A Parent’s Experience Choosing Preschool

Yesterday, I reviewed the thoughts coming from the directors on one of New York’s foremost preschools, the famed 92nd Street Y Nursery School in Manhattan. The 92nd Street Y costs $21,000 a year for 4- and 5-year-old students. The school is so highly thought of that megacelebrities and Wall Street executives seek to have their children placed there.

But the two directors, Nancy Schulman and Ellen Birnbaum set forth the notion that one should skip all the hype and think about their respective child and his or her needs. Go with your gut feeling say the ladies and forget about the mindset that the choice of preschool is somehow making a choice for a specific college down the road.

What a breath of fresh air.

My Experience as a Parent
When it came time for our two children to go to nursery or preschool, my wife and I discussed the topic at length. After talking things through, we both agreed that the purpose of the preschool was really two-fold, at least from our perspective. One key aspect was the opportunity for our girls to associate with other children that would likely be in school with our children once they entered public school. The second was to introduce our girls to the concept of school so that they would be very comfortable when the time came to head off to kindergarten.

Given those two objectives, we decided to send our children three days a week for a period of what was a little less than three hours a day. Because we felt time to play was still very critical and that 13 years of school were coming soon enough, we did want our children going five days a week. Second, we truly believed that time spent with us at that age was very critical to shaping their values. We were not interested in handing that responsibility completely over to others. Lastly we enjoyed working with our own children so we always spent time teaching them many of the skills they would need when they entered public school anyway.

We can honestly say that we never regretted our decision to limit our children’s time at preschool. We remember those years fondly and look back on them as one of the best times in our lives.

And now that our daughters are grown I believe that the idea of pushing kids academically early in life is truly overrated. One of our daughters pursued the medical field. She earned her bachelors degree in clinical science and her masters in physical therapy - she now works at Lankenau Hospital in Philadelphia. Our other daughter is in graduate school in the Netherlands where she is pursuing a masters in linguistics and language acquisition after majoring in French in her undergraduate years.

That is why I found the thoughts of Birnbaum and Schulman so refreshing. They could not have convinced me anyway that the hype was warranted. So to see these two people be truthful and stay away from self-serving pontification was truly refreshing.

The decision around the preschool years is a critical one - but don’t get caught in the hype and be sure you think about what you want for your child when you sign them up.