In Part 2 I made the case for nursery. In Part 3 I made the case against.

I still have not decided.

But I know what home offers, because I live in it. What I cannot judge is the other side. So I have to go and look.

The problem is that a nursery visit is not what people imagine. You do not sit in a toddler room for an hour and watch. You get a short tour, mostly walking, with a manager talking beside you. You look into rooms rather than stay in them. You see about four minutes of any room.

So this list is built around that. Three parts. What you can actually see in a short walk. What the children tell you. And what you have to ask, because you will never see it.

Two notes before the list

First, this only works if there are children in the building. If you visit during a holiday you will be shown empty rooms and a brochure, and you will learn nothing. In my case, some nurseries have already started their term and others are running summer sessions, so there are children to look at. If there are not, ask to come back another day.

Second, I know this list is long. It reads like it was written by a Karen. And honestly, that is fine. You are leaving your child with strangers. Being difficult is part of the job.

But you do not have to care about all of it. Pick the things that matter to you and let the rest go. I care about the brand of soap on the wall and the smell of the place. You will care about something else that other people find strange. That is normal.

What you can see on the tour

The room. How big is it, and how many children are inside? You can count them. Twenty toddlers in one large hall is a very different place from eight in a small room, whatever the number of adults.

The adults. Count them yourself instead of accepting the number you were told. Then look at what each one is actually doing.

Screens. Is there a television or a tablet in the toddler room? This is a bad sign even if it is switched off, because it is in the room for a reason. You will notice it immediately.

What is on the floor and shelves. Blocks, water trays, sand, books, balls, paint, climbing frames, dressing-up clothes. Or tables, chairs, worksheets and flashcards. This tells you what the day looks like without anyone having to describe it.

Whether the children can reach anything. If all the good material is on high shelves, the children are not using it. If it is at their height and slightly messy, they are.

The changing area. Look at it properly. Is it clean? Is there a sink next to it? Is there soap? Is it smelly, meaning nappies sit there for a long time, or are they removed immediately?

The bathroom. Small toilets and low sinks, or adult ones with a step. Clean or not. Soap brand.

The sleeping room. Is there one? How many beds, and how close together? Is it dark and quiet, or next to the noisy room? Or do the children sleep on mats in the same room where everything else happens? Again, the smell of it.

The outdoor space. Not whether it exists. Whether it is used. Worn grass, scratched equipment, toys left outside. That is a garden in daily use. Perfect grass and new equipment usually means it is there for photographs.

Where they eat. High chairs, small tables, or the same room they play in. Is it clean? Is it near the food?

General condition. Not how expensive it looks. Whether it is looked after. Are broken things fixed or left broken?

What the children tell you

This is the most useful part of a short visit, because you can read a room quickly.

Are the children busy? Doing something, moving around, interested in things? Or sitting, drifting, waiting?

Is anyone crying, and did an adult go to them?

Do the children move towards the adults, or around them?

Do they look at you when you walk in? Curiosity is a good sign. A room of toddlers who do not react at all is strange.

Are they all doing the same thing because they were told to, or different things because they chose to?

And the simplest question. Does the room feel busy and calm, or does it feel loud and out of control?

What you have to ask

None of this is visible on a tour. If you do not ask, you will not know.

Staffing

How many adults are with the toddlers between eleven and one, when lunch, nappies and staff breaks all happen at the same time?

Who covers when someone is on a break or off sick?

How many staff in this room left in the last twelve months?

How long has the main toddler teacher worked here?

His person

Who will be his key person?

Will she be the one who feeds him, changes him, settles him to sleep and greets him in the morning?

What happens if she leaves?

The first weeks

Can I come with him for a short visit before he starts?

Can he begin with short days and build up slowly?

What do you do if he is still very upset after a week?

The day

How long were the toddlers outside yesterday?

Is there one nap time for everyone, or is there flexibility if he is tired earlier?

What happens if he does not want to eat?

When things go wrong

What do you do when a toddler bites another child?

What is your policy on fever and vomiting, and when can he come back?

How are allergies recorded, and who knows about them?

Safety

Who can enter the building?

Who is allowed to collect him, and how do you check?

Who on each shift has paediatric first aid?

Where are medicines kept?

Vague answers here worry me far more than an old or shabby classroom.

What I am ignoring

The furniture. The uniform. The reception area. The Instagram account. The app that tells me nap 10:42, meal 11:13.

