Smelling the Flowers: Putting community back into community childcare
25 July, 2005
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Smelling the Flowers: Putting community back into community childcare
Rattler Magazine
Winter 2005
We know that community is important. The Community Childcare Association’s Community Ownership Project clearly sets the agenda regarding the uniqueness and value of community owned childcare centres. But, do we blow the trumpet a little too loud and long sometimes. In the early childhood political battlefields where better pay and professional development for staff and more places for children on waiting lists dominate, have we forgotten what community really is?
Australian Bureau of Statistics data since 1980 shows that the number of children in care has not changed significantly. For the last 25 years the percentage of children in care has hovered between 45-50 per cent. What has changed is the type of care those children are in. When once it was informal arrangements with family, neighbours or friends, now most children are cared for in childcare centres or through other formal arrangements like family day care.
This important shift has been unacknowledged for too long. Where once community cared for children, many are now cared for by community childcare centres. And, if community childcare is to remain committed to the holistic development of our children, we need to find ways to make the community aspect of the title more relevant.
Community childcare centres' pride themselves on parent-influenced decision-making, quality above regulations and community involvement. But, what does community involvement actually mean? What does it look like?
Community involvement is not just about access and mutual support between parents and centres. Too often links with the community are a footnote in the annual reports of community childcare centres. If we are serious about the development of children into capable adults, we need to give a greater focus to bringing the community into childcare centres. And, taking the children out to their community.
A child in informal care is being exposed to developmental processes that centre-based care cannot match. While, the next-door neighbour isn’t fluent in current early childhood theory, they are able to teach young children many things. Children cared for in an informal community setting learn that all families are different. They learn they must react differently in different social settings, that other people eat different foods, do things in different ways and are exposed to ideas, music and cultures in ways centre-based care can replicate, but never to the same capacity. The subtleties of human relations are taught through the diversity of human contact. In the same way the love of a parent can never be replicated, so it is with community relationships.
Children in informal care learn to play and socialise with children of all ages. They are not separated into different rooms. Older children learn how to care and respect the younger children, learning patience and how to communicate and play with children much younger than they are. Of course, children should not be given full responsibility of looking after younger children, but the importance of those interactions on childhood development is crucial to their development as members of a community.
Childcare centres cannot offer the diversity of experience or depth of community interaction that informal community supports can offer. But, community childcare can develop ways of becoming a more community inclusive service and allowing children in centre based care to experience community more directly.
Some centres now invite parents to volunteer their time once or twice a year, so engaging parents in the lives of the children that their young ones spend many hours with each day. Parents help to support workers, or read stories that relate to their lives. Their presence is a contribution to the broadening of the experience – for the children and themselves. Other centres may invite parents from culturally diverse backgrounds to share aspects of their culture with the centre and impart an alternative community and cultural experience.
The case is that an open day or a fundraising focussed fete once per year is not enough. Community childcare centres need to find ways to become part of the local community. Participate in local community festivals; link with local services like the fire brigade, local bakery or newsagent. Make partnerships with other childcare centres and find ways to exchange staff and work together to bring a sense of the wider world to the children with whose early development you are charged.
These experiences should not just be for the threes and up. As early childhood professionals we know the importance of the first year, and should find ways to introduce these children to as many new faces, new sounds and new smells as possible. Excursions for children under two can be simple trips to the local shopping strip, so they can meet the shop-keepers and grab at the flowers in gardens along the way.
The challenges that face the sector regarding quality, staffing and resources are dominating the sector. They are important, but they also detract from the fact we are supporting the development of children who are out most valuable community members and in the future, community leaders. We do our children a disservice if we keep them within a room and an outside play area for the whole year. There is a world out there to explore; they deserve the chance to explore it. Community childcare centres can lead the expedition.
Centres should work hard to support relationships between children of different ages.
A centre I have visited used to take their kinder aged children down to watch babies being fed and changed. I’d like to see more combined outside play, so the younger children watch and learn from the older children. If we stick to textbook developmental theory and keep doing things the same way, we will only succeed in limiting our children.
Community childcare needs to re-engage with the word community. What does it mean to us? Is it enough for our physical buildings to be located near some houses and shops – is that community? Or do we need to find ways to give children in our care the experiences that many of us had. Staying with relatives, realising that some people eat dinner at the kitchen table and some in front of the TV. Or spending time with a neighbour and learning they believed in a different God.
Community is diverse and community childcare needs to teach that to our children.
Daniel Donahoo is a Fellow at OzProspect, a non-partisan, public policy think tank. He has worked in Children’s Services in Victoria at a Local and State Government level.