attention. Others will hover on the edges, comfort themselves with repetitive movements, look warily about, or make forays into play and then retreat. They often seem detached, not quite there. They are far from happy, not showing any of the singing, laughing, chattering behaviour of the truly happy child. Yet to the staff these are ‘good’ children, not troublesome. They tend to be forgotten while more demanding kids take up the carers’ time.
Hanging on the gate
I’m visiting a high-quality nursery on an observational visit. Today the weather is mild, and a group of three-year-olds have been taken outside to play. I notice that one girl is not playing with the others. She is hanging onto the gate into the yard, pulling at it in a listless repetitive action. I check my watch, and keep watching for about 20 minutes, and in that time she never stops the tugging action, rocking her body, gazing about as she does so. The young male carer is busy with other children, and seems oblivious to her. But now something happens: a boy, also a bit of a loner, is making his way along the fence line banging a stick on the railings. He stops when he reaches her – an obstacle in his path. They look at each other; I am too far away to tell if they speak. I’d like to report a human moment, a bit of contact, but sadly it’s not to be. He solves the problem by making her not matter, he trails his stick across her middle, and continues on his way. She goes on pulling absently at the gate. The message of her body language seems so plain – ‘Let me out of here.’
6 Some staff are more caring than others
You will notice that the staff members differ in personal qualities. Some are energetic, warm people, that you would love your child to be friends with. Some seem rather young to be caring for children. Some of the older ones look tense, exhausted, doing their best to be available but basically worn out. Still others seem bored, doing the bare minimum of ‘work’. Of course, these things describe some parents too. But if this is your child, you have more reason and motivation to be at your best.
7 The staff care in a different way to a parent
The interactions with children – the way staff talk, hold them, respond to their emotions – is always affected by the fact that this is a professional relationship. There is a necessary coolness to everything. Eye contact is not the same. There is no time for long, peaceful, intimate moments. Concern has to be tempered, empathy withheld, because another ten or 20 children are there right now, ready to make their claim. In fact, staff would be in trouble – and we would be concerned – if they showed real affection and attachment to any particular child. What nursery staff offer is care, but it isn’t love, and the difference is vast.
8 There is a mechanical, institutional quality to the day’s events
Toileting, meals, nap time, nappy changing, face and hand washing, moving from activity to activity, are all mass activities. It’s a rare staff member who sings to a baby or blows a raspberry on its tummy while changing its nappy – something a mother or father does all the time. This is institutional life. (One nursery made a video of the children’s day, with a stationary camera, and then played it fast-forward at their annual parents’ meeting as a joke. There were one or two laughs at the start, then everyone went very quiet. It all looked so regimented, so impersonal.)
A place to call home
Remember your childhood days – if you were lucky, you will recall the haven of your bedroom or living room, a favourite chair or corner, well-loved toys and books. You might remember hours spent in a smallish back garden, which seemed to you quite big, and had interesting, even scary, corners and hidey-holes, insects and birds, some stuff to climb on. And over it all, with any luck, a feeling of peace, safety, time, your own space to be absorbed in fantasy play and imagining, which in turn was stimulated by books read to you, stories and TV programmes you were allowed to watch. You had friends who visited with their parents, or came in from next door, and you played with them, mostly in groups of two or three. You developed fantasy games, which lasted for hours, and from which you had to be dragged away for supper or bedtime. Perhaps you had these things, but even if not, you probably wished you had, and you want your children to have them too. Childhood needs its time, and its space.
9 The presence of babies seems wrong
The younger the child, the less appropriate the environment of nursery care seems to be for their needs. In terms of the enjoyment, opportunities, interactions, it will be clear as you watch that older children are better suited to nursery than the younger ones. Playing in groups, being able to fend for themselves or lose themselves in activities such as painting or sand-play – all seem to be happening for the three- and four-year-olds, while the babies and toddlers seem lost, disengaged, given a peremptory cuddle or a short-lived bit of focus from a carer. They manage to get through the day, but it is not exactly happy. Older children enjoy nursery, younger ones tolerate it.
10 A day is a really long time
The final thing to notice on this visit to the nursery is how slowly time passes. You don’t wonder at the high staff turnover, or the fact that many carers move on to more interesting or varied lines of work. But remember how time passes for a child. A day is a really long time when you are only two, even for a happy child. A day at home can be long too, but it is punctuated by being part of the parent’s life – going about, meeting friends, shopping – in a way that can be made enriching and interesting. There is more variety and change in a child’s world outside than inside the fences or walls of a daycare centre.
In the chapters that follow, you will find that each of these concerns, these ‘seat-of-the-pants’ observations, are shown by research to be factors that make a nursery a second-rate environment for children under three. You will also discover how hard it is to cater for this age range in a group setting, whereas for the over-threes it becomes the very thing that, in moderation, supplements what parents provide, and prepares children for school. The research picture supports what common sense might tell us, that distorting the natural social environment of children has disturbing results. However, you should trust your own impressions above all, as ultimately you have to decide for yourself if the research supports or denies your own common sense.
What nursery staff think of nurseries
The media loves telling horror stories of nurseries from hell, psycho-nannies or carers going off the rails, because these play to parents’ greatest fears. In this book, we are more concerned with the most typical and likely experiences – what you can expect to find, rather than the extreme failures. One way to form an overall picture is to listen to the views of people who work in nurseries, and who have been thinking about this topic all their working lives.
In 2004, the BBC screened a documentary called Nurseries Undercover. Parents around the country watched in dismay as hidden cameras showed children being mistreated by staff and the dismal conditions in some nurseries. There was a spate of letters to newspapers around the country, including this one from Fiona Steele, a nursery director in London:2
‘I have worked in too many nurseries, for too many years, to be surprised by the neglect, incompetence and casual cruelty the programme revealed. But I did feel angry.
‘Everyone who talks about childcare, it seems, has a political agenda. But I am speaking purely from six years’ personal experience of working in nurseries. And I can tell you there is indeed a problem with the quality of childcare in this country – however uncomfortable the truth is, however much we might want to avoid anything that appears to curb our freedom to be child-free parents.
‘Parents send their children to nurseries for many different reasons: they might be single parents; they cannot afford not to work; they find parenting boring, or bonding difficult; they might have been persuaded that it will benefit their children’s social development (when did this fallacy become accepted wisdom?); or they simply