Huh. I can think of six daycares/preschools right here in my smallish town that meet the criteria I listed. Maybe I'm lucky in where I live, but I definitely think describing them as unicorns is exaggerating.
I think nearly every daycare/preschool markets itself this way, and I've seen parents work very hard to convince themselves that the one their child is in is pretty good... because the alternative is crushing guilt. So I'll take that comment with an unhealthy dose of salt.
My DW sought work at several of these in three geographically diverse areas during DD's early childhood, as a way to provide some extra cash while still being available to DD. Her experiences were universally awful.
In one such experience, DW was assigned to the baby room, where she was instructed that she was not to comfort the children or interact with them. The babies were treated to hours of feeding, burping, changing, and social isolation. Meanwhile, DD3 was getting the usual Lord of the Flies experience in another room.
That's very sad, and it isn't what happens in good babyrooms. But more generally, these perception differences are very odd. I wonder whether it's largely driven by the fact(?) that available daycares suit the needs of some children but not others - and maybe also that whatever these factors are are largely inherited so parents of children it doesn't suit think these places are awful, and parents of children it does suit think they're great?
I think children largely know that they need. Given that my DS was almost always happy to go to the nursery he was at for four years, and once he could speak, told me he enjoyed it, I'm inclined to think it was good for him! (People may enjoy things that are bad for them for a while, but daily for four years? Not sure I believe our brains are that deceptive.)
Another thing: I don't have time to search right now, but I remember reading one of these "daycare causes behaviour problems" papers a few years back. Turned out that the things they classed as behaviour problems included, for example, taking a toy instead of waiting to be handed it. It's not clear at all that this is really a problem, as opposed to being behaviour that's better adapted for dealing with other three year olds than with caring adults! It makes me wonder whether e.g. any of the "aggressive" behaviour observed in children who'd been at daycare a lot might, wearing different spectacles, be labelled "unskilled assertive" behaviour.
