Author: Caron Carter

Froebelian Principles and Children’s Friendships (2 of 2)

[00:00:00] [music playing] Hello, and welcome to Children’s Friendships Matter.  A podcast about children’s friendships post-COVID 19.    In this, the second of two episodes, Dr Caron Carter continues her discussion with Professor Sacha Powell, Professor Tina Bruce, and Doctor Stella Louis from the Froebel Trust, reflecting on Froebelian courses and the impact of COVID 19 on children’s friendships.   

[00:00:39] I’m really interested in Froebel and Froebel’s training courses and sessions that they have and I just wondered if you could tell us a little bit more about that, and maybe any links to friendships.  I think Stella, perhaps you’re the person to go to first on this one.

Stella Louis: [00:01:03] What I would say first is Froebel talks about the child, their relationship with themselves, their relationship with others, contributing to a family, a community, and the wider physical environment and I think all of those things you can link to friendship.  When you think about how you get to find out about yourself, it’s through your family.  So although I might not explicitly mention the word friendship, I think that going back to Froebel’s core ideas about self, others, and relationships and it’s those relationships that become absolutely critical.  

[00:01:44] In relation to the short courses, the short courses were developed by Professor Tina Bruce, and I have nurtured them for a long time now.  I’ve nurtured them for the last five years and I like the word ‘nurtured’ because Froebel nature was really, really important to Froebel.  There are six elements, each element is made up of two days, delivered by two indoors Froebelian travelling tutors and the course has been delivered in Australia, in South Africa, in New Zealand, in Wales and in Scotland and in England, so hence us being called travelling tutors.

[00:02:29] The first element really looks at Froebelian principles, and really encouraging practitioners to locate themselves in practice.  The second element is looking at Froebel’s gifts and occupations, and there are links to modern day relevant block play today, which Tina spoke about, and Sacha, earlier on.

[00:02:49] Element two is really getting practitioners to think about worthwhile, you know, thinking about and reflecting on the worthwhile educational resources that they offer children.  Element three is about engaging in and with nature, and it really begins to unpick Froebel’s ideas of unity, connectedness, law of opposites, and that relationship.  You know, the relationship that we have with nature, for instance.

[00:03:17] Element four looks at the symbolic life of the child and how children make their inner outer, and whether they do it through movement, mark making, through their play – but again that dictates having knowledgeable educator so that they can understand exactly what it is that they’re seeing.  So that is element four. 

[00:03:41] Element five is Froebel’s mother songs, and Sacha talked a little bit about that earlier on.

[00:03:46] And element six is about looking at Froebelian ideas of equity, equality, diversity and inclusion.  Looking at those issues through a Froebelian lens, and I would say that the Froebelian understanding of equity is that we begin where learners are, and we start with where they are rather than where we want them to be and whatever that stage we need to be that stage.  But again, that comes with knowledge.

[00:04:18] But I just quickly want to go back to element four.  It’s talking about the symbolic life of the child, and I think that this is a really important element.  When Tina and I were in South Africa this last May we were gifted some blocks by a colleague and when we introduced the blocks to a group of children that we hadn’t met before and we weren’t aware of what block play experience they had had, one little girl, there was just something about her that we just took notice of and she started to build a structure kind of sort of upright, and then she was talking to the teacher and it transpired that that night she had been bitten by a rat and what she was doing was she was building a rat house. 

[00:05:03] And even though it was like an upright structure on day 1, by day 4 it was like some kind of really solid enclosure that she had built and I think relationships are really important and I think that for me, that particular observation, not just linked to the relationships she had with the educator that she could talk about it, but what it says is that solitary play is really important and solitary play must be valued because it offers children the opportunities for repetition, reflection, consideration and it also allows them personal space that they need. 

[00:05:44] If we look at self, relationship with others, and community – you can see how you can really bring this whole concept of friendships together, because a Froebelian mantra is link always.  Always.  Always link.

[00:06:00] It’s really great to hear that passion you have for your Frobel courses, because there’s quite a lot of interesting things there and I’m not going to say too much because I want to get everybody’s ideas in but maybe when we talk about COVID, when you were talking about links to nature, we will maybe come back to that point and how children connect with nature.

[00:06:21] Tina, would you like to add anything to the Froebel courses?

Tina Bruce: [00:06:29] I mean I think one of the things that’s so useful is that they are very practical. So, you’re asking the practitioners to try things out themselves, because Sacha talked about rehearsal for friendship, well you need rehearsal for making those relationships with the children and things like block play we’re finding on the courses are invaluable for that sort of thing.   I mean I mentioned block play earlier, but when I was a child, I also mentioned I played a lot with the doll’s house and like Sacha, it was moving house that really helped me to have the solitary play that was very rich.

[00:07:09] There was a little boy who lived down the road to where we moved, and he had a train set.  Wow.  Now I had all that experience of my solitary play with the dolls house, and he had a lot of experience of solitary play with the trainset because he had actually broken his leg and couldn’t move around a tremendous bit for a while and so I went to his house.  I took my dolls house things, and we made towns and villages and all sorts of things on this route of the trainset and it was absolutely fabulous and we became very good friends.

[00:07:45] So sometimes I think solitary play is a rehearsal for – and then you’ve got things to talk about because friendship is actually about shared interests and finding things that chime with each other, it doesn’t just happen, and we’re not going to be friends with everybody and so for children they need to begin to try out, you know, who are the kind of people that it’s going to be lovely to have the deeper kinds of friendships.  Because we have companions and people that we get to know and we go through life there, but actually when you talk about friendship it’s something that’s quite deep.

[00:08:19] So I think the courses actually are very helpful to the practitioners and they do things like dance together and they make up songs together and they tell stories together and so they are beginning to think how do we create this nurturing environment where we can actually use our knowledge as practitioners to help those children learn.

[00:08:40] I’m just thinking that one of the stories actually that I absolutely love is about a little girl, a refugee context, small boats, she as part of this experience of arising on a beach finds a pebble, and that pebble becomes her friend, and another little boy becomes her friend through the pebble.  They draw a face on the pebble with a pen that they find on the beach and when her family leaves obviously to go to a better place the little boy is left behind and she gives him her pebble.  And that is a very deep friendship, and it deals with loss as well as becoming friends.

[00:09:23] So I think that this kind of training that Stella is leading is very, very important in helping people actually to try things out in a very practical way.

[00:09:31] Thank you for that amazing story and again that idea of objects and how they can initiate or develop friendship is so important.  Sacha, would you like to add anything to that?

Sacha Powell: [00:09:45] The courses, as Stella has already said, the courses start where the learner is and of course in those courses the learners are educators who are working with children and families.  So, if the pre-occupation of a learner or a group of learners was aspects of children’s friendship then that is what the course would be about, regardless of whether it’s element oner or element six.  You might think about equity in relation to children’s friendships.  It is very practical and practically oriented and the kinds of activities, whether it be writing songs or something else that take place during the courses build on what interests preoccupy those learners on the courses.   So, I think that was just one thing that I wanted to say around friendships.

[00:10:36] Thank you, that’s great. There is so much I would love to pick up on but I know that we really need to move on.

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[00:10:47] This is the penultimate question.  I wanted to ask about the COVID 19 pandemic of course, because it’s such an unprecedented situation that we’ve had with children being socially isolated and I’ve recently done some research with children and parents looking at kind of exploring how children had maintained or tried to maintain their friendships during lockdowns and returns to school and I just wondered what your views were on the COVID 19 pandemic and the impact on children’s friendships, so can I start with you Tina?

Tina Bruce: [00:11:22]  Yes, I mean it’s been such a major part of our lives for several years hasn’t it, the pandemic.  One of the things that stuck me was seeing two little sisters who were playing out their ideas and it linked so strongly with the research which the Froebel Trust has funded with Chris Pascal helping Sally Cave, who leads school, she is head of school at Guildford and the family centre and how the children actually want to be very informed about COVID and didn’t want things to be kept from them about people dying and they were creating private play spaces in the garden, because they couldn’t be in the classrooms very much, and playing out death scenes.  All sorts of very interesting things.  

[00:12:16] And these two little sisters had been involved in Froebelian paper folding so they had made lots of paper cones.  One of the children was lying down and had put the cones all over her stomach and said ‘I’m a corona virus’.  Those are the ones that I’ve been thinking about.

[00:12:36] Yeah, that’s so interesting.  And Sacha, can I go to you next?

Sacha Powell: [00:12:41] Yes, thanks Caron and thanks Tina for reminding us of the fantastic research that Chris and her colleagues did in England and Scotland.  I think it was not the first, some the first research ever to take place about young children’s experiences of the pandemic in 2020 and what I think was really striking about it was the way that children express their anxieties.  Whether that was about loss of friendship, loss of family, loss of freedom and a whole host of other things, or anxiety about the virus, but in so doing also showed huge knowledge and wisdom about what was going on around them in their worlds and that they had a thirst for knowledge.  They didn’t want to be closeted away.  They didn’t want to not know what the realities of COVID were and I think that as really a fascinating aspect of the project and undoubtedly through other research that we’ve funded, for example an Access to Nature project which was about equity, we know that there are huge inequities that occurred as a consequence of COVID and the aftermath for the young children and their families.

[00:13:55] But I think that what Chris Pascal and her colleagues’ research really showed was that yes, there are some terrible things that happened but what they were able to focus on too was some of the amazing things that young children were knowing, and doing, and expressing about COVID and during COVID lockdowns, which showed their incredible resilience and ability to adapt and be flexible in circumstances that are incredibly difficult.

[00:14:25] Thank you Sacha, and that reminds me of what I was talking about earlier, that you’ve reminded me of but also Stella reminded me of in terms of children connecting with nature.  So, the research that I did, it was quite fascinating really because the children started to talk about how they had made connections with nature, because they’d been going out on walks more, they’d been spending more time in their gardens.  And one of the children actually drew a lovely picture and drew, they said some of the friends that had visited them in their garden.  They said there was a hedgehog and a fox, and they had kind of got all these sort of animals but they were referring to them as friends.  And I thought it was so interesting because they had also previously spoken to me about ‘Actually I used to play in the garden with my friends’, you know, peer friends that came to play, and now they were talking about this connection with nature and I just thought that was really, really interesting.

[00:15:23] Let me move to you Stella before we come to our final question, in case you want to add anything on COVID.

Stella Louis:  [00:15:30] I think what I would add actually builds on what both Tina and Sacha have just said.   During COVID I was doing a training session online because everything moved to online and I was working with a nursery school and they were talking about they were closed down for a while but when they opened they had decided this is what we were going to be doing with the children, we were going to have maths stations, we were going to get the children to learn about shops and counting but actually the children wanted to develop their knowledge in very, very different ways.  Like Froebel believed, they kind of said no, we don’t want a shop.  And within their friendship groups and their relationships with others they were like no, we don’t want a shop.  What we want to do is we want to make masks and we want to be able to draw arrows on the floor to say it’s two metres between this person and this person in the queue.

[00:16:27] Firsthand experience, we mustn’t underestimate it in relation to children’s wider relationships with the world.  And I think that kind of sort of just brings together what both Tina and Sacha were talking about, that it is that engagement that will help children develop an understanding of not just themselves but their relationship with others and also what they need and want.

