With heightened expectations and a shortage of time, parents sometimes overlook the need, and benefits, of play, according to the chief executive of the IPPA.
WHEN IRENE Gunning started a playgroup at her home in a new Dublin housing estate in the 1970s, she remembers a mother saying as she left her three-year-old child in: “Now Irene, I don’t want my daughter just playing, she can do that at home. I want her to learn.”
More than 30 years later, it is still a constant battle to make people understand that it is through play that children learn. In fact, she thinks it’s getting worse, with so many new pressures, including parents’ heightened academic expectations for their children and lack of time to engage with them.
“Real play is messy, it’s noisy and a lot of people want to short-cut that,” says Gunning (60), a mother of three, grandmother of two and chief executive of the IPPA (Irish Pre-school Play Association), the Early Childhood Organisation. Even childcare providers may say they will have the table-top toys, jigsaws and dress-ups, “but not that messy old dirty sand indoors. But we would say that’s always part of it.”
Celebrating its 40th anniversary this year, with a major two-day conference in Dublin Castle next week (April 17th and 18th), the IPPA’s four decades span a time of remarkable change for children and parents. Its nearly 2,500 members now look after about 50,000 of the State’s children in creches, pre-schools, playgroups, afterschool care and parent-toddler groups.
Passionate about early childhood development through play, Gunning was among the first Irish women to open playgroups in their own homes. She had given up her job as a clinical biochemist at the then Jervis Street Hospital in Dublin, in 1971 when pregnant with her second child. Up to 1973, women employed in the civil service were obliged to leave when they got married.
“In those days the culture around childcare was very different. I didn’t find it easy to go out to work and leave my child behind and there were a lot of women like that,” she says, in her windowless office at IPPA headquarters in a business park off the Broomhill Road in Tallaght. Photographs of her two grandchildren soften the otherwise functional surroundings.
Motherhood fuelled her fascination with the issue of children’s opportunities through education and in 1972 she took a course at St Brigid’s Nursery in Mountjoy Square organised by the IPPA – it was her first contact with the association.
“We had no history of kindergartens or nursery schools or anything like that in Ireland. Junior and senior infants have come a long way; in those days there was quite a didactic way of dealing with small children.”
The whole idea of inducing a passion and a love of learning through play was so wonderful, she enthuses. “There was something special about it, there had been nothing like it before. It was all about children and in those early days it was nearly anti-school. It was not about A,B,C, it was all about play.”
At her playgroup in Ballinteer, she started with six three-year-old children, nearly all her friends’ children. “What we all discovered was that children just learnt masses.”
A network of such playgroups became the structure on which to build on as women started to go out to work in much greater numbers. Only 7.5 per cent of married women were in the workforce in 1971; by 2001 this had jumped to 46.4 per cent.
Professionalisation of the sector developed during the 1990s and the first big tranches of money from Europe for investment in childcare came under the equal opportunities programme, starting in 2000. The focus shifted from enhancing children’s preschool experiences to having places to put children so their mothers could stay in, or rejoin, the workforce.
The word “childcare” is not a great name for this whole sector, says Gunning, reflecting, as it does, a custodial view – that it is all about taking care of the child while the mother goes off to work. “Whereas the playgroups had a very holistic approach – care and education, you can’t separate them. Play is learning; education and care co-exist in play.”
The key word about early childhood and play is “meaning making”, she explains. “That is what adults and children do together, they co-construct. It is not the adult’s wisdom all the time, pushing down on the child.”
She recalls how free she and her five siblings were growing up in Heytsbury Street in Dublin city centre in the 1950s. Her mother worked in the home while her father was a self-employed builder.
“I played on the street, cars going up and down. We played hopscotch, marbles, skipping on the footpaths and we meandered to school. What children do that today?”
Now children are “scrutinised and supervised and there is no freedom, that day is gone. Play is a playdate, it has to be arranged,” she says.
“We had so much freedom and play was always what you did yourself when your parents weren’t around. Gangs of kids would be out on the street, up to all sorts of things; playing without any adult interference.
“You learned so much about resilience, socialisation, your own physical abilities. You learned how to get the measure of another; how far to push someone,” she explains.
“Think how assertive you have to be in the boardroom or in work – where else do you learn these things? You don’t learn these sitting down at your desk doing your mental arithmetic.”
If children’s time is scheduled morning, noon and night, when are they learning to manage their own time? “Boredom is often a good thing,” she points out, as children have to find their own things to do.
“You can learn and become skilled through training but the passion, the motivation, the inner core that is you . . . There is something about you managing yourself, managing your own time, assessing your own risks.
“That learning whether to trust or not trust another child, whereas of course now when mummy brings you here, ‘don’t talk to that child’ and ‘that’s dangerous, get down’, we’re so safety conscious. And we clean, clean, clean. You should hear my daughters, they’ve taken it all to a ridiculous degree. You’d swear I brought them up in a pig sty!” she says.
Over the past five years, IPPA members have been reporting that it is more difficult to manage children’s behaviour. They are also encountering a lot more speech problems. Gunning sees many reasons for these trends, including diet, not playing outside, television.
On the one hand you have excessive attention paid to children, with smaller families and parents wanting their children to do everything they never did. On the other hand, people are so busy.
