Belief - “I wouldn’t be able to give him/her the same level of stimulation at home as he/she gets at nursery”

Donald Winnicot writes of ‘Good enough’ parenting as being the best there is - and, I would say that in the context of parenting, good enough and perfect are the same thing. 

I would say that ‘perfect parenting’ includes joy, satisfaction, moods, mistakes, fun and boredom, frustration, excitement and lots and lots of love. 

The world is a highly stimulating place for someone who has only recently entered into it. It is full of colour, shape, sound, interaction, rules, texture, tastes, smells, activity and stillness, human contact, things that cause laughter and tears, fear and safety and so on. All these can be experienced in the company of a primary carer who welcomes the newcomer to share life. Going to the shops, dropping siblings at school, walking the dog, observing domestic chores, cuddling in front of the TV, meeting friends, visiting the library, watering the garden…..Life can first be observed and spoken about (long before the infant actually understands the words) and gradually the infant can engage more and more as her motor skills develop. We know masses about what infants and very young children need for development, I will not rewrite it here. Suffice it to say, a parent at home is absolutely capable of providing sufficient and appropriate stimulation without any formal training in early years education. 

Unfortunately, along with the rise in the promotion of day nursery as a desirable option for infants, a myth has been created that to stimulate infants satisfactorily, training, educational materials and equipment and a curriculum are essential. If children do not participate in formal educational activity before school, they will enter school ‘behind’. 

I believe that the race for reading that parents are encouraged to enter into is partly facilitated by the guilt of not being with their children. If parents can be persuaded to feel good that their children are getting a head start by attendance at day nursery, they can quiet their guilt with a rational narrative that supports their choice, supported by the rest of society. Academic achievement can be measured using tick boxes and if this is how we measure the success of a system, then that some children may be reading at some level before they enter school shows we have a successful system. 

At what cost though? In my experience as an early years and year 1 teacher and as a colleague of many others with whom I would talk at CPD events etc. the children who came into school from day nursery were significantly less ready to engage in school learning than their counterparts who had been mostly at home with a more traditional 2 mornings a week at nursery in the year before school. Emotionally, day nursery children were not equipped for learning. In those days, it was easy to make the comparison because far fewer children came from day nursery. Their lack of emotional resilience and social skills manifested in different ways on a continuum from aggression to withdrawal. Over the last 30-40 years, the children with greater emotional struggles has become the norm. The confident children who have entered school from a place of emotional safety today, are the exception. Our children are forced to join the race to the top from birth. We have enculturated the notion that our value is only in our work and if we miss it while we spend a couple of vital years nurturing the next generation we are somehow lesser human beings. 

I haven’t come across anywhere in the developed world that has a perfect model for infant care but there are countries that have more children friendly ones than the UK. When I taught at an international school in Norway 50% of my class had no English language at all at entry. This was their first year in formal school, the curriculum was delivered in English and the children were 6 or rising 6 at the beginning of the year. By the end of the year, those children were able to read and write simple stories comfortably at the level of children at the end of year 1 in the UK. At no time in our lives can we learn what we are not ready to learn and when we are ready to learn we fly - so long as we have a sense of safety and worth as a human being. If we have these then we have the courage to be vulnerable, to make mistakes knowing that this is a vital part of learning. Maternity/paternity leave in Norway is much more generous than in the UK and Barnehage (Norwegian day care) is more closely aligned to what children need in the early years - there is no attempt to get ahead in skills that children are not ready for.  I observed that Norwegians had a significantly more balanced attitude to life than in the UK - work is not the be all and end all - family time has a high priority and yet, somehow their country looks good! And their youth mental health statistics look significantly healthier than the UK’s. 

The Netherlands is another country with an educated population, infrastructure and services that work - it looks good - and it has the lowest rate of mothers returning to full time work after maternity leave. There are those who argue this is a waste of human resources, that these women are an untapped workforce - Ideally, work patterns could be shared more equally between parents, but the priority is the children and I hope that in the meantime they stand strong and remain untapped for the sake of their children and as a model for the rest of us. 

How stimulating (in its positive sense) is it to be in the same four walls every day, sharing one adult between three infants, where every stimulation is contrived and often inappropriately targeted in terms of level, where there is no-one who loves you more than themselves. The shared adult also needs to take time to take photos and complete records to demonstrate how stimulating the environment is, the adult cannot be available to her/his charges at all times. At best, ‘bewildering’ might be a more accurate term for the day nursery experience.