[00:16:54] Again, it shows that real attunement with children and what do they need at this moment in time, instead of trying to go ahead with the sort of maths and the shop agenda, but we’re thinking no, this isn’t what’s needed at the moment, this is what’s needed at the moment.

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[00:17:14] So I will just go to the final question now:  What sort of take-home messages, or it might be reflections or it might be a question would you like the listeners to take away from this podcast?  So, could I start with you Tina?

Tina Bruce: [00:17:29] Well, that’s an enormous question isn’t it.  I think that there are three things that really beam out for me.  One is the way that relationships matter so much.  Knowing yourself, being aware of yourself, your sense of identity and that helps you to link with others.  As Stella said, always link, Froebel.  And to move to the wider community of people that you don’t know and haven’t met, but you begin to think about them.

[00:18:00] So relationships matter.  Play is a wonderful way for children to be getting to grips with these things.  Solitary play we’ve talked about a lot, but also the play with other children, and play with adults.  So, play matters, and throughout we keep coming back to adults needing to be very knowledgeable about how children develop and learn, and being very good at creating a nurturing environment so that children can grow and develop their thinking, having ideas, and relationships that really work well for them.

[00:18:45] That’s great, thank you.  And then Sacha?

Sacha Powell: [00:18:48] Well mine is very short really.  I agree with everything that Tina has said.  Friendships start from birth.

[00:18:56] Yes, thank you.  And Stella?

Stella Louis: [00:19:00] I think I would draw on Tina’s twelve features of play and say something that is really important that we take away when we’re thinking about these relationships is that play; we need to see play as an integrated mechanism that brings together children’s ideas, their feelings and their relationships.  It is in play that children co-ordinate their ideas, their faults, and feelings well as their physical body.   But they are also able to make sense of their social relationships and their sense of themselves and the world around them.

[00:19:39] Thank you.  It has been a real privilege to talk to you today around children’s friendships and also to hear a lot more about Froebel and Froebelian principles and how they link so closely to children’s friendships.  It’s fantastic to hear about the ongoing work that you do and the passion that you have for Early Years and for children and young families.  So, I think that’s brilliant.  Thank you very much.

[00:20:12] [music playing] Thank you for listening to this podcast. For more information on Caron’s research and other related podcasts, please visit  https://research.shu.ac.uk/friends   This podcast was made possible by a fellowship opportunity funded by Sheffield Hallam University.  [music playing]

Froebelian Principles and Children’s Friendships (1 of 2)

[00:00:00] [music playing] Hello, and welcome to Children’s Friendships Matter.  A podcast about children’s friendships post-COVID 19.    In this, the first of two episodes, Dr Caron Carter talks to Professor Sacha Powell, Professor Tina Bruce, and Doctor Stella Louis from the Froebel Trust, reflecting on research and practice.    Here they explore Froebelian principles and their links to children’s friendships, considering how a Froebelian ethos can support children’s friendships.   This first episode explores research projects and publications, and the following second episode: Froebelian courses and the impact of COVID 19 on children’s friendships.

[00:00:57] Welcome to the podcast. It’s fantastic to be able to speak today to three people on this podcast.  So, I just wondered if we could start with you introducing yourselves and telling us a little bit about your background?  Could we start with you Sacha?

Sacha Powell: [00:01:14] Sure, thanks Caron.  It’s great to be here today.  My name’s Sacha Powell and I’m the Chief Executive Officer of the Froebel Trust, which is a charity which supports and encourages early childhood educators and researchers and teachers who work with young children, and we do that by providing grants for research and practice development but also a range of free resources and events, and some specialised continuing professional development courses. 

[00:01:46] And then Tina.

Tina Bruce: [00:01:49] Hello, I’m Tina Bruce and I’m an honorary professor at University of Roehampton.  I originally trained at the Froebel Educational Institute to be a primary school teacher and I found that I loved the earliest years the best and so I specialised in that increasingly across the years.  And I also trained to work with children with profound hearing loss at University of Manchester, and I’ve been involved in teacher training and bits of research and all sorts of things across the years, but my passion is the children and families that they come from.

[00:02:27] Thank you very much.  And Stella.

Stella Louis: [00:02:35] Hello, I’m Dr Stella Louis and I’m a freelance Early Years consultant.  Currently I work as the lead Froebelian travelling tutor for the Froebel Trust and that involves leading a group of 22 travelling tutors and we deliver Froebel short courses online and universally.   My interest in Early Years goes back when I originally trained as an NNEB Nursery Nurse a long time ago now, and I became really interested in children and observation.  Yeah, observation and just trusting my instinct and looking for their good intentions.  Although I couldn’t articulate that at the time, I think the Froebelian framework has really helped me to do that.   So,I’m involved in research universally as well with Froebel short courses, so that’s me.

[00:03:41] Thank you very much.  it’s really, really great to hear about how you’ve come to Early Years and a little bit about your background, so thank you.

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[00:03:55] Kind of moving on from that a little bit, but you’ve already mentioned, Stella you just mentioned research, and I think Tina did as well.  Could you tell us about your research so the listeners can hear a little bit more about that?  So can we start again with Stella?

Stella Louis: [00:04:11] Okay, I’ve been involved in a piece of research in Soweto, South Africa.   My involvement started in 2010 where I was invited along to join Professor Tina Bruce and Professor Ian Bruce in pre-school, in a kindergarten, in a place called Kliptown, Soweto.  Ian had been working with the youth project next door and Tina and been accompanying him and next door to the youth project was a pre-school and the principal of the pre-school really wanted her pre-school to be just like the European pre-schools and she kept saying to Tina that she would love to work with her, but Tina didn’t want to work with her as a white woman on her own.  

[00:05:02] So I was invited, because it was felt that what would be really important, that whatever work or research that was going to happen in South Africa, there would be that level of connectedness, unity.   I got involved in 2010 and it was the first time I went out to South Africa, but Tina and Ian had been involved previously and my role was as the main trainer, to train the staff that were in this pre-school. 

[00:05:32] It’s been a really long project, and there has been lots of things that have happened along the way.  Initially we embarked on staff training, training the staff in different parts of the Froebelian approach.  We started with the principles; we looked at freedom with guidance, we looked at the community, and we used a particular framework called Asset Based Community Development, which we referred to as ‘ABCD’.  And what that does is it builds on a community’s strengths rather than identifying any weaknesses or deficits and that was really challenging in Soweto but what was wonderful was that we were able to use the Froebelian principles and the Froebelian approach to really support the practice.  Because even though it was a pre-school I think just historically where this township is located children would just roam the streets.  And although Pam, the Principal opened up this pre-school, it was more to care for the children rather than to educate the children. 

[00:06:46] So that was really our starting point and starting with where the community had strengths.   Long story short:  if we kind of fast-forward to 2023, Tina, Ian and I recently attended a graduation session of one of the participants in this research, which was graduating as a teacher.  So, the dream behind the project has been to train the staff up so that they are not just offering the children care but they are offering the children education.  But equally, the community have realised the importance of Early Years.

[00:07:28] When we first went in there, there were 50 children in a room with one member of staff and that is challenging.  Now you go in there, and we were there recently I think in May, and there was one room in particular that you go in and you could be anywhere in Europe and you wouldn’t know, anywhere around the world, not just Europe.  I’m not going to just limit it to that.  Children were autonomous, you could see the Froebelian principles really in action.  Staff were knowledgeable, they were observing children, and children were constantly engaged in doing or reflecting or contemplating them.  Children were playing on their own and there were children in friendship groups.  There was so much going on for the children and it was such richness, but that has been a really long process and it’s easy to look in in 2023 and say this is wonderful, but we have actually come a really long way.

[00:08:22] So it’s been about staff training, working with the community, and building on their strengths rather than focusing on weaknesses.

[00:08:31] Really interesting to think as well, you know, that starting from the community strengths and that idea where you can actually think about, you know, what can we learn from one another, from the different communities.  So it’s really interesting to hear about that and to hear how those Froebelian principles have kind of become embedded over time.  Really interesting.  Thank you.  And Tina, can we move on to you and hear a little bit about your research?

Tina Bruce:  [00:09:01] I think it segues in to what Stella was talking about because I thought of this one lovely little example, which Stella and I observed, where children had been involved with block play and they had made a wonderful – they said it was the Carlton Tower, and we realised, talking with the staff, that this had been one of the most important days when President Mandela became president and there had been huge celebrations at the Carlton Tower and I think that some of the children knew about this and they started to dance around this fabulous construction and so this was the kind of thing, you know, these little friendships that are occurring with the children and how they begin to work collaboratively together.  They feel comfortable to develop their ideas together and they begin to listen to each other in what they’re doing and then you get a wonderful group community enterprise.

[00:10:12] So these were some of the ways that we could see the things that Stella was talking about; the autonomy, the nurturing, and the joy in being together.  All of these things which are deeply part of the Froebelian approach.   And the block play has always been something dear to my heart, because some years ago now I was given some grant funding by the Froebel governing body to undertake some research with block play because blocks were Froebel’s gifts, and we did this using unit blocks in five different schools; they were primary schools.  And we worked with the youngest children and again if I give you an example of the kind of thing that we began to see across the two years was two little girls, Pat Gura was the research director and she would share her findings with us all and we wrote a book about it, which was published by Sage, and we noticed that these two little girls had made a wonderful – it was a cantilever bridge, which is pretty good engineering, and Pat said to these two little girls how did you manage to get these blocks in place?  And one of them said ‘Well, you need a friend, because one of them has to hold the block while the other one positions the block and it’s quite a delicate exercise’, and so that was an example of the kind of things that were emerging from the research.  And we called our book ‘Exploring Block Play’. 

[00:11:55] It’s still in print, Caron.  It’s one of the most used books on block play, which is very heartening.

[00:12:02] It’s so interesting to talk about play and friendship because play is so integral to friendship and making sure that friendship and play and those opportunities for play are still there and for children to have free play, and you talked about that agency and that autonomy.  So important for nurturing and maintaining friendships.  So thank you.  And Sacha?

Sacha Powell: [00:12:30] Thanks Caron.  I was thinking about what both Stella and Tina have said and thinking about block play.  And this is not my own research, but it’s research that the Froebel Trust has funded in Wales at Cardiff Metropolitan University, which has just been reported and will be published very soon.   It’s by Jennifer Clement and Sian Sarwar, and in their research, they had invited classes of teachers and young children to come to what they call Froebel House in the campus of Cardiff Met University.  And at the house they have a range of resources including all of Froebel’s gifts and occupations and one of the things that they particularly noted in their report where they had spent many months observing young children’s free-flow play was that where the children were playing with Froebel’s gifts and engaged in block play, in an ethos where the children were supported to be autonomous and grow in that autonomy that new friendships began to develop because of the open-endedness of those block play resources and because of the autonomy that the children were allowed to developed by the teachers stepping back and observing what was happening and engaging with and alongside those children as and when the children indicated that they might need some support to extend their thinking and their learning.

[00:14:05] So I think that that was a really lovely example of the continuing relevance, or the timelessness if you like, of block play in 2023 in Wales, where these new researchers are finding the benefits in today’s society for young children.

