At what age should I enroll my child in daycare in Denmark?

Question

I have been offered a contract for work and we are planning a move with my wife and ~7 month daughter to Denmark about 2.5 months later. My daughter will be about 10 months old then. My wife wants to work in Denmark, too.

We've heard so many good things about the Danish child care system. My friends from work told me they began using child care from their children's 6th month and everyone I talked to was very happy with it.

We are coming from a culture where either you leave the child to your grandparents, or you say goodbye to your career until the ages of about 3-4 when you can leave your child to a kindergarten.

When is the best time for daycare in our case?

Answer 1

Dane here.

Our first daughter arrived at day-care ("vuggestue") on her 6-month birthday, the earliest at which they'll take kids. It's said the normal thing to do is to wait until they're 8 months, because then they'll be more mature -- but also they'll have separation anxiety (if starting earlier, they'll already know their caretakers and, for us at least, separation anxiety was never a problem). We'll have another daughter soon, and we expect her to follow the same schedule.

Of course, just because your kid is in daycare, it doesn't have to be from 6:45 to 17:00 ... we try to arrange it so she gets dropped off as late as possible (8:00-8:30) and picked up as soon as we can (15:00-16:15). This seems to work well, and is not uncommon in Denmark.

Leaving the job market for 3-4 years is an option if your economy can sustain it (few Danes can do this), but, just as for "the grandparents option", actually might put your kid at a disadvantage, as they'll have less interaction with other (Danish) kids. Depending on how long you'll want to stay in DK, this might affect their experiences in their early school years.

Answer 2

My partner and I were living in Denmark when our first child was born. The Danish child care system is indeed excellent but we chose not to use it because it was all or nothing. We did not want to put our baby in full-time child care. Of course that is a personal decision and maybe it will feel right to you to do things that way. If your wife is not working or studying, you would have to check and make sure that the child care system would be open to you -- I don't remember what the rules are. (We lived in France when this child was slightly older, and there, the subsidized child care system was more flexible, and we chose to use it on a part-time basis, which was allowed despite one parent not being employed.)

Alternatively one can always hire a private baby sitter and pay by the hour.

My personal philosophy about child care is that the child often has an easier time getting used to it if you start with a few hours a week as early as possible. With child #2 we started with three very short visits per week at age one month. We just wanted him to get the hang of going somewhere else, one parent kissing him good-bye, and another parent picking him up again an hour later. We gradually increased this, to three hours per day, three times per week, and that worked well for us. Of course, if both parents are working, one could in principle continue to increase the hours.

That's not the only model, but that's the one that worked well for us.