Andrew Smith: 'He appears to want to hug, not slug, peers'

HE may have just made it into the 15-month bracket, but my son Corin has gone through his first rite of passage.

His bits are still intact, no communion wafer has passed his lips - see how I am embracing literary ecumenicism here? - and we haven't been chomping down on cigars and talking matters of the flesh. But the wee man has experienced real and profound change: he's no longer in the baby pod at nursery.

He has cast aside such childish things. And so left behind the soft illuminations and furnishings, the pan pipe and mating whale soundtrack, and chilled-out staff.

All has been swapped for the bright lights and big sitting/beetling/bounding area of the toddler room, policed by women who, by the end of any day, sport back-through-the-hedge hair, lop-sided glasses and seriously haunted looks. And I know why.

The centrepiece of this room is a wooden frame-cum-slide. Oh my, seeing that thing again gave me the shivers. It was on this piece of apparatus that my four-and-a-half-year-old daughter Sylvie, now in veritable nursery adulthood in her Montessori classroom, had toddler turf wars. Often.

So many evenings, on the verge of tears over the shame and sense of rubbish parenting, I would have to fill in report forms because she had chomped her molars into another little person after some coming together on the stairs or when scrambling to the slide.

As of now, at least, Corin is different. He appears to want to hug, not slug, peers. He's a lover not a biter. And yet, that isn't the relief it might have once held the promise of being.

As one of the nursery staff danced round it: "It's such a surprise he's so sensitive ..." After Sylvie, I filled in for her. What that means, though, is that he has exhibited separation anxiety. Sylvie never cried when I settled her in; Corin has howled a couple of times in recent weeks and it is heart-breaking.

When I have left him still in tears - and this week I haven't, thank God - what immediately races through my mind is Peter Hitchens's sneering description of nurseries as "day orphanages"; Oliver James talking of the emotional deprivation that can be caused by group daycare for under-threes and the fact that I rarely walk out of the place in the morning without feeling a pang of guilt.

My childminding arrangements expose certain double standards in how I am rearing my weans. Any time during the day or night - any time - my wife Sara and I would never leave our children to cry. Yet we leave them in the care of others. Pondering the vagaries of parenting certainly provides plenty to sink your teeth into.

This article was first published in Scotland On Sunday, 20 March, 2011