[00:14:30] That’s great.  I think across all three of you, the things that you’ve said, you know, talking about play and Stella talked about going with your instincts and I think that we know that children need those opportunities for free flow play and they need those opportunities in order to sort of instigate friendships, maintain and nurture their friendships.  So, so interesting.  Thank you very much.

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[00:15:00] I also walked to talk to you a little bit about things that you’ve written.  So it might be books, articles, or things that you’ve written.  Obviously, the audience will be so interested.  Listeners will be so interested to know about the things that you’ve written and any links that there might be to children’s friendships.  So could we start with Stella?

Stella Louis: [00:15:24] I’ve recently written an introduction to Froebel for beginners actually, for Tapestry, which is an online learning journal, but you can access this Froebel for Beginners free, and it looks at the Froebelian principles, as articulated by the Froebel Trust, and very kind of relevant for today.

[00:15:45] And what it does is it brings together Tina Bruce’s principles, Helen Tovey’s principles, and it just connects them together.  So that is something that I’ve written recently but something else I’ve written recently is this book here: Observing Learning in Early Childhood, and it is relevant to friendships because it’s based on Tina’s work.  In 1996 Tina wrote about The Network for Learning and as an NNEB student that did things for me, in ways that I cannot describe.  It really does describe learning and it guides educators in knowing what to observe and how to intervene and when a child may need help.  Because, you know, sometimes – depending on their experiences, there will be children that need help to play but educators need to know what those cues are.  They need to know what that looks like, so observing learning in young children really just bigs up, I think, Tina’s Network for Learning and it uses it as an observational and navigating tool to really get to know your children and what it is they’re expressing externally.  Yeah.

[00:17:09] Thank you, that’s so interesting.  What we will do with the podcast is we will make sure that these links to the things that we’re talking about are available next to the podcast, so you know where to go and find them.  So, you’ve mentioned the book and a Tapestry and we’ll make sure that those links are on there.

[00:17:21] As well Stella, when you were talking about – you know, we’ve talked a lot about children having agency and autonomy and that is definitely the case with children’s friendships, but also, you’ve talked about when children might need scaffolding or they might need support or they might want that help and support.  And interestingly I wrote an article about the lunchtime period and children’s play and friendships and that came up where children said sometimes, I do want someone to help me.  So, I think that’s really important, isn’t it, that we think about children’s agency on autonomy, but also we’re tuned in to children for those opportunities and those times when they do want adults or more able peers or others around them to support and help them.  So that is really interesting, thank you.  And could we move now to Tina?

Tina Bruce: [00:18:15] That Network Learning which Stella talked about from one of my publications, I started off thinking around that in 1991, and I wrote a book called Time to Play in Early Childhood Education.  It’s a long time ago, but I sort of extracted from the canon of literature on play 12, they seemed like recurring themes really and they became 12 features of play.   Some of them were to do with children being involved in solitary play, you know, having imaginary friends, which children will sometimes do when they’re alone, but it was also not about children being lonely and not wanting to be engaged in solitary play.   And I was thinking back to my own childhood and how we moved house, and I loved my doll’s house and I loved my doll’s house and I had all these characters and people I can still remember; a little girl called Flora who lived in that doll’s house and went to school and all sorts of things.  And so those 12 features of play are sort of trying to look at the different things that children need and, as you say Caron, the kind of help that they might need at a certain point.

[00:19:30] But as Stella said, knowing when to help them and when to hold back.  It all helps you to make sense of people like Vygotsky and Winnicott and Erikson.  All these giants in the field of play.   So it’s quite practitioner friendly, because when you’re with the children you just have to do what your heart-  As Stella said; what your instinct is saying to you.  So, it’s trying to sort of strengthen practitioners to have confidence, to feel that they can really have some agency and autonomy and the right kind of control so that they don’t invade children’s play.

[00:20:09] So I wrote Time to Play, I wrote Cultivating Creativity in Early Childhood, and then I became involved in a research project which the Froebel Trust funded about children’s storytelling, because also the kinds of stories that we read to children, they begin to come out in the play and that very often turns in to quite a collaborative kind of play. Because as well as the story you need some other characters and so if they’ve not got a doll’s house or smaller – you might want some other children to participate in that play.

[00:20:42] And actually that won an award that book.  It was different chapters by different practitioners all thinking about storytelling and how stories can help children to learn through their play.  I have recently written a book about Friedrich Froebel because I just felt I was on a journey and it was where I had sort of landed up in 2021, and it’s called Critical Debates and Aims, or something like that, An Introduction to Froebel.   That is not so practical, but I have got practical examples in that but it’s kind of taking stock of the Froebelian framework, which as Stella said, is something that we all try to work with.

[00:21:22] Yeah, it’s really interesting that you pick up on imaginary friends.  I remember having an imaginary friend that got up to all sorts of things, including taking a bite out of the cheese in the fridge and all sorts of things.  My imaginary friend got blamed for lots of things.  You know, I’ve written something around imaginary friends that come in the form of objects, and so that might be a cuddly toy or some other object like a Lego figure.  Also, I think those stories that you get from practitioners, from children that you hear about are so vivid really and so important, and it shows this other meaning of what these object friends have.

[00:22:09] Some years ago there was some concern about imaginary friends, and that was this okay for children to have imaginary friends, was that going to be at the expense of peer friends, or sometimes concerns of children being on their own.  I think now what’s really good is that we look at imaginary friends and we see actually no, this is a creative process, it’s kind of enhancing, it’s kind of opportunities for rehearsing things with your peers and so on.  So, I think that it’s great that we can see that there’s a real value in those imaginary friends that might be there.

[00:22:48] I had a really nice story that was shared with me of a child that had a little Lego figure that was their friends and I think they used it to sort of initiate friendships with other children, you know, kind of used the object and would say ‘Do you want to play with me and my little Lego friend?’ and what have you.

[00:23:09] And also, it kind of brought home to me the value of that object as a friend, because they talked about keeping it with them.  I think they were in Y1 and so I think that there was some concern that I think the adults were less keen on them bringing objects to school in case they got broken or damaged but he really wanted this little figure with him and he talked about going to PE and putting shorts and a T-shirt on and then not having any place to put the little Lego friend, but he really needed the Lego friend to come to PE, so he put the Lego friend in his pump and did PE with the Lego friend in his pump, you know, and he was saying ‘It was really painful but I really needed my friend with me, to do PE’, you know? 

[00:23:54] And again I think all of those little things, it’s kid of us tuning in to children and thinking about what they need, and what they need in terms of supporting them with those friendships whether they’re peer friendships or imaginary friendships and providing those opportunities for those friends to be present.   Sacha, coming on to you. 

Sacha Powell:  [00:24:15] You’ve reminded me of my imaginary friend who was with me for quite a long time I seem to think, when I was probably around 3, 4, 5 years old when we moved a lot and I wonder now, with us talking about imaginary friends, whether that imaginary friend, whose name was Crudger, because his language went ‘crudge, crudge, crudge’, and I think I was the only person who could understand what he was saying, but we understood each other perfectly; I wonder whether he was a form of constancy and continuity for me, because I moved a lot when I was a little girl.  But I am also interested in this idea that you talked about, of objects and perhaps connected to Crudger being with me as I moved from lots of different places, whether that connects to, and we’ve talked about this in the past, Winnicott’s idea of transitional objects.  And I think Tina you have said that for you it became objects of transition and perhaps for me that’s what that imaginary friend partly represented.

[00:25:16] You also talked, Caron, about rehearsing friendships and perhaps we do that through our imaginary friendships but my particular research interest, for a very long time, has been in babies and toddlers.  Very little children from birth to three.   Arguably we could say that The Network for Learning, for babies and toddlers is often family, and in some cultural contexts that might be a very large, wide family.  Or it may be one or more parent or carer, and I think that we could argue that they are the baby’s first friends but also through those intimate relationships with their carers they are rehearsing many of the elements of a successful friendship or friendships that they’ll develop throughout their lives.  And I think that my interest latterly was in singing with babies and young children and I think through singing there is, as Froebel said, an affective and emotional connection that goes on which is why we know that being sung to as a baby is so much more interesting to babies than listening to music through a CD.

[00:26:31] Not that that is wrong, of course it’s not, but babies love being sung to because singing isn’t just about the sound, it’s about the facial expressions and it’s about being held, it’s about synchronising heartbeats and other physiological aspects of our bodies.  

[00:26:51] And I think that turn-taking, eye contact, negotiation, anticipation, trying to understand what the other person’s next move is going to be – All of those things are the elements of what it is to be and have friends.  We need to know how to do all of these things, so in their infancy when they’re being sung to, babies are learning all sorts of amazing things that will stand them in good stead for their friendships as well as being good at that moment in time.

[00:27:21] So I think that’s an area for me that’s been of particular interest in relation to some research that I had done with Kathy Goouch in particular around babies, and Vanessa Young as well around singing with babies.

[00:27:38] Thank you Sacha, that was really interesting to think.  As we’re all sort of talking it feels like we’re kind of all sparking off of each other and we’re all thinking of things, which is great.  You know, when you were talking about friendships as opportunities for rehearsal I thought ‘Yes!’ and then I was also thinking also thinking that friendship at that present moment and the value for it as it is, as it stands is so important.  Not just for what’s coming in the future.

[00:28:06] So that made me kind of think yes, that’s so important that we don’t just think that it’s something for practice for something in the future.  It’s the here and now and the value that that relationship has. 

[00:28:13] And also, all the links to friendship, whether that’s play, whether that’s singing, whether that’s story telling – it’s not something that sits in isolation, friendship. 

[00:28:34] [music playing]  Thank you for listening to this podcast. The second episode of this Froebelian Friendships podcast can be accessed by visiting https://research.shu.ac.uk/friends   Here you will also find more information on Caron’s research, and other related podcasts.  This podcast was made possible by a fellowship opportunity funded by Sheffield Hallam University.  [music playing]

Children’s Imaginary Friends

[00:00:00] [music playing] Hello, and welcome to Children’s Friendships Matter.  A podcast about children’s friendships post-COVID 19.    In this episode Dr Caron Carter talks to Professor Kate Adams, Professor of Education at Leeds Trinity University, Leeds, UK. Kate has published widely for over two decades, through research papers, articles, and books.  Including Unseen Worlds – Looking Through the Lens of Childhood, and The Spiritual Dimension of Childhood.  In this episode they explore the concept of imaginary friends.  Asking are there different types of imaginary friends, how should we react to the presence of an imaginary friend, and how can we support children with their imaginary friends.

[00:01:01] Welcome Kate to this podcast.

Kate Adams: [00:01:07] Thanks Caron, it’s lovely to be here.

[00:01:08] I suppose we’re going to talk a little bit today, mainly around friendship but particularly imaginary friends.  I’m particularly interested in imaginary friends, and I know it’s something that you’re particularly interested in.  The reason why I wanted to talk about that was because of the presence of imaginary friends, and we will talk a little bit about that as time goes on.

[00:01:29] So before we do, could we just start with you introducing yourself, Kate, and telling us a little bit about your background and role as an academic?

