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.
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[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]
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