I like the commitment in the new Early Years Foundation Stage to see each child as unique, and a competent learner. But it isn’t easy to honour this commitment: we will have to work harder at observing children closely and trying to understand how they are making sense of the world. We will need to make more time and space for their play and, as Tina Bruce recently suggested during a conference speech, give children more personal space too. We need to stop crowding them with things, and rules, and our own ever-close presence.
Not long ago, I was part of a fascinating discussion with the nursery team about whether there was any reason to maintain our “no running inside” rule. Some of the team had recently been involved in training run by Jabadao, the National Centre for Movement, Learning and Health. They had been watching how children moved at nursery, and had noticed that nearly all the children took care not to bump into each other or the furniture. Where children did bump into each other, or the walls, it was almost always because they intended to, not because they were uncontrolled. As we talked, I was aware that only moments earlier I had asked a toddler to do “nice walking” as she grabbed her coat and ran to the garden door. I started to wonder whether you can feel your life in every limb, aged two, by doing something called “nice walking”.
We decided to experiment with dropping the “no running inside” rule, and at the same time enabled children to have experiences inside and out where they could bump, roll and push into each other, drawing their attention to the need not to hurt anyone else. A few weeks later, and the “no running” rule had been practically forgotten. I became aware of how our rule had prompted the children to be devious. We had made an excessively sanitised environment with no pushing or bumping allowed, so the children were doing it out of sight or pretending it was by accident.
I am not suggesting that we should let children do whatever they want. Children need limits. They need to know that adults will protect the rights and needs of younger, smaller and more vulnerable members of the group. But this does not mean we should see children in nursery as little packages which need to be controlled by adults: socialised, processed through their learning goals and sent off “ready for school”.
Sue Palmer, author of the book Toxic Childhood, recently commented that toddlers are “working at a very emotional level. They should be told stories and allowed to sing and play. That's what will turn them into normal people." Whilst applauding this plea for enjoyable nursery experiences for young children, I would go further. We are quick to assume that we know how to shape young children for the future, and we spend insufficient time trying to understand them in the present. Toddlers don’t need to be turned into anything.
Wednesday, 25 June 2008
Monday, 16 June 2008
Thoughts about psychoanalytic theory and the development of the "Key Person" role
I've been thinking and reading around the development of the key person system in early childhood education and care, and some of its "lost history" of development by those pioneers of psychoanalytic theory who also worked with young children - Anna Freud, Susan Isaacs, Melanie Klein. I think that a lot of the understanding of the "key person" at the moment seems somewhat boiled down to providing lots of close attention and physical care. The importance of personality development, play and creativity seem somewhat obscured...I think...at the moment.
so...my thoughts...
From the 1920s onwards, psychoanalytic thinking began to influence theory and practice in English nursery childcare, an attention to children’s emotional development which would eventually inform the development of the key person system. Susan Isaacs’s Malting House School (open from 1924-1929) for children aged from 2 upwards provided the context for the development of some of the key ideas in the Kleinian school of psychoanalysis. Isaacs provided the children with an environment in which there were more opportunities for free play and fewer prohibitions, to enable “an all-round lessening of the degree of inhibition of children’s impulses". In this context, aspects of the child’s anxiety could be expressed symbolically, and this symbolisation was seen to support the child’s ego-development and the "greater dramatic vividness of … social and imaginative and intellectual life as a whole".
This development did not just depend on the conditions of free play, however; in the Isaacs/Klein model, the infant needs a consistently available adult figure. In a 1945 paper written for the Home Office, Isaacs despairs of the impersonal “rigid routine and emotionally barren life in an institution” and proposes that instead each child “should feel himself to be the member of a small family group” in care settings.
Similarly, Anna Freud arranged for each child in her wartime Hampstead Nursery to have a constant “maternal figure”, contending that “repeated experience proves the importance of the introduction of this substitute mother relationship into the life of the residential nursery. A child who forms this kind of relationship to a grown up not only becomes amenable to educational influence in a very welcome manner, but shows more vivid and varied facial expressions, develops individual qualities, and unfolds his whole personality in a surprising way” .
Anna Freud proposes a model for the child’s development in which there is what she terms an “intimate interchange of affection” between the child and the “maternal figure”. Both Isaacs and Anna Freud emphasize this inner life of the child, the social, imaginative and creative life, which is developed only in the conditions of interchange: in other words it depends both on the child’s inner development, and the conditions and relationships provided by the adult. However, for Anna Freud the process is one of successive disengagement from relationships as the infant becomes more independent, a process which she does not significantly elaborate or theorise . Isaacs and Klein place significantly more emphasis on the inner psychic structure and functioning of the infant. They see the infant as splitting the world into good and bad, and feeling persecuted or even destroyed by the bad. Hence Isaacs argues that if a child is in an institution where there is inadequate care, “this does not mean to him the mere absence of the good he requires, a merely neutral place; it means the actual presence of positive evil.”
Whilst for Anna Freud, the assigned carer enables a process of ego development, for Klein and Isaacs, the assigned carer creates a relationship through which a drama of love and hate, care and persecution, may be played out with the desired development of the infant taking up what Klein calls the “depressive position”, in which “the ego becomes able to take in the whole person, to see that good and bad can exist in the same person”. Space does not allow for a full discussion of these ideas; there is one particularly salient point. For Anna Freud, the care offered by the adult to the child is absolutely real: real kindness, feeding, cleaning, and loving interaction, creating a climate in which the child can develop independence and an independent personality. For Klein and Isaacs, there is more of a dynamic relationship between the real world of physical needs and care, and the child’s inner world, which Klein calls “phantasy”. Juliet Mitchell summarises that “phantasy emanates from within and imagines what is without, it offers an unconscious commentary on instinctual life and links feelings to objects and creates a new amalgam: the world of imagination”.
so...my thoughts...