Kate Adams: [00:01:40] Yes, absolutely.  So, I’m Kate Adams. I’m currently a professor of education at Leeds Trinity University, and I started my professional career as a primary school teacher where I taught the whole curriculum across primary, but I specialised in religious education.   While I was working as a teacher, I was very privileged to earn a Farmington Fellowship from Oxford University which was an opportunity for teachers to have a term out of school to do a piece of research that was based around religious education.  And the study I did there was a very small-scale study around children’s dreams in sleep that they felt had a spiritual connection.

[00:02:28] So this is something that we find in many world religions and ancient religions, a concept that the divine can communicate with people through their dreams in sleep.  And it was quite an original study. Work had been done by psychologists and other researchers with regard to adults, but nothing really that we were aware of around children.   And to cut a long story short that really whetted my appetite for research into children’s spirituality and that led to earning a PhD scholarship from Glasgow University where I turned that study on spiritual dreams in to a PhD and never looked back!

[00:03:19] So after studying for a PhD, having given up my teaching career to do that, to be a full-time student in my 30s I have then embarked on an academic career and here I am.

[00:03:36] That’s great.  So interesting.  What an interesting journey.  So, could you tell us a little bit about your research?  I know that we’ve said about friendships and imaginary friends, but could you just tell us about-   You’ve told us a little bit about your research but what about your current research today?

Kate Adams: [00:03:52] Yes, so following the PhD I did some wider research in to children’s spirituality more widely and that’s linked with an agenda in education where schools have to promote the spiritual, moral, social and cultural development of children and so I’ve applied my work to education.  And it was actually like many academics.  We have a nugget of an idea, and it can kind of be there for years and years, can’t it, before we actually really kind of get stuck into it.  So many years ago, in 2010, I wrote a book called Unseen Worlds, Looking Through the Lens of Childhood, which was about children’s spiritual and unseen worlds that they inhabit.  And in that book, I wrote a short section on imaginary friends, but I said in there that there were these overlaps with other kind of concepts, like ghosts perhaps, and that the line might be a little bit blurred.

[00:05:01] So it was way back in 2010 that I had that idea about friendship, but it’s only kind of recently now that I’ve really come back to that and really started to unpack that notion of friendship, but this concept of what are often called imaginary friends, and in my work I’m referring to them more as invisible friends.

[00:05:25] It’s interesting isn’t it because sometimes you hear imaginary companions, or imaginary friends, so I suppose there are different terms that are sometimes used.  Yes, that importance of imaginary friends, and I was thinking I did some research and it started with my PhD, similar to you Kate, I was looking generally at friendships, and I was working with 5–7-year-olds and I actually felt-   I had made an assumption that the imaginary friends wouldn’t be there with that age group.  I thought it would come before that, like kind of pre-school age.  So, I started doing this research and then the children started, as part of it, they started talking about imaginary friends.  Some as invisible companions, but also others sometimes as objects.  Object friends. 

[00:06:18] So they were talking about that, and then when I went back and did a little bit more sort of looking at the literature around friendships it did say that children between 5-12, you know, there is a kind of reporting that they have imaginary friends, and actually some children even into adolescence have still got imaginary friends.  Which I was quite surprised about really. So, it’s really quite important that we do think about this really and look at this and research this area.

[music playing]

[00:06:52] So I just wanted to ask you next, could you tell us something about something that you’ve written recently that you could tell the listeners about that related to imaginary friends?

Kate Adams: [00:06:58] With a couple of my former undergraduate students we wrote a paper on reconceptualising imaginary friends and, as you say, they are often called invisible or imaginary companions in the academic literature.  Those terms are often used interchangeably, and the field is dominated by development psychology.  My argument really is that whilst we’ve learnt some really amazing and important things from development psychologists, we also need to bring other disciplines much more into the conversation to have an interdisciplinary conversation, particularly around the invisible friends, and those which take a human form.   And those are the majority of invisible/imaginary companions that children report.

[00:07:58] So I have always been worried about academic silos, which have been embedded for decades and despite moves internationally to try and get people to talk to each other and so on, but what we did in our paper was we looked at the concept, the actual phenomenon of what happens when a child has an invisible companion that takes a human form, and we looked at that experience, which when you strip it back, it’s about they may talk to them, they may see them, they may hear them, they might potentially feel the presence of this invisible companion.

[00:08:51] And then we looked at different disciplines that don’t talk about imaginary friends or invisible companions, but we argue are actually still looking at the same phenomenon.    So for example we might look at bereavement counselling, where someone has died and the living person still sees, interacts, potentially smells and hears that invisible person that is invisible to everyone else.  There are overlaps there then with parapsychologists who will be using different language again.  They will be talking about after-death communications.  They might be talking about ghosts.

[00:09:38] We have psychiatry which of course is fairly pertinent to these discussions, and we can come back to that, but we also need to move outside of those psychology and related disciplines because those are Western constructs.  And what Western constructs do is they wipe out and ignore, for example, indigenous voices.   So, if we look at what indigenous communities may say, they will be using different language again.  They will be talking about their children who are interacting with spirits, or their ancestors. And religion and spiritual more widely, a similar context.  

[00:10:29] So while those other disciplines are not using the language of imaginary friends, or imaginary invisible companions, they are actually in some cases talking about exactly the same phenomenon, but the disciplines largely are not in dialogue with each other.

[00:10:48] Yes, so when you’re talking about silos you’re talking about perhaps, just to break that down for the listeners as well, is thinking about how we can work together with these other disciplines to see how those things might work together or how they might be different and to have more of that communication together?

Kate Adams: [00:11:08] Yes, very much so.   Because the dominant discourse around imaginary friends is literally, as in the title, they are imaginary, the literature really is explicitly and implicitly talks about them being deliberate creations by children, usually as part of their play.

[00:11:39] Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not for a moment saying that most of them are not imaginary.  Children will tell you themselves, ‘Yes, I made up my invisible friend because I was bored’ for example.  But equally there are many children, and I have even spoken to adults who remember back to their childhood imaginary invisible friends, and they will to this day say they are not imagination.  They are real.   And that is where that will be understood in different disciplines like anthropology, religion, spirituality, but will be disregarded by the more Western constructs of psychology and psychiatry, for example.  So I’m encouraging people really just to be open-minded to different explanations.

[music playing]

[00:12:45] Just before we go on to the next question Kate, I’ve just been thinking to myself – we’ve been talking about imaginary friends, we’re talking about invisible friends, we’re talking about object friends.  I just wonder if we kind of ought to give some sort of definition or a distinction between those for people who are listening.  So, when we talk about invisible friends and then we talk about object friends or imaginary friends in the form of an object, do you think you could just kind of define those for people?

Kate Adams: [00:13:19] Yes, of course.  So, object friends, sometimes called personified objects are inanimate objects; teddy bears are very common.  I know you found in your research that there was a Lego-

[00:13:36] Lego figures, yeah.

Kate Adams: [00:13:36] Lego figures as well. So it can be anything that is an inanimate object that a child ascribes a personality to and interacts with, talks to, plays with and so on.  So that is something that we can see.  Physically. 

[00:13:57] The imaginary friends, psychologists have found that they, although the majority take the form of a human, they are often a child.  Often similar gender and physical characteristics to the child that has them, but not always.   But they can also be superheroes, they can be animals.  Some people have talked about gods and angels, which I think is a separate discussion really.  But essentially, it’s someone that is visible only to the child who has them, not visible to anyone else.  But importantly it is someone that they interact with regularly and for a period of time, usually months, and can go into years, absolutely.  So, it’s not a one-off like someone might see what they think is a ghost but only see it once.

[00:15:03] That is really interesting.  I’ve kind of spoken a couple of times about, well imaginary friends have come up a couple of times and I mentioned how I had an imaginary friend that I used in the form to kind of get me off of things.  So, if there was anything I had done that was a little bit naughty or a little bit cheeky, I would blame it on the imaginary friend and say it was nothing to do with me.  So, it would be interesting.  I know that we haven’t got time for it now but to explore the affordances and the benefits of the friendships, and that links in with this next question.

[00:15:34] A bit like you Kate, when you’ve been looking at the literature in different fields, when you look at the literature on imaginary friends, perhaps around the 1990s and before then, the literature from that time gives a sort of impression that imaginary friends, the presence of imaginary friends is quite negative and it’s something that we should be concerned about and perhaps it’s children who might be an only one, or somehow lacking in social skills, and parent, if you’ve got a child who has got an imaginary friend you might be thinking should I be concerned about this, is this okay?  So, I just wanted to unpack that, seeing as the literature since the 1990s says different things.  So, I just wondered whether you could talk about should we be concerned or is this something that we should encourage and do we pretend it’s not happening?

Kate Adams: [00:16:32] Yes, as you say, research previously used to associate it with mental ill-health.  The good body of research from psychologists has shown that we don’t need to worry about that at all and psychologists who use the language of children who have typical development, it is actually quite normal.  Estimates vary depending on definitions but we’re looking at up to 65% of children in Western cultures reporting at some point having an imaginary friend.  And psychologists have found quite a lot of benefits.  Gleeson’s work in the US has found that if a child has an imaginary invisible friend, then that is a great rehearsal of social skills.  They can practice friendships and falling outs and all those things that go on in a safe way before it happens in real life.

[00:17:39] There is work that suggests that children who have them have better kind of emotional literacy and there is the concept of theory of mind, which is where children start to learn that other people have a mind of their own that’s different to theirs.  And again there is work by Taylor and Carlson that has shown that children with imaginary friends have better developed theory of mind.

[00:18:05] Other research by Trionfi and Reese showed that language acquisition can be better and that children who have them are better able to narrate both real and imagined experiences.  So, we have a lot of evidence.   

[00:18:24] Now that doesn’t necessarily stop obviously parents, as you say, worrying.  If my child is seeing and hearing and interacting with something that they can’t see then might that child have a mental disorder, something like on the schizophrenic spectrum.  But there is increasing research around auditory and visual hallucinations which we can describe these as, to show that actually hallucinations are very common in the non-pathological populations of children, adolescents and adults, and so I think the changes in understanding around psychiatry and so on are changing and so unless there is real kind of evidence that really, really worries a parent I think that it will be quite rare.

[00:19:25] Okay, so in fact we are kind of saying that the presence of imaginary friends could suggest that children are very imaginative, creative – and I think that I read somewhere something some while ago that you always imagine that the imaginary friend is going to be very cooperative, but actually is there some evidence to suggest that some children have conflicts of fallouts with their imaginary friends?  Yeah?

Kate Adams: [00:19:53] Absolutely, and that is the route of some psychologists not using the word friends and calling them companions.  That is how that came into literature, because they are not all as nice as we would like them to be.   And I think that one of the interesting findings from studies is that these imaginary invisible friends have their own personality, and they have their own will and their own sense of agency.  Lots of them will argue with the child and they will go off and do their own thing and, as you suggested, sometimes cause trouble.  So, a child will often say to their parents ‘my imaginary invisible friend has just messed the bedroom up.  It wasn’t me.  it was them’.  And yes, you’re absolutely right, they will argue back.  I read one account where the imaginary invisible friend actually threw things at the child.   So yeah, there is lots of really interesting stories out there but they definitely mostly, yes, they have their own mind.  And are not always nice.