And the words on the door. Montessori, Reggio, Waldorf, bilingual, STEM. All of them can describe good practice, and none of them tell me what an eighteen-month-old actually experiences all day.

None of it is harmful. It just does not tell you anything.

And one thing I am against

The camera.

Many nurseries here offer a live camera so parents can watch the room from their phones, and they sell it as a feature.

I do not want it, for two reasons.

It puts your child’s privacy in the hands of every other parent in that room. Anyone can record it, take a screenshot and share it, and you will never know.

And more importantly, think about what wanting it means. You are handing over the most precious thing you have. That should go to a place you trust. If you trust them, you do not need to watch. If you feel you need to watch, then you have already decided something about that place, and you should listen to that instead of installing a camera.

A camera does not create good care. It only lets you see bad care more clearly.

That is the list. Now I have to go and use it.

I am not trying to find the best nursery. I am trying to find out whether any nursery near us is good enough to be better for him than staying at home.

Then the decision.

Part 2 made the strongest case I could for nursery, and I meant all of it.

But there is research pointing the other way. Some of it is very solid. Some of it is weaker than people claim. And one popular argument against nursery has actually been disproved, which I will come to.

Here are four things.

First: a day at nursery is physically harder on a toddler than a day at home.

Our bodies produce a hormone called cortisol. It rises when we are under pressure. Normally it is high in the morning and falls slowly through the day.

Researchers measured it in the same children, at home and at nursery. At home it fell as expected. At nursery it often rose instead.

Be careful with this finding. Cortisol also rises when a child runs, gets excited or does something new. No study has shown that this daily rise causes long-term harm.

Why this is a point for home: whatever a nursery day asks of a small child, home asks less. If both options are decent, one of them is easier on his body.

Second: the first weeks are hard for him.

One study followed children at fifteen months, close to my son’s age. It measured them at home, then while their mothers stayed with them at nursery, then after the mothers began leaving. In the first hour after the mother left, their cortisol nearly doubled.

There is a second half to this. Another study followed children for three months. The early weeks were hard. By the third month the levels were normal again, and both parents and staff said the children were doing well.

Why this is a point for home: starting nursery has a real cost, and the child pays all of it. Staying home has no such cost. Most children recover, but you should know you are asking him to pay something.

Third: at home, nobody else is using the adult.

This is the biggest point, and several others come out of it.

To be fair, a nursery room is usually not one adult alone. Many have a teacher plus two or three helpers for around fifteen children. That is a reasonable amount of adult attention.

But it is shared attention, and shared attention is not the same as attention that belongs to one child. Four things follow from that.

He waits. One child falls, one cries, one needs changing, one is hungry. The adults have to choose an order. At home there is no order, because there is nobody else in the queue. That immediate response is one of the main ways very young children learn.

He may hear less language, not more. This surprised me, because language was the strongest argument in Part 2. One study recorded children’s whole days and counted the words adults said, the sounds the child made, and the exchanges between them. The children got more of all three at home. The reason is simple. A toddler points at a bird. The adult says “bird.” He makes a sound. She says “yes, it is flying.” He points again. That conversation can continue because nobody else needs her.

Nobody knows him as well. A person who looks after the same child every day learns a great deal. That sound means tired. That cry means hurt. That gesture means water. This song calms him. Children can form real relationships with nursery staff, as I said in Part 2, but knowing one child that well is harder when you are responsible for fifteen.

He loses control of his own day. A toddler gets tired at unpredictable times. He eats badly one morning and is hungry by ten. At home, someone can simply react. Fifteen children need a schedule. Meals at a set time, naps in a system.

Why this is a point for home: at home the day is built around one child. At nursery the child fits into a day built for fifteen. The staffing may be perfectly good, and it is still not the same as having someone to himself.

Fourth: he will get sick more. This one is not in dispute.

A Danish study followed more than one million children. Starting nursery caused a clear rise in infections, and the rise was larger the younger the child was when they started.

And the extra illness was not repaid later. The common idea that they get sick now so they get sick less at school did not appear in the data.

Why this is a point for home: this is the only cost on either side that is certain. Nursery means more illness, for him and for the rest of the house, and nothing later cancels it out.

And one argument that is weaker than people think

This is the one you hear most often, so it needs care.

