I was about to make a long post on 'learning' when I saw the report 'Baby School' (The Sunday Times, Dec 30), and felt utter sadness.

Why are young parents farming out infants to people to do things that they themselves can do just as well, if not better, with the additional benefit of building lasting bonds with their children?

For example, the advice from 'infant school principals' include: Use proper English and speak in proper sentences. I did not think this was anything but common sense till I heard another mother refer to a fire engine as 'ni-noh, ni-noh'.

I too felt that if I were to send my son to a childminder while I worked, he would be kept safe, but he wouldn't get the intellectual stimuli just as his brains are being 'wired'.

So I took my infant son 'to work' with me, in his push-chair running all the errands that a stay-at-home mum would do, and spoke to him as if he understood every word I said. Passers-by might have thought I had gone mad, but if an infant could learn through flash cards, he could learn from the reassuring tones of his mother.

We walked, observed how the shadows changed as we rounded corners, noted the colour and texture of leaves. We counted red cars and yellow cars, those parked and those moving. We stopped to read the numbers and letters on number plates.

It would have been much easier for me to tidy up his mess, but making a child 'put the yellow brick into the blue tub' or getting him to 'pick up seven cars' became a fun learning activity as well.

He helped with chores like sorting the cutlery back into the cutlery drawer, standing on a stool (after all the sharp knives had been removed, of course). Classification is a fundamental skill in learning and we sorted and classified as part of our everyday life.

We banned children's TV till he was two years old. 'Children's TV' assumes and reinforces the short attention span of young children. Instead he was allowed to watch as much sport and news on TV, an activity which he self-regulated, and listened to stories read by his parents or on a CD (BBC English, of course).

Learning to add, subtract, multiply, etc, at a young age does not necessarily mean a child would surpass the educational attainment of other children in later life. Here in the UK, teachers often point out that children on the continent start school much later and yet they actually do better than British children.

So there is no real benefit in requiring children to 'know how to spell and count before kindergarten'. What matters more are the intangible gains of forming life-long bonds with our own flesh-and-blood.

Would you be surprised if these babies, institutionalised voluntarily by their parents at the beginning of life, also decide to institutionalise their aged parents later on in life?

Yet before the finger of blame is pointed at young mothers, I wish to add that we lack a culture of allowing career women (and men) to take a parenting break and returning successfully to work. Until this paradigm shift is achieved, young couples might wish to consider not over-committing themselves financially to a large property so that they have the option of enjoying a stint of full-time parenting.

Do we want to invest a life-time building a house (bricks and mortar) or a home (the relationships within)?

As for my seven-year-old son, he's only aspiring to win a Nobel Prize for finding a cure for cancer, and getting a PhD in astroengineering. Ah, whatever.

Dr Lee Siew Peng

Middlesex, UK