[00:21:15] That’s fascinating, isn’t it.  Again, it links in with what you were saying about that kind of rehearsal, so maybe it’s children thinking if this happens to me in the real world, so to speak, how do I manage that if a friend does this to me or that.  I suppose it’s a bit like when we’re adults and we’re kind of – you know, often you don’t like the idea of confrontation or something happening and how are you going to manage that or what are you going to do, and it could potentially be children kind of rehearsing that confrontation or that conflict when it comes and how are they going to manage it and what are they going to do.

Kate Adams: Yeah, that is certainly one explanation.  And then of course a completely different explanation might come from anthropological study, for example, or parapsychology where they’re saying this is an entity, it’s a spirit being that is doing the things that they’ve been accused of, like throwing things.   So there are so many different explanations and I think that is one of the really fascinating aspects of imaginary/invisible friends.

[music playing]

[00:22:28] I have been really interested to think about different aspects of friendships and the impact of COVID 19 and I was just thinking there may not be any research yet on this but did you or do you get a sense of if COVID 19 has impacted on children’s imaginary friends.

Kate Adams: [00:22:47] Yes, it’s a really interesting question and I think something that would be really useful to explore.  There was a study undertaken in Japan by Moriguchi and Todo and they talked to five hundred and sixty caregivers of children aged 2-9 who had imaginary friends and they wanted to see whether during lockdown in Japan whether there was an increase and they predicted that there would have been because children cut off from their normal communications with other friends, but they didn’t really find that.

[00:23:31] What they did find that you’ll be interested in, is that it was with the personified objects, as they called them, that children played with them more during the pandemic.  But there wasn’t an increase as such in new ones or new invisible friends.   So, it’s definitely I think an area for more research, yeah.

[00:23:58] Yes, that is really interesting, isn’t it.  And I found in research that I did that when children were connecting more with nature they were going on walks or they were playing more in their own gardens, they were referring to – there was one child who referred to friends in their garden and when I kind of explored it a bit more with them they talked about they’d had a hedgehog in the garden, they’d had a badger, they’d had a fox and they were almost saying that they came each night and we left some food out for it and that kind of thing.  So, there was kind of like friends in nature and then as you were saying, those personified objects, perhaps some of those things came to the fore for these children perhaps when they weren’t able to be with their peers face-to-face.

[00:24:50] I would be really interested to find out if there was an increase in children’s imaginary friends during those lockdown periods and would that just be that they would have appeared anyway, whether it was lockdown or not lockdown or, you know, I was thinking oh gosh, people might think that again that sort of negative side of are the imaginary friends there because there’s a deficit and they haven’t got their face-to-face friends. 

[00:25:16] Yeah, like you say, it’s probably an area for a little bit more further research.

Kate Adams: [00:25:14] Absolutely, because it could be that it’s a positive sign that children potentially became more creative and more imaginative and so on, so yeah, yeah, lots of opportunities, I think.

Rather than that deficits kind of model.

Kate Adams: [00:25:37] Yes.

[00:25:35] Yes, okay.

[music playing]

[00:25:43] So this sort of brings me to our final question, and I just wondered, you know, we’ve talked quite a bit about imaginary friends and what sort of take-home messages, reflections, questions – is there anything you would like the listener to take away from this podcast in relation to imaginary friends?

Kate Adams: [00:26:07] Yes, and it’s quite interesting.  There is a survey running at the moment for adults who have strong recollection of their childhood imaginary friends, and in that I’ve asked them if they wished to give any advice to parents, teachers, or children who have them.  It’s the early days of the survey but we’ve got some very wise words coming in from people who did have their own invisible friend when they were children.  The overarching message for parents and teachers is definitely listen, but don’t judge.  We all know how easy it is to put our own spin on things.  And one participant gave a particular piece of advice for parents which said ‘As long as your child is happy, run with it.  And whatever you do, don’t tell your child they are imaginary’.   And it’s great, because I think that we often say to children about lots of things ‘Oh, it’s just your imagination’, and we say it with all the best intentions.

[00:27:26] For example, if a child is scared because they think that there’s a monster under the bed, of course it’s done with the best intentions.  But these messages can tell children the implicit message is ‘I don’t believe you; you’re making it up’.   And children have reported in wider studies on children’s spirituality that that makes them feel dismissed.  Which is sad.

[00:27:57] In my survey there was a lovely piece of advice for teachers which was ‘Become curious about them’.  And I love that, rather than that shutting it down because a teacher is busy and they’ve got to move on to the next thing in the curriculum, you know, if a child does talk about them, be curious.  Ask the child about them.  So, I thought that was fabulous advice.

[00:28:24] And finally from children themselves.  Again, from my survey, a participant said they would say to children ‘Enjoy having a friend who is always with you’, and I thought that was lovely because, as we all know, friends come and go don’t they and that instability when friendships fall apart.  As you know Caron, you’ve done a lot of research on friendship.  That can be very distressing for children.  More so than sometimes adults realise.  But that idea that you’ve got an invisible or imaginary friend, or a personified object friend – they are always with you, and I thought that was a lovely phrase.

[00:29:10] Yes, that’s lovely actually Kate, because I was thinking about a few things when you were talking there but I think that they are, like you say, really wise words.  I was thinking about a scenario when I was in the park, when my son was small, and there was a child in the park who had got an imaginary friend and there were three swings and my son went to sit on one of them and the child said ‘No, no, my-‘  I can’t even remember the name, ‘My Joe is sitting there’, you know, the imaginary companion is sitting in the swing, and the parent was quite mortified really because she felt like-   I suppose it’s a bit like we sometimes have this obsession with like sharing and turn taking and what have you.  I think that she felt that was a really awful thing to say to my child, and I was like no, it’s fine, we will be in this one.   And I think sometimes, like you say, just kind of saying ‘That’s okay’ and then being curious and asking about the companion, I think that is really nice.  Rather than- I think that we feel we might feel embarrassed, or we might feel like ‘this is not a normal thing’, so to actually not to judge and kind of be accepting of that, and then also be quite curious about ‘Oh, who is your friend’, kind of thing, is really, really great.

[00:30:36] And then that thing you were saying there about enjoy having that companion there, and definitely I think the research that I’ve done with children around the everyday friendships – they did talk about losing friends.   Even sometimes friends can be transient through your school life can’t they and things swap and change.   Sometimes they can be quite enduring, and you can have friends from pre-school to adulthood, which is fantastic.  But children also talked about losing a friend when they might move a school, or if they’d come from another country and they spoke really fondly about friends back in their home country that they’d had several years with and then they’d come to England.  And when they were talking about it, it was so profound, it was almost like a bereavement that they couldn’t be with those friends from before, and I think Judy Dunn, she talks about how it’s not a trivial thing, you know, a friend leaving a school or being in another country.   Just a fallout with a friend.  It can be really felt deeply by children and again we shouldn’t underestimate that, so I think that those are really wise things to say really and for us to have that time to tune in to children and listen to those things that affect them on a daily basis.

Kate Adams: [00:32:06] Yes, absolutely, because at the heart of it, isn’t it, it’s for us to understand these things from children’s perspectives rather than putting our own thoughts and impressions and views on to it.  Which links back to what you said about children finding that some animals in wildlife and so on being their friends and there’s literature on children’s relationships with pets where children describe them as friends.  So, it’s not so much what we as adults define as children’s friendship, is it, it’s very much about listening to children’s definitions as well.

[00:32:48] That’s great, thank you very much.  It’s been fascinating talking to you Kate.

Kate Adams: [00:32:54] Likewise and thank you very much for inviting me.

[00:32:56] [music playing] Thank you for listening to this podcast.  For more information on Caron’s research and other related podcasts, please visit https://research.shu.ac.uk/friends   This podcast was made possible by a fellowship opportunity funded by Sheffield Hallam University.  [music playing]

The Role of Adults in Children’s Friendships

[00:00:00] [music playing]  Hello, and welcome to Children’s Friendships Matter.  A podcast about children’s friendships post-COVID 19.  In this, the second of two episodes, Caron talks to Professor Chris Pascal, OBE, and Professor Tony Bertram, Directors of the Centre for Research in Early Childhood, or ‘CREC’; based at the St Thomas Children’s Centre in Birmingham. 

In this episode Caron talks to Tony and Chris about the role of adults in children’s friendships, time and friendship, hope, and optimism.

[00:00:52] What opportunities and challenges are there in these new times for children’s friendships and wellbeing?  And I wondered, Tony, if you might be able to start here?

Tony Bertram:           [00:01:00] I really wanted to say something about the adults, because I think, you know, that’s part of the context in which children are growing up, and the wellbeing of the adults obviously influences the wellbeing of the children and particularly I’m worried about practitioners, Early Years practitioners.  I’m worried about their professionalism, which I think at some level is being undermined because now they’re becoming more like technicians, that are required to deliver packages of knowledge, which is then tested, as I say, under this metrics system.  And we are losing the professionalism and that ability for teachers and other Early Years practitioners to individualise their response to children.  That is one of the things.

[00:01:55] There’s also something to do with what Jack Whitehead calls ‘Living Contradictions’; that they have certain personal principles, and they will have professional principles, and then they will have the things that they’re required to do.  And sometimes those are all in conflict and that is quite difficult to live with.  ‘I’m being asked to do this when I actually don’t believe in what it is that I’m being asked to do’.   Because of some of those things that Chris was saying, you know, ‘Yeah, but I’m in a hurry and I know I’m being tested, so I’ve got to do it like this’.

[00:02:31] And I think that issue of us continuing to pressurise both the children and the practitioners, and including parents in that, you know, yeah sure the home learning environment.   The home learning is an important issue in children’s development, you know, there’s the research evidence on that.  But it’s not just about sticking magnets on the fridge.  It’s not just about all of those things that nice middle-class mums do.  It is actually just about engaging and talking with your children and having the space to do that.

[00:03:04] And another study that we did in austerity showed the impact.  You know, we talk about the trickle-down economy.  Actually, what trickled down was the poverty.  So when we talked to parents in a setting in an area where many of them were on contractual work, where they had to be on the end of a phone.  I can’t go out to the park like I used to, because I’ve got to be here or else, I lost my benefits.  I can’t go to the park because the park keeper isn’t there, and I used to be able to go there and watch the kids play and talk to other mums about the child-rearing practices, you know, about bedwetting or whatever it was, but I can’t go there now because the park keeper is peripatetic, he has to go up to three parks, and the big kids are let out of the secondary school too early and they run up the slide the wrong way.   And all of that kind of stuff. But what you saw is that the impacts of those cuts and austerity was impacting on the very people who most needed it.  

[00:04:04] So I think that those issues for both parents and for practitioners, you know, it’s being supported.  Parent friendships are quite important and giving them the opportunity-   I would recommend that people have a parent’s morning once a week or something.  Create a forum for them where they can talk to each other, and you can get to know them too. I think that is hugely important.

[00:04:31] This business of having forums for discussion, for practitioners, for parents, for them to come together and have that space individually.  The whole issue of professionalism.  And most of all this Jack Whitehead about Living Contradictions.  I think that is quite tough to live with.