She says it is healthy that children have a voice in a way they didn’t have in the past, “but I am not sure that a lot of people understand the boundaries. That they have a role as an adult to, number one, keep that child safe and, number two, direct the child.
“It’s really important to give children choices, but within limits. We have to activate development, not let small children make decisions that they are not really capable of making. They are so bright, it is very easy to be lulled into thinking that the child really understands what they’re saying but emotionally they do not.”
Time pressures and the tendency nowadays of people wanting to be a friend to their child can contribute to challenging behaviour. First and foremost you are a parent, she says. There can be role confusion when mothers are taking small girls off to have their nails painted together.
“We have gone away from the bad old days, when disciplining children was a straight forward thing, with a slap. But people did not really know what to replace it with. A lot of people don’t understand how to guide their children.”
That is one of the values of early childhood education provided by skilled professionals, because parents can learn from them, she points out. “As parents we don’t stop and learn these things, how to guide our children into behaviours that are good for them and good for others, and to become socially acceptable. Small children, let’s face it, are ‘I want what I want and I don’t even know what I want but I want it now’.”
She feels for parents who are out working all day. They’re tired when they come home and face more chores.
“That is heavy going. It can be easy just to plonk a child in front of the television. It’s not always easy when you’re tired to have conversation with children.”
Now rising unemployment is putting new pressures on family life. “It is at times like this more than ever that the investment needs to be made in young children and to support young families.
“We do notice the extra stress on young families; all our members are saying that. They worry about jobs, are they going to lose their house? Our members are being asked to have much more flexible services because people can’t afford to pay.”
If today’s Budget cuts any of the funds supporting young children and their families, there will be consequences for all of society, she warns.
“They are the bedrock of our community. We will all pay in the long term.”
She hopes to see continued investment in the development of quality childcare.
How does she see life for a child in Ireland today? “If your parents have money, you will be all right but if they don’t, life may not be so good for you.”
She was very taken aback by the results of a survey published earlier this year by the Irish Primary Principals Network in which 45 per cent of its members identified neglect as the greatest factor affecting the welfare of children in their schools. “I thought it was a very sad reflection of the country that has just come through the Celtic Tiger.”
She acknowledges that people like her can be sentimental about children’s play in years past and that they must embrace the new.
“They are the children of today and my grandson Tiernan,” she says, gesturing to a large canvas photograph on the wall of a little boy playing with a multi-coloured train, “he’s three, and he is going to grapple with a world he knows, not my world. He is going to learn new ways to play.
“Play exists in all children throughout time because it helps us evolve,” she adds. “But what I would say is for God’s sake let us give them the time to play.”
MISSING: MEN IN CHILDCARE
Low wages and low status are blamed for the almost complete absence of men in Irish childcare.
Less than 1 per cent of the IPPA’s members are male and “some of those are owner/managers and don’t even work there, that is an absolutely new phenomenon,” says the association’s chief executive officer, Irene Gunning.
Traditionally, it was women motivated by the work who got involved, along with women who had not done very well in the education system and “were sort of dumped in there”, she suggests.
Yet it can be seen from Scandinavian countries that men bring a really important dimension to childcare, she says. Denmark has the highest proportion of male childcare workers, where they make up 8 per cent of the sector’s workforce, according to a 2005 study of men in childcare by the National Institute of Economic and Social Research in Britain.
“It’s sad that they are missing,” says Gunning. “Every system needs men, women, children. They bring a male energy.”
Women prefer children to be quiet, she suggests. “We now know that boys like to run around and need to run around. Men are much more prone to letting them run around.
“The men will go outside quicker than the women; they will play ball games, rough and tumble play that is such a part of children’s development, particularly boys.”
Male Norwegian childcare workers have been over to talk to the IPPA.
“We see videos of these Norwegian men and they’re throwing a child from one to another, and there’s shock at first,” she admits.
“But then you realise everybody is having a great time.
“I heard one guy from Norway saying that childcare places are boring places, because of the feminisation.”
The current recession may start to change this. “We certainly have more men coming up and down to collect the children and traditionally this is how a lot of women got involved,” explains Gunning. They would start to come in the odd time to help out.
“There is no doubt,” she adds, “that men are as fascinated by their own children, and the way children learn and grow, as anybody else.”
IPPA CONFERENCE: 40 Years On
Letting the Children Fly is the theme of the IPPA’s 40th anniversary conference which will be held in Dublin Castle on April 17th and 18th, and the talks are open to both members and non-members.
Speakers from Britain include Dr Tessa Livingstone, executive producer of the BBC series Child of Our Time, which is following the lives of 25 children from their birth in 2000 until they are 20; Sue Palmer, author of two books on “toxic childhood” and how to counteract the damaging effects of modern life on children; and Prof Christine Pascal OBE, lecturer in educational policy and management at Worcester College of Higher Education, who is currently directing research on how early childhood settings support the children of newly-arrived immigrant families.
These speakers will be joined by, among others, the Professor of Early Childhood Studies in UCC, Francis Douglas; Prof Noírín Hayes, head of the School of Social Sciences and Law at DIT; and Dr Orla Doyle of UCD, who is currently the principal investigator on the evaluation of the Preparing for Life early childhood intervention.
For more details, see ippa.ie or contact Caitlin Gaffney at 01-4630026.
