Standing on the Shoulders of Giants: The Importance of Choice

I put my firstborn into creche when she turned 2, just weeks before the second one came along. It was agonising. I had set my heart on her going to a minder with her friend (well, my friend’s son) and I had geared all my thinking towards that. Unfortunately, we were let down at the last minute and I had to scramble to find a creche place in January. No one has creche places in January!

When we finally did find a place, it was very different from what I’d mentally prepared for. There were no familiar faces, no midday WhatsApp messages of her eating her lunch, no walks in our local park as I’d arranged with the minder. I felt very suddenly cut out of my child’s life.

Between the change to my plans and the all-too-common post-natal depression I suffered after my second child was born, I felt very out of control. As a reaction to that I took over the control of my children’s lives: I chose their clothes, decided their routines, dictated their diets. I didn’t realise there was anything wrong with this at the time. When babies are very young of course you choose their clothes for them because they can’t. But my oldest was well able to make these basic choices at this point and I just wasn’t prepared to let go of the control.

When my second was due to start in creche two years later it was a very different story. The creche we were in didn’t have space for my second, so we moved both girls to a new service. Again, the anxiety hit about whether moving my oldest would affect her, whether she’d miss her friends, whether she and her sister would kill each other without Referee Mama to oversee them. But boy, did I luck in with the new creche.

The motto of the new creche is “choice”, and that came across from Day 1. The owner was very flexible with me, asking for my input on what I thought would be the best way to settle the girls in. This came as a very big surprise to me and, for the first time in my child’s early years’ experience, I felt involved.

When I met the manager, I felt like I was being welcomed into a new home. She wanted to get my take on how the girls were, what was going on in their home life, how they were enjoying the service. I was so grateful for this opportunity to connect with the person who was so very involved in my children’s lives. Little did I know, that was just the beginning of what I would be getting out of this experience.

Soon, through our doorway chats at drop-offs and pickups, I began to see the way the staff interacted with the children: always offering – and offering the right to refuse. My children were both eating better than they ever had before and when I mentioned this to the manager, she told me it was because she always gave them the choice of not eating. A lightning bulb flashed over my head as she said that. It was like something I knew before I had PND flashed back into my mind. Choice.

I started experimenting with this at home, giving them two or three options to choose between and noticed a marked enthusiasm for putting on clothing, eating their food and generally doing their daily routine. The children were well-versed in this type of communication thanks to their Early Years educators so they responded readily to it. Unsurprisingly, I felt more involved in their lives than I ever had before.  I felt the fog of the depression lift from my life as I reconnected with my children and interacted with them in a much more positive way.

Two years later, I love taking my children to creche. I believe that the education they get in the Early Years setting is some of the most formative they will ever receive. Will they ever learn anything more important than how to relate to other people who don’t yet have the same physical and verbal skills as they do? How hugely it will benefit them if they can learn how to communicate their consent to participate in an activity in a clear unapologetic way? These are the things my older daughter took with her when she started school. I could not have progressed through my experience as a mother without the help I received from my service and every day I hang on to their words to see what new pearls of wisdom I can gain. I truly feel that they are unsung heroes: giants in my life who probably have no idea of how much they matter.