[00:04:47] And when you say professionalism, I kind of get that sense of often practitioners really know what children need and they are really good at tuning in to what children need, but yet they’ve got these other agendas, and sometimes that kind of, you know, it’s like we’ve only got so much time, but we need to do this.  Yeah, I can see what you’re saying there.

Tony Bertram:           [00:05:10] And I’m talking particularly also about policy.  Because clearly there is an issue with childcare costs, and I want to trouble the notion of childcare, or can we talk about early years development in care.  It’s not just about the workforce agendas and getting more women in to work and so on, but childcare costs is an issue because the budgets have been cut over the last 21 years, you know, enormously.  And the result of that is if you talk about professionalism, it’s going to cost you more.   If you’re talking about CPD, that’s going to cost us more.  So now people have to go and learn about things from, forgive me, not podcasts, but there are all kinds of things out there on the web.  Some of which actually I would seriously disagree with, but they’re there and available and they’re free.

[00:06:04] But I do think that there is the whole issue around professionalism.  There’s a danger, and again I’m talking about Early Years practice, there is a danger of us losing our professionalism and just having people who are technicians who are trained to deliver whatever it is that they’re given to deliver, because they know that they’re going to be tested.

[00:06:19] That’s great, thank you.  And did you want to add anything to that Chris?

Chris Pascal:            [00:06:23] Yeah, I’m going to kind of flip it though, because I think that we are at a point globally and nationally, I think that a reckoning is happening.  We’re living with the consequences of our actions, but I think a reckoning is being taken.  There is a reckoning on the environment being had, there’s a reckoning on social mobility, there is a reckoning on preparation for things.  So, I think that it’s also an opportunity for a recalibration and a rethink, and certainly I try to live my life in an optimistic way and I do trust if we can get it right for this generation of children coming through.  They are going to be living with the consequences of what this reckoning is going to do.

[00:07:10] I spend time with children, deliberately, because they inspire me with their optimism and their resilience and their capacity to think differently and do things differently.  You look at the young people around:  Greta Thunberg and all of that, you know, they are not going to do and tolerate what some of us in our generation have done.  So, I try always to be optimistic about the future, because we have to be.   But I also think what we’ve lived through and are living through is we are reckoning.

[00:07:42] I think it is an opportunity to recalibrate and rethink about what the quality of our lives are in terms of family life, and I think COVID gave us an opportunity with homeworking.  Many people have said ‘I don’t want to go back to what I was doing before, because I had a different and maybe a better life working in this kind of way’.   I think that many practitioners-   going to Tony’s thing about being a living contradiction, I know I don’t agree with that, and I know what my children in my class or my group need, and I am going to spend time on that.  And I may be a bit stronger about knowing where their loyalties and priorities should lie.

[00:08:24] Certainly the dialogues that we’re having in our research, I mean our training that we do, are with leaders and practitioners who are deeply rethinking through their curriculum, and really importantly their pedagogy, and trying to navigate a different, slightly more balanced path with all of that, because they know and understand that the children need that.  Their children need that, and their loyalty is to those children.

[00:08:54] I am hoping that we will get politicians that can make more informed choices and lead in a different kind of way.   And, you know, sorry but our work is in a political context that has shaped where we are now, which has not been great, but we’ve got huge developments in medicine, and knowing how we live well together.  English is generally a tolerant, inclusive, welcoming place and I really get the sense that we’re moving away from that ‘close the borders and close opinion’ to be more opening and welcoming.

[00:09:37] And I’m coming back to the theme of this …. That we have these friendships across these boundaries, and across these differences, and have the humanity and the – we talked about compassion and empathy, to say we can do better than this and we will do better than this.  And there is no better place to start than those who work with younger children, because you’re creating those citizens of the future who will do better than what’s been done, I’m hoping.

[00:10:10] But we are part of that change now.  We can create a now daily work and life with children.  If all of us recalibrated a little bit and enabled children and practitioners, and families, to spend time on being together.   And I think it’s the togetherness that will solve these issues, not the separateness.

[00:10:37] So I think that friendships and relationships and the collaboration of that, the partnerships, we are all of us strongly together, not part.  And we need to set that atmosphere, that ethos, and that climate in our Early Years settings that when we’re here we’re a collective, that we’re ‘we’ together, and we’re inclusive, and we’re respectful, and we celebrate those individuals, but we work together on joint projects, not individual journeys – but a collective journey together.

[00:11:08] And we care about the big questions, about the planet, and living in peace and harmony, and having a voice, and listening well to each other.   These are the things that our work is about, and friendships thrive, and social networks thrive in those kinds of climates.   That’s what I and CREC and our colleagues believe in passionately and we’re trying to put those priorities, through our work, back in to settings and I remain optimistic.  Ruthlessly optimistic about it!

[00:11:45] Yes, I really like that.  I think that we’re coming to a nice close point here in terms of that hopeful optimistic feel for the future, and for children and children’s friendships. 

[music plays]

[00:12:04] So just finally, is there anything you would like the listeners to sort of take from this?

Tony Bertram:           [00:12:10] From me, five things.  I mean we’ve talked about flourishment, we’ve talked about friendships, we’ve talked about professionalisms, and we have talked about – well, I certainly mentioned seeing children as individuals and treating them as individuals, and I think the fifth thing would be entrepreneurship, which might be a surprising thing.

[00:12:31] I think that children should be encouraged to be entrepreneurial; and by that, I mean that they should be allowed to make choices and an entrepreneur is somebody who sees an opportunity to do something different and make changes.  To do that, young children will have to have agency, there would have to be voice, they would have to have curiosity and imagination.  I’m happy for metrics of these to be invented and to be used more fully.   I don’t see us doing that.  But to develop an entrepreneur who wants to do something differently for the future, because that’s what the future has got to be about.  It’s got to be about change and adaptability to all the things that we face including sustainability and all the other aspects of the UN Charter.  

[00:13:24] So yes, entrepreneurship I think is quite an interesting thing.  Allowing children imagination; that’s to say an autonomy and choice, and to see things slightly differently.  It requires us to listen to them.

[00:13:37] Yes, definitely listening.  And I really liked your points there Chris around being hopeful and optimistic.  Is there anything else you wanted to add to that?

Chris Pascal: [00:13:47] I think time and temporality, how we spend time together and the timing of things and allowing days to have fast time and slow time.  We need sometimes to be hurried a bit, because we need to get things done, but we also need to slow things down.  So, I think being conscious of how we spend and offer time and make time available.

[00:14:15] A little bit more compassion to each other and ourselves about what’s possible and what we can do.  The hope is this kind of deep belief in yourself and in those around you, that you can change things, that we don’t have to go on like we are.  That it is possible to imagine a different world and a different day and a different space.  And a different way to live.    And to start thinking what can I do to start that going.

[00:14:48] And this belief that things can get better, and I’m beginning to hate these slogans, ‘Build Back Better’, but we can do better than we’ve been doing, and we can do it differently to what we’ve been doing, and that starts right now in daily life.  But it’s the small things, not the grand-   It’s not the big projects, it’s the small things.  How you introduce in your daily life moments when joy can come in, or affection can come in, or excitement, or serendipity, or a deep immersion in something, or you can just take time to stand and watch your children, because children teach you.   If you really get close to a child and watch what they do, and follow their lead, they can teach you as well as you teach them, so it’s this learning collectively together and giving yourself permission to do that.  Not feeling that you’ve got to hold the power and control everything all the time.   Letting go a little bit of that is really important.

[00:15:53] Thank you very much.  I feel during this podcast with talking to both you Tony, and Chris, I have been doing a lot of nodding as we’ve gone along and I’ve been thinking ‘Stop doing that!’ but each time you’ve been saying things I’ve been nodding, so-    It’s been really great to talk to you, I really appreciate it, thank you very much.

[00:16:15]  [music playing]Thank you for listening to this podcast.  For more information on Caron’s research and other related podcasts, please visit https://research.shu.ac.uk/friends   This podcast was made possible by a fellowship opportunity funded by Sheffield Hallam University.  [music playing]

(end of recording)

The Importance of Children’s Friendships in Early Childhood Education (1 of 2)

[00:00:00] [music playing] Hello, and welcome to Children’s Friendships Matter.  A podcast about children’s friendships post-COVID 19.  In this first of two episodes Dr Caron Carter talks to Professor Chris Pascal OBE, and Professor Tony Bertram, Directors of the Centre for Research in Early Childhood, or ‘CREC’. based at the St Thomas Children’s Centre in Birmingham. 

In this episode Caron talks to Tony and Chris about the importance of children’s friendships in early childhood education, and links to children’s wellbeing.  This episode covers a range of topics including flourishment and joy, encouraging children to connect respectfully with others, COVID 19 and friendships, recovery, and re-entry into settings and schools post-COVID 19.

The second episode will look at the role of adults in children’s friendships, time and friendship, and hope and optimism.

[00:01:19] So welcome, Tony and Chris, so this podcast.  It’s really great to be able to talk to you this morning.  I wondered if I could ask you to introduce yourselves and tell us a little bit about your background.  If we could start with you first Chris?

Chris Pascal: [00:01:34] Hello everyone, and to you Caron.  Really happy to be part of this wonderful conversation this morning.  My name is Chris Pascal and I’m Director of the Centre for Research in Early Childhood in Birmingham, which I co-direct with Tony Betram.    I began my professional career as a social care worker with younger children in inner-city Birmingham, looking after children under the age of 5 who had been taken in to care but were in a children’s home.  I don’t think that we do this anymore.  It was a kind of assessment centre for children.

[00:02:08] Then I went on and got inspired by the value of education as a means for social mobility and life transformation.  So, I did a teacher training and then became an early years teacher in inner-city Birmingham and I worked doing that for fifteen years; doing my master’s and doctorate at the same time as teaching fulltime, and then went in to HE to train teachers and started at that time to research my own practice in the classroom – and that’s where my research career started.  Inspired also by my doctorate.

[00:02:44] And then I met Tony, who was also at Worcester, and we established the Centre for Research in Early Childhood, which we relocated into a children’s centre in inner-city Birmingham in the year 2000, as we turned a new century.  And here we are, doing research practice, consultancy, and training – living our daily lives in a children’s centre in inner-city Birmingham with children and families.   So, we walk in the front door with the children every day and it keeps us very grounded, I like to believe.

[00:03:17] That is so interesting, thank you.  I think that it’s really great for listeners to just- They are also interested in people’s backgrounds and how they’ve come to where they’re at.  So, could I ask you the same Tony?

Tony Bertram:           [00:03:30] Yeah, well I was born in Bolton, in Lancashire.  I grew up in Blackpool, in a little fishing town on the coast there.  We were market traders.  I’m not talking stocks and shares; I’m talking about making women’s hats.  And I spent the first infant years in a drawer at the market stall, a hat drawer.  That was my beginnings.

[00:03:54] I emigrated to Canda when I was maybe in my early twenties, got married out there.  Then decided I should do something serious, and I came back and trained as a teacher.  I worked in infant schools.  I have always worked with children under-five, for about thirteen years.  I became a head, and then moved into higher education.