The large American study found that children who spent more total hours in childcare over their first four and a half years showed more difficult behaviour later. More aggression, more conflict with adults.

If I wanted to make a dishonest case against nursery, I would stop there.

But newer research combined data on more than ten thousand children across seven studies in five countries. Instead of comparing different children with each other, they checked whether a change in the same child’s hours changed that same child’s behaviour. The result was zero.

Why it is still worth knowing: because you will hear this argument, and you should know that the older studies found a link and the better ones found no evidence that the hours cause it. It is a reason not to assume more hours is better. It is not proof of harm.

And one thing that is not on this list at all

Staying at home does not put a child behind.

The same large study checked children’s language and thinking at one, two and three. Children cared for only by their mothers did not do worse than children in childcare.

Why this matters most: it removes the fear behind a lot of these decisions. There is no evidence that a child who does not go to nursery is missing something he needs.

Where this leaves us

All of this is real, but the points are not equal.

The illness finding is certain. The physical cost of a nursery day is real, though we do not know whether it matters in the long term. The undivided attention at home is a genuine advantage. The behaviour argument is much weaker than the internet suggests.

But notice something. Every point above assumes one thing: that home means a warm, attentive adult who talks to him, takes him outside and answers him when he needs something.

If home means an adult busy with housework, a television on in the background, few books and no other children, then every advantage on this list disappears.

Which is the same problem as before, from the other direction. The question was never nursery or home.

It is which nursery, and which home.

So I need to know what a good nursery actually looks like.

That is Part 4.

Most parents reach this question the same way. It starts to become too much. There is too much work, and you begin to notice that you are not giving the little one the time he deserves. Then one of you gets tired, and the other one follows, and there is nobody there to take over.

Then you begin to wonder two things. Would nursery help us? And would it actually be good for him?

Whether it would help us is obvious. Of course it would. That is why we are asking in the first place.

So I went looking for the harder question. Would it be good for him?

Here are five things the research found that make a real case for nursery.

First: a good nursery gives a child more language.

This is the clearest finding in the field. Children in better-quality nurseries had better language and better thinking at ages one, two and three.

And the reason was simple. In those nurseries, the adults talked to the children more.

Why this is a point for nursery: more talking produces better language, and a good nursery is a place where an adult talking to your child is the job rather than something fitted in between other tasks.

Second: a room full of people produces more talking than a room with one adult.

At home, the language a child hears is whatever one adult says to him.

At nursery, several adults are speaking. Other children are making sounds. There are songs and books and routines with words attached. And he hears everything said to the other children as well.

Why this is a point for nursery: the amount of language reaching a child goes up simply because there are more people in the room. Home cannot produce that no matter how good the adult is.

Third: other children teach him things adults cannot.

At this age, children do not really play together. That comes later.

But being around them still teaches him. Another child takes his toy, so he learns what that feels like. Another child copies him. He has to wait his turn. He has to make himself understood without the words.

And he watches other children and copies them. He sees one child use a spoon, then he tries a spoon.

Why this is a point for nursery: children learn by watching children slightly ahead of them, and at home there is nobody to watch. This is the one thing a parent genuinely cannot provide alone.

Fourth: he can gain another adult who is truly his.

Children can form real, secure relationships with nursery staff. Not a replacement for a parent. An additional adult who knows him, comforts him and answers him.

This only works if that adult stays. One study compared nurseries where staff stayed a long time with nurseries where staff changed often. Where staff stayed, children got more attention and had fewer behaviour problems.

Why this is a point for nursery: at home a child has the adults he was born to. A good nursery adds one more, and having more trusted adults in the world is a real gain for a small child.

Fifth: fewer children per adult means more attention.

Nurseries with better numbers had children with better language and fewer behaviour problems.

An adult looking after three children can watch one of them, notice what he wants and respond to it. An adult looking after ten cannot.

Why this is a point for nursery: a well-staffed nursery room is designed around children. A home day is not. If the numbers are right, the attention is deliberate rather than whatever is left over after the cooking and the laundry.

Where this leaves us

All five are real and based on research in child development. And all five depend on one thing, which is the same thing I found in Part 1.

They only happen if the nursery is good.

None of them come from the building, the sign on the door, the uniform or the curriculum. They come from what the adults in that room actually do all day. A bad nursery gives none of this. An average one gives very little.

There is also research pointing the other way, and I am not going to skip it because it makes the decision harder.

That is Part 3.