"Daycare illnesses" by Nina Panickssery
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What initial thoughts did the host have about daycare before becoming a parent?
Daycare Illnesses. By Nina Paniksiri. Published on April 13, 2026. Before I had a baby I was pretty agnostic about the idea of daycare. I could imagine various pros and cons but I didn't have a strong overall opinion. Then I started mentioning the idea to various people. Every parent I spoke to brought up a consideration I hadn't thought about before, the illnesses. A number of parents, including family members, told me they had sent their baby to daycare only for them to become constantly ill, sometimes severely, until they decided to take them out. This worried me so I asked around some more.
What concerns do parents commonly express about daycare illnesses?
Invariably every single parent who had tried to send their babies or toddlers to daycare, or who had babies in daycare right now, told me that they were ill more often than not. One mother strongly advised me never to send my baby to daycare. She regretted sending her, normal and healthy, first son to daycare when he was one. He ended up hospitalized with severe pneumonia after a few months of constant illnesses and infections. She told me that after that she didn't send her other kids to daycare and they had much healthier childhoods. I also started paying more attention to the kids I saw playing outside with their daycare group and noticing that everyone had a sniffly nose. I asked on a mother's group chat about people's experiences with daycare.
Again, the same. Some quotes. They do get sick a lot. I started my son at 2.5 and feel he always has something. The limit does not exist. brought home every plague in first six mo, covid, hfm, slap cheek, rsv. They usually say 8 to 12 illnesses per year. My girls were sick every 2 to 3 weeks in their first year of daycare. My daughter started daycare at 6 months and got sick a ton the first year. Despite all this, many parents who have the option not to, that is they can afford in-home care with a nanny or for one parent to stay home, still choose to send their babies and toddlers to daycare. How come? Surely most well-off adults wouldn't agree to be ill non-stop in exchange for the monetary savings daycare provides?
Asking around, it seemed like the most common reason given was that parents believed daycare illnesses built immunity. That if their babies and toddlers got sick at daycare they'd get less sick later in childhood and so overall it would net out the same. Unfortunately few could point me to any evidence for this but nevertheless passionately defended the view. The claim that daycare illnesses simply offset childhood and adult illness immediately seemed suspect to me for a number of reasons. 1. Quite confident, the most common illnesses, colds and flu, don't build immunity in general, in kids or adults, because they mutate every year. 2. Quite confident, the same illness has a greater risk of complications in babies versus older children and adults.
3. Moderately confident, the same illness has a greater duration in babies versus older children and adults. 4. Moderately confident, illness during early development is probably more harmful than illness during adulthood. 5. Weak guess, daycare environments are more conducive to disease spread than schools for older kids and the number of possible illnesses is very high. There isn't just a limited number of things you catch once. I zeted about this. There's an image here. Description.
Nina tweets, Why are people so nonchalant about the frequency of daycare illnesses? Colds don't build immunity. It's just pure harm and suffering. People should more sad about this.
A number of people sent me this link, an alleged study from UCL showing that frequent infections in nursery help toddlers build up immune systems, authored, of course, by a group of parents who all send their kids to nursery, what the British call daycare. The link I was sent was actually a UCL Press release summarizing a narrative review paper and not a study itself. Narrative reviews are susceptible to selection bias because, unlike systematic reviews or meta-analyses, there's no pre-registered search protocol or Prisma-style methodology requiring them to account for all relevant evidence.
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