[00:04:20] As Chris said, we started the Centre for Research in Early Childhood when we were at Worcester and since then we’ve become independent.  Our focus of much of our research is on the implications of research for practice and policy.  In other words, we don’t just want to do research for research’s sake, but we want to have an impact.

Chris Pascal:            [00:04:44] It is a very ethical and values driven organisation with a serious mission around social justice and equalities, and particularly for those less-advantaged children and families which Tony and I both come from, is to give them the opportunities that we feel we’ve had and just support children and their families holistically.  So our work is very much infused with a social mission and a political mission to make a difference to the kind of country that we live in, to make it more inclusive and allow every child to thrive and achieve their potential and I say that at the beginning of this podcast, because we’re talking about something that is really important in securing children’s life chances and their sense that they’ve lived life well, and lived a fulfilled life and our friendships and relationships are at the centre stage of all of that, as our own lives have illustrated to us.

[00:05:42] I think that it’s really, really important, as you say, that the research that we do has that impact.   I was just thinking I probably wouldn’t be doing this right now if it wasn’t for, you know, I’m from a similar working-class background and widening participation at the time when I was kind of going to university and so on allowed me to do what I’m doing.  So, I think that’s really heartening to hear that that is still on the agenda and people are still advocating for that, because it’s so important.

Tony Bertram: [00:06:14] I would never have gone to university unless I had received a grant.  I can say that straightforwardly.

Chris Pascal: [00:06:26] But I think our work in early childhood education is not just education, it’s what I call civic work.  It’s about citizenship, voice and democracy and listening to children and their families, whoever they are, and responding to that.  And that’s the kind of society that I want to live in, where it’s inclusive and people have the chance to live their life in a, we’re going to use the term ‘In a fulfilled way’.  Not just driving academic lives.

[00:06:59] For me education, when I trained back in the 70s, was much more holistic.  It was about giving children the capacity to live a culturally and socially and professionally rich life.  To be able to develop relationships, and coming back to the theme of this podcast, are really meaningful and help them live well.  We are social beings, and we all depend on having people around us who we care for and who care for us, which is what friendships are about, isn’t it.

[music playing]

[00:07:31] One of the reasons I was so interested in talking to you is knowing that you do quite a lot of work around children’s wellbeing and obviously that’s so linked in with children’s friendships.  So, I just wondered if you could tell us about your research and links to young children’s friendships and perhaps wellbeing?  So, could we start with you Tony?

Tony Bertram: [00:07:55] Yes, I mean we are interested in researching friendships and wellbeing.  Friendships are very important to wellbeing.  Not just for children but for adults as well.  Communities within school settings and early childhood settings.   I think that there’s a danger at the moment that we’ve developed, and I think that it’s particularly impactful in early childhood settings, we’ve developed what I would call a performative culture. So, all of a sudden we’ve started to measure children and have metrics on everything and we’re forcing both the practitioners and the children to be subject to that and I’m not sure that we’ve got the balance right.

[00:08:43] I do think that we want all children to be fulfilled and to be the best that they can be, and to develop skills and so on, I’m not saying that.  I’m saying I think that we’ve got in balance the relationship between fulfilment if you like, the development of all the skills and things that children need, and flourishment.  And I think that flourishment is quite a nice idea because it suggests that children have to develop within the community and with themselves and be socially interactive and so on.

[00:09:10] So that focus on, I think at a political level, that we’ve got that out of balance at the moment.  That is one of the things that we’re very interested in exploring.

[00:09:22] That’s great, thank you.  And did you want to add anything to that Chris?

Chris Pascal: [00:09:27] I want our children to progress academically and to achieve that because that’s what’s helped me in my life, and I had a good education in Birmingham that gave me the knowledge and the skills and capacity to do that.  I think particularly in early years, although I think that it’s true throughout, is how do you live well while you’re doing that.   And I really worry at the moment about mental health issues amongst our children and young people, because they’ve lived through COVID and been very isolated – cut apart from their normal networks and friendships and a lot of our work really looked at that, and I think that has led us to a preoccupation, not just with the knowledge and skills that children need to progress educationally, but the process by which they experience that.  I think that for children, flourishing is about having a life in which things like joy, love, trust and relationships are part of that, part of where children are developing the skills to be able to do that.

[00:10:27] And actually to perform well in any area of your life you need to be able to connect with other people.      I also want to make the point at the beginning here that friendships are part of that.  That relationships are bigger than that.  We have to relate to people who are not our friends.  We have to relate to people that we sometimes find it difficult to be friendly with.   We live increasingly in a polarised society of us and them, and othering others, and not connecting in a respectful way with each other, but in our world, we’ve got to learn to live with difference.  And I mean that at a global level.  There is war going on in Europe now, and how we live with difference and diversity, and people who are different to us and how we relate to that in a respectful way with that without losing your own integrity and your own sense of groundedness and who you are.  And you’ve got your place in that world, and you’ve got your close network of – I will call that ‘friends’, but you operate in a connected way with other people in that world.

[00:11:37] We can’t live like hermits or in gated communities or in camps away from other people.  So that is when I talk about our civic work and relationships are at the heart of that.   A bit of the foundation stage curriculum which puts personal, social and emotional at the heart of it probably more than – and I’m a great fan of getting children mathematically and linguistically competent, but the ability to be socially, emotionally literature as well is probably more important in terms of determining that child’s life and their fulfilment in their lives.

[00:12:18] My daily work is full of relating to other people and if I hadn’t got the skills to do that I would be in big trouble.   I don’t think that you can live well in an isolated way, and so I work on relationships and within those relationships we all need somebody around us or a few people around us who would go to unreasonable lengths for us, which is what your friends and hopefully your family do.  But we all need people in our lives to do that, and that means that close relational friendship and developing that capacity to link up with somebody like that, to have a bond, and it starts really early on – that basic skill of connectivity and attachment, we might call it.  Attachment of another to us, because we learn it through that, but also our attachment to others around them and how we negotiate that through our lives.

[00:13:12] Because our relationships, our close attachments change as we grow too, don’t they.  I was struck by a young child I was with the other day who had got in to trouble at school because she had said that somebody wasn’t her friend and then I thought that’s a fairly okay thing to say because I have to work with people who are not my friends.  I thought she had been quite sophisticated saying ‘No, she’s okay, but she’s not my friend’, and she was making that distinction.    So I think that friendships and relationships and our networking with people is how-   And that is created by the processes by which we live and work together and as Tony said, we don’t spend enough time, or there’s a danger that we’re spending not enough time on that, and some of that is part of why I think some children are struggling in today’s world, because they haven’t had enough experience of it or that there is too much of a function to drive them on and drive them through and catch up, which is very individuated, rather than a collective endeavour.

[00:14:18] I have recently done a podcast with a teacher in a school and they were saying very, very similar things to you.  Again, the fact that we want children to reach their potential and to do well in maths, English and that kind of thing, but also the really important things are those relationships and making connections.

[00:14:36] I know you mentioned there about COVID-19, and I know you’ve written a social mobility impact research brief, and I just wondered if you could tell us a little bit about that?

Chris Pascal: [00:14:48] We were commissioned by the social mobility unit actually to look at what was happening over the period of the pandemic and also the Froebel Trust that we’ve been working with because Froebelian practice has a great emphasis on some of the things that we’ve talked about; fulfilment, friendships, and networking, and the important of being together with each other during this time.

[00:15:12] And our work tends to be in practice and with practice.  All of our research is done in the company of others.  We don’t come in as researchers and do research. We kind of work alongside children and particularly we try to listen well to children and encourage them to kind of share their knowledge and expertise, which is what we were doing on this project.   What were their experiences like of living with COVID?  There is age hierarchies that go on here and the group of people that haven’t been listened to by policy and practitioners are children and young people.  There is a lot of evidence now.  But the younger children particularly – because there is this perception that they’re not able to articulate and actually we find children profoundly able to articulate and communicate.

[00:16:03] Even without words.  Their body, if you tune in to what they’re telling you, they’re communicating with you.  They are incredible communicators of their mental state, their wellbeing, and what matters to them.

[00:16:16] So through the children’s play, when they were going through COVID, and sometimes there was lockdown and they were not allowed in and some kids were in and some were not in, but we really were trying to listen well to what children’s experiences were and we did some work in primary schools as well, at the Teach First project to see what their experience had been during lockdown, and the fundamental thing that bonded them all was that during lockdown, the biggest thing that they missed as their friendships in the nursery or in school.

[00:16:51] When they were going backwards and forward; lockdown and not lockdown, or in bubbles and not in groups, the children found that profoundly difficult.  That they couldn’t relate to their home friendships because their home friendship and settings, how they lived with that.  Some children we found very, very resilient in that.  In fact, the children were teaching us as adults how to manage that, and they found ways to express it through their play and through their actions, to make different kinds of connections with people.

[00:17:28] I remember one little girl, she knew she couldn’t hug her friends so she kind of developed this self-hug and then she did a kiss by opening and shutting the palm of her hands to express her feelings so they were telling us you can find ways to connect, even if you can’t physically but they were absolutely, when they were back in the nursery and the school, sometimes the coming back was difficult to navigate because it was a long period of time and they’re growing fast and things are changing and their friends had had experiences that they hadn’t.

[00:18:01] The thing that they most missed and most needed as a kind of therapy was to reconnect with their friends and being back into the routine of their nursery community.  But what we were doing in our research was documenting and curating their play sequences to see what was happening in their play and how they were making their inner-life, and this is very Froebelian, their inner-life outer, through the expression of that in their play sequences. 

[00:18:36] There was lots and lots of COVID play.  There was a game called the death game, where they acted out somebody dying, but they didn’t want to do that with an adult, they did that away.  That was quite interesting.  But mask games, touching games, and not washing/hand cleaning games.  All kinds of play that went on over a period.     Whereas others didn’t want to do that at all, they wanted to play away from that.  So super-hero play.  And the other thing that we found is that they were drawn to the outdoors.  Again, children teach you.  In the nursery they had the choice of indoors and outdoors, maybe because they hadn’t been able to when they were at home.  They wanted to be outdoors because a) I think they kind of knew.  It was almost in that romantic way; the outdoors is healthier for you.  The engagement with the outdoors was much more profound as an individual but also as a group they wanted to be outdoors as well.  So, we learnt a lot through observing, listening, and documenting their play and then talking with the children and then telling their stories.  Often using their words or through multimedia expressions of what they did.  

[00:19:49] And then really dialoguing with them and the practitioners about what they were telling us and then we adjusted practice because of that.  So that’s the impact and so the children’s voices really shifted.   So, the practice in the pre-schools changed, nurseries changes, so they changed to be more outdoors focused.  They changed to give children more time to play and less time doing kind of what might be prescribed as catch-up activities around literacy and numeracy.  They felt that the children needed more time to be with each other and play in a free way and play out these narratives and express these narratives that were really important to them.

[00:20:34] And they also wanted knowledge, by the way.  They wanted to know about the virus and what it looked like.  And the drawings of this virus, which is a crown, isn’t it, so they wanted that intellectual academic knowledge about- They didn’t want to be protected from that.  They really wanted to know the science I would say, and they understood what would happen if the virus got on their hands and got transmitted to them.  

