KEY POINTS:
Jean Elmer, manager of what used to be Auckland's Myers Park kindergarten, has an admission to make.
"If I saw a child take its first step, I'd say to the parent, 'She's very close to taking her first step'," she says.
She wouldn't say, "Your child took its first first step today and you missed it," because even parents who put their babies in daycare still expect to see such important milestones themselves.
"That's a parent's right," Mrs Elmer says.
Her tact is a sign of the angst that many parents still feel if they choose to go back to work and make their children "childcare kids".
Bob McCoskrie, of the lobby group Family First, presents a common view when he says: "The best daycare in the world can never love a child like a parent does."
Yet 54 per cent of mothers with preschool children are now in paid work. And at least one of them, art gallery owner Melanie Roger, refuses to feel guilty.
She and her former partner opened their gallery when their daughter, Sofia, was 10 months old.
"I had worked in the art world for 15 years. For me, I think the biggest issue for a woman, in particular, is that if you take too much time out to have children it's too hard to get back into it," she says.
"In the art world it can restrict you quite a bit. I had visions of myself going to openings with Sofia, but you don't get any respect - people just want to talk about your child."
So when the gallery opened, she placed Sofia at Myers Park, which was transformed six years ago from a traditional morning or afternoon sessional kindergarten into an all-day "early learning centre" run by "Kinz", a subsidiary of the Auckland Kindergarten Association.
Association general manager Tanya Harvey says Myers Park is now one of three Kinz centres, which open from 7.30am until 5.30pm, run commercially and feed their profits to the association.
Outside Auckland, many more sessional kindergartens have become all-day childcare centres - more than half of the kindergartens in the Central North Island, and half a dozen in Franklin - but Mrs Elmer says Myers Park staff still take great care to keep the kindergarten's educational strengths.
Babies and toddlers who are too young to talk are given notebooks in which the staff record their "learning experiences" at Kinz and the parents record whether they have had a sleepless night or have any illness which the teachers should know about.
For many new parents, the teachers are a fund of advice about child development and parenting. And the children take home a portfolio of art and other work recording their growth.
"One of the things I liked is that it has quite a warm feel. It's not a corporate kindy," Ms Roger says.
"People will do things that I can do at home. It's recycling cardboard cartons and making robots. I love that."
She says that, at 2 1/2, Sofia talks about her teachers as members of the family.
"She loves kindy. I think children can thrive in this sort of environment. They feel very safe and secure."
An OECD report says the evidence is still "ambiguous" as to what age mothers can go back to work without having a harmful effect on their children.
The leading American study, which has followed 1364 children in 10 locations since they were born in 1991, has consistently found that children who spent more time in childcare have had more behaviour problems at school ages.
This was true regardless of the quality of the centre-based care they received.
But it also found that children who received higher quality childcare before entering kindergarten had better vocabulary later than children who received lower quality care.
A similar "Competent Children" study of 500 New Zealand children who started school in 1993 has found that high-quality preschool education produced better school results even nine years later.
The Ministry of Women's Affairs concluded that "consistent maternal time in the first year (20 hours or less of paid work per week) is beneficial over the long term".
But there is a "likelihood that the socialising atmosphere of early childhood education is beneficial after age 1".