From the 1920s onwards, psychoanalytic thinking began to influence theory and practice in English nursery childcare, an attention to children’s emotional development which would eventually inform the development of the key person system. Susan Isaacs’s Malting House School (open from 1924-1929) for children aged from 2 upwards provided the context for the development of some of the key ideas in the Kleinian school of psychoanalysis. Isaacs provided the children with an environment in which there were more opportunities for free play and fewer prohibitions, to enable “an all-round lessening of the degree of inhibition of children’s impulses". In this context, aspects of the child’s anxiety could be expressed symbolically, and this symbolisation was seen to support the child’s ego-development and the "greater dramatic vividness of … social and imaginative and intellectual life as a whole".
This development did not just depend on the conditions of free play, however; in the Isaacs/Klein model, the infant needs a consistently available adult figure. In a 1945 paper written for the Home Office, Isaacs despairs of the impersonal “rigid routine and emotionally barren life in an institution” and proposes that instead each child “should feel himself to be the member of a small family group” in care settings.
Similarly, Anna Freud arranged for each child in her wartime Hampstead Nursery to have a constant “maternal figure”, contending that “repeated experience proves the importance of the introduction of this substitute mother relationship into the life of the residential nursery. A child who forms this kind of relationship to a grown up not only becomes amenable to educational influence in a very welcome manner, but shows more vivid and varied facial expressions, develops individual qualities, and unfolds his whole personality in a surprising way” .
Anna Freud proposes a model for the child’s development in which there is what she terms an “intimate interchange of affection” between the child and the “maternal figure”. Both Isaacs and Anna Freud emphasize this inner life of the child, the social, imaginative and creative life, which is developed only in the conditions of interchange: in other words it depends both on the child’s inner development, and the conditions and relationships provided by the adult. However, for Anna Freud the process is one of successive disengagement from relationships as the infant becomes more independent, a process which she does not significantly elaborate or theorise . Isaacs and Klein place significantly more emphasis on the inner psychic structure and functioning of the infant. They see the infant as splitting the world into good and bad, and feeling persecuted or even destroyed by the bad. Hence Isaacs argues that if a child is in an institution where there is inadequate care, “this does not mean to him the mere absence of the good he requires, a merely neutral place; it means the actual presence of positive evil.”
Whilst for Anna Freud, the assigned carer enables a process of ego development, for Klein and Isaacs, the assigned carer creates a relationship through which a drama of love and hate, care and persecution, may be played out with the desired development of the infant taking up what Klein calls the “depressive position”, in which “the ego becomes able to take in the whole person, to see that good and bad can exist in the same person”. Space does not allow for a full discussion of these ideas; there is one particularly salient point. For Anna Freud, the care offered by the adult to the child is absolutely real: real kindness, feeding, cleaning, and loving interaction, creating a climate in which the child can develop independence and an independent personality. For Klein and Isaacs, there is more of a dynamic relationship between the real world of physical needs and care, and the child’s inner world, which Klein calls “phantasy”. Juliet Mitchell summarises that “phantasy emanates from within and imagines what is without, it offers an unconscious commentary on instinctual life and links feelings to objects and creates a new amalgam: the world of imagination”.
Sunday, 8 June 2008
Nursery childcare: entitlement or perk?
A quick train of thoughts.
The Financial Times reports that "increases in nursery fees have continued to race ahead of consumer price inflation, increasing the burden on working parents." The government says that tax credits make childcare affordable; the Daycare Trust say they are so complicated that they are often not claimed.
The Guardian reports that Caroline Spelman, the Conservative Party's chairwoman, paid Tina Haynes, her children's nanny, out of her parliamentary expenses. Ms Spelman and Ms Haynes have subsequently told the BBC that the expenses only paid for secretarial work undertaken when the children were at school.
Both these stories say something about how childcare is seen in England. Even the fairly well-off find it difficult to afford. Poorer families usually don't even have a chance, because of the complexity of the tax credit system.
It's not as if lots of nursery nurses are getting rich. Looking after babies and young children, and giving them a decent early education is hard work, complex and costly. It cannot be done well through a mix of private enterprise and tax credits; nor does it seem to qualify as either a legitimate expense or a perk.
The Financial Times reports that "increases in nursery fees have continued to race ahead of consumer price inflation, increasing the burden on working parents." The government says that tax credits make childcare affordable; the Daycare Trust say they are so complicated that they are often not claimed.
The Guardian reports that Caroline Spelman, the Conservative Party's chairwoman, paid Tina Haynes, her children's nanny, out of her parliamentary expenses. Ms Spelman and Ms Haynes have subsequently told the BBC that the expenses only paid for secretarial work undertaken when the children were at school.
Both these stories say something about how childcare is seen in England. Even the fairly well-off find it difficult to afford. Poorer families usually don't even have a chance, because of the complexity of the tax credit system.
It's not as if lots of nursery nurses are getting rich. Looking after babies and young children, and giving them a decent early education is hard work, complex and costly. It cannot be done well through a mix of private enterprise and tax credits; nor does it seem to qualify as either a legitimate expense or a perk.
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