[00:21:04] And then they were telling their parents about wearing their masks and sanitation.  So, we sometimes, no, we quite often underestimate what children are interested in and capable of but what they most needed, and need now, as we are moving ahead, is time to play.  Time to express their daily realities and live out and express their emotional state in relation to that.  Or not.  Sometimes they want to move on from that and do something different and that should be fine as well.

Tony Bertram: [00:21:35] Two quick anecdotes from me, is that when we were doing this thing on COVID we were interviewing children, and adults, to see what had been the impact but also what had been the process of recovery and re-entry in to schools, and I remember interviewing this 12 year old girl and asking her what was the most difficult thing about having to come back to school and how she could pick up where she had left off, and so on.  We had a strategy of an intervention process from an additional teacher who had been engaging with this group and I was thinking about the curriculum and when I said to her what is the most difficult thing, she said ‘I was frightened that when I came back my friends wouldn’t be friends with me’, and I thought wow, that’s it.   You know, if you’re talking about developing children you’ve got to be aware that all this happens in the social context.   So that would be one anecdote.

[00:22:32] The other one was we’ve done another piece of research with The Scouting Association, and historically when I was that age you had Scots and Cubs or Guides and Brownies, but now we’ve got underneath the cub level we’ve got Beavers, and we’ve got the new group which is called Squirrels.  So, this is 4- and 5-year-olds, so again we’re doing an evaluation, national evaluation – it’s an incredible programme I think.   It is scouting, but it’s about growing kids independently, it’s not gender specific, it’s boys and girls.  So, I am asking this group of children at the end, I said what was the most dangerous thing that you’ve done in Scouting and one of them said ‘Oh yeah, we had to light a fire! We were allowed to light a fire!’ and the other one said ‘Yeah, we were chopping up wood!’ and I said, ‘Have you got any fingers left?’ and then this one kid said, ‘The hardest thing for me is actually coming in and seeing if my friends are still here and if they still like me’.  And I thought, you know, it’s as deep as that.  I don’t think that PSE sums it up.  Sticking PSE on the end, it’s an actual integration, an integrated part of children’s life and in fact all human life.

[00:23:49] Do I belong here?  Is there somebody looking at me as an individual?  The teachers that I remember from my school, still, are the ones that saw me as an individual and I think that there is a problem with us just looking at children as what’s the average and why aren’t they up to the average?  Because actually none of us are average.  We’re all individual and independent and I think that kind of flaw, not the ‘law’ or averages, but the ‘flaw’ of averages is something that we ought to take on board and see children more as individual.  And listen to this social and emotional process that has to be right, and you have to be close to it and understand it.  And that is how we wrap all friendships.  And, as I say, I think that applies not just to the children but to the adults as well.

[00:24:37] Can I just pick up on a few points that you’ve said there.   Those kinds of stories, those things that you’ve just told us Tony about what friendship means to children, I think that’s why I’ve been researching this for the last decade, because I know how much it means to children.  I know that it’s really important to them.  It’s really great that you could share those examples.   Just picking up on a couple of things that you said, Chris – those positives almost, if we can say.  I know that we don’t like to look at it in that way, but actually in terms of adversity like COVID, you were saying that some of the children showed resilience through their play.  And again, play being so integral to friendship.  And you mentioned Froebel and I’ve done a podcast with them and interestingly they mentioned your work. 

[00:25:28] I think when I did some research with children during COVID there were some children that talked about actually this did give me the opportunity to make new friends, or to talk to people that I don’t usually talk to.  Particularly when there were groups of children where there were keyworker children and vulnerable children that were in school, so it might be that your friends weren’t there but actually for some children that was an opportunity to have conversations with other children or be in groups with other children that they wouldn’t ordinarily be with and for some that was positive.

Tony Bertram: [00:26:00] We did a piece of work in a seaside town where we were looking at Early Years settings and seeing what had been the impact on those Early Years settings in terms of COVID and so on, but this one particular setting, it was close to a hospital – and it was an area of great social deprivation.   You know, some of our seaside towns now are where what used to be called ‘troubled families’ were placed.  And the children in this setting were those who had been children of key workers during COVID.  And, as I say, they were next to a hospital but they weren’t the children of the nurses and doctors, they were essentially the children of the porters, the ordinary people who were grafting around things.

[00:26:51] And for them of course, because they were seen as children of keyworkers the ratios had suddenly changed within the setting.  Their care and education was being paid for, and what the practitioners reported to us was that what they had predicted in terms of these children’s achievements was far exceeded during the COVID years.    They were the ones who were the complete outliers who went against it and they had really benefitted from lower ratios, more time, they hadn’t stuck to the rigidity of the practice and as Chris said, they had enjoyed a lot of time outside, outdoors, exploring things because actually the staff wanted to be outside more than they did inside. 

[00:27:38] So I just thought that was an interesting outlier, and maybe saying something about what’s needed in terms of having the space and the forum to develop children in the way that we’re suggesting.  And yeah, maybe in a Froebelian way.

[00:27:51] To have that time and space to actually focus on those interactions and those relationships, yeah.

Chris Pascal: [00:27:57] I think it’s important to say that COVID impacted on all of us differentially.  Some of us, and some children had – if we can say this, a good COVID and others a really bad one, and all those now are back together, and so the challenges that those of us who work in those provision is to support all of those children and the danger is that we focus on the catch up thing, which is to intensify and narrow down on a few certain things when maybe what we should be doing is opening up and relaxing and we are very inspired recently by Alison Clark’s work on slow pedagogy and giving time-  Because staff are also struggling with their own mental wellbeing and recovery too, but not thinking that we’ve got to catch up in 12 months what was a three year process, and for some children the majority so far of their young lives.  We’ve got to give them the luxury and freedom of time to navigate through that.

[00:29:07] Now that takes skill and it isn’t just about saying that we just need to let them go, free for all, and all of that.  Skilful practitioners who know how to scaffold and structure individually for those differences that are there, but to pay attention to the wellbeing and to give children time and staff time to have relaxed time together, slow time together, to process things and find their feet.

[00:29:39] And the skill of interacting with a wider group of children, you know, these children coming in from home and family and that has been very restrictive.  If you think of how many different relationships these very young children are having to make and respond to when they’ve been in a very contained environment, you know, you add another two children in and exponentially the number of interactions and the number of relationships between all those children – and you add another ten children and its massive what we’re expecting of these children in order to function. 

[00:30:14] It isn’t just about sitting them down on the mat and showing them flashcards or getting vocabulary into them, it’s how they interact and relate to each other and we’ve got to pay attention to this I think looking ahead.  If we don’t then there is this whole generation.  And all of us, we are all still in recovery from it.  I certainly still am, because my working life was transformed, and children’s lives were shaped differently, this cohort coming through, their lives were shaped differently.

[00:30:50] We’ve got to kind of pay attention to that and infecting their day – I talked earlier about the conditions for flourishing and fulfilment is joy.  They’ve got to experience joy in their daily life.  Being able to be joyful and to feel the joy and to develop and feel warmth and affection from people who aren’t their family.  To know when and how to trust other people.  There is a lot of caution, because there had to be, so having to engage in a trusting way and develop trusting relationships is a big work for us to do in our sector.  So, joy, love, trust and giving them time to process those experiences through play or through arts.   And there is another thing that’s linked: the imagination and creativity.   

[00:31:46] One of the things that other pieces of work were very involved with is the place of creativity, the arts, and the cultural life that goes on in the setting that many of these children have missed out on, giving nurseries and schools not just permission but the support to kind of enrich their lives.  That aspect of their life has been impoverished as well and will have consequences for how they grow up with a love of the arts, the ability to enjoy music or make music, the ability to create wart of be in art or perform art.  All of these things enrich life and make us more rounded people, and we generally do these things in the company of others, don’t we.

[00:32:36] You know, you just think that we couldn’t sing together and how joyful singing is at every age.   We are having to re-learn all those things or learn for the first time those things again, and all of that needs space and time to have its place, and there is a big, huge work for us to do, but underneath that children are incredibly resilient and have found ways through it but not all children did.   So we have got to be aware of the differential of experience.  Some children flew and thrived and had brilliant times and had wonderful home experience as well as carried on at the nursery and that was kind of better for some children who were there, but other children did not and they had a very difficult time.

[00:33:30] But we always say the best therapy for any child is another child.  A Greek friend of ours once said that to me and I always remember it.  The best therapy for any child or any human is another human that they can get close to.  That’s what friendship is about and it’s fundamental to our work and our life more broadly I think, and we are really campaigning in all of our political work and in our practitioner and practice work, is to encourage and support attention to be paid, equal attention, and a rebalancing, I think.   Tony talked about our attention to these underpinning life skills, which is what they are.  Which is how we live well in the 21^st century and how we deal with virtual friends or the virtual world.   There is an AI kind of issue. 

[00:34:27] When we think of the sustainability goals, the human, social, and environmental – that technology is also changing the nature of friendships and relationships and helping children and ourselves navigate the way through that.  it’s a massive challenge that brings huge opportunities for connectivity, but it brings huge challenges about what’s real and authentic and that will help you live a fulfilled and well life when all those options are around.

[00:35:00] I think that we should in this podcast touch the AI and the virtual world, or the metaverse and do you like me, am I your friend, what image am I presenting on that, on my Facebook?   Very, very young children have phones and live in this virtual world.  It’s astonishing to me, and how we give them alternatives to that, or ground them in a real world.  Something that I care quite passionately about, that I want the meta world, or whatever that is, to be a benefit to our humanity and not to kind of distance ourselves from each other or allow ourselves to live in even more of a bubble, because I think that one of the things that’s happening is that we’re all living in little self-contained bubbles and social media and the internet are part of that, aren’t they, and that polarises or puts us in to that camp or that camp. 

[00:35:59] And I’ve come back to that learning to live and relate to people who are different to us in many ways.  I don’t just mean in terms of their abilities, and I mean in terms of their sexuality.  All the diversities.  Populations are on the move and our countries are becoming much more diverse places, so we are not living in a tightknit homogenous community and shouldn’t be.  And how we encourage that openness to difference and that welcome to difference and an ability to connect across those differences in an inclusive way is going to be vitally important for our survival as a species, I think.

[00:36:40] When you were talking, lots of things were coming into my mind but I was thinking still about that sort of tolerance, our understanding, that compassion and that time and space, and I was just thinking about a scenario that somebody was telling me about just after we had the second lockdown.  I think one of my friends said that they saw a lady with a pushchair with a toddler in the pushchair and she just went up to just talk to them in the street and said hello and said hello to the child in to the pushchair, and the child kind of turned away and she just said ‘Look, I’m really sorry, but he’s a COVID baby and he’s really finding it hard now with those interactions’.  And when you said about trusting people, it made me think about that whole, you know, we’ve got to allow that time and space and understanding and compassion about how children have kind of learnt during those lockdowns to be cautious and to be careful and now it’s going to take a while for that.  So that reminded me of that.

[music playing] Thank you for listening to this podcast. The second episode of this podcast with Tony and Chris can be accessed by visiting https://research.shu.ac.uk/friends. Here you will also find more information on Caron’s research and other related podcasts.  This podcast was made possible by a fellowship opportunity funded by Sheffield Hallam University.  [music playing]

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