a three-hour work cycle. Who trained the teachers. Are the wooden materials being used in sequence, or are they on a shelf because they photograph well.

Wooden toys and neutral colours are not the method. They are the set design.

Which is the wider point. The sign on the door tells you almost nothing. Researchers avoid all these words entirely and use one term for everything before primary school, whatever the building calls itself.

How young children start elsewhere

I assumed there was general agreement that children stay home until two or three. There is not.

Finland starts once parental leave ends, around nine or ten months. Denmark from birth. Germany from birth to three. Norway from one. And the OECD reports that in many of the systems it studied, more than half of all children are already in some form of care by two.

So an eighteen-month-old at nursery is not unusual anywhere. That tells me it is normal. It does not tell me it is right.

So what does the science say?

This was the part I did not want to hear.

There is no established best age to start nursery. I could not find good research saying a normally developing child should start at twelve months, or eighteen, or two years. That is not the question researchers are asking.

What they ask about is quality. Hours. The relationship between the child and whoever is looking after him. How many children per adult. How much talking happens. And what the alternative at home actually looks like.

The largest American study followed children from infancy to four and a half. Better quality care, especially care with a lot of language in it, was linked to modestly better development. But children who stayed home with their mothers did not do worse.

That kills both arguments at once. Nursery is not necessary for a child to develop properly. Nursery is not harmful. What matters is which home and which nursery you are comparing.

And three is not a magic number either. The evidence for good preschool does get stronger from around three, but even there the finding is not that a child needs it. It is that a good one helps. The same rule keeps applying at every age I look at.

Which brings me back to my son

He is not three. He is very much a toddler.

He is still recycling the same ten words, and on some days I suspect he has decided that one word is enough and everything else can be handled through tone and facial expression. Which, to be fair, is roughly how most adults communicate anyway.

So the question is not is nursery good, or is home good. Both can be either.

The real one is harder.

For a child this age, in our situation, would the nursery we can actually get be better or worse than what he would otherwise have at home?

Which means looking honestly at both sides, rather than deciding first and hunting for research that agrees with me.

Five parts

Part 2, the case for. Part 3, the case against. Part 4, how to choose one, if we choose one.

And Part 5, what we decided.

I genuinely do not know yet which way that one ends.