If my girl gets filthy at daycare, she’s had a good day

Early childhood educators are quite simply angels on Earth.

If there’s one thing that makes a parent’s heart sink in an instant, it’s seeing on caller ID that your child’s daycare is trying to get in touch with you.

My thought process usually goes something like this: ‘‘ARGH! Nooooo!’’, ‘‘I hope the kids are OK’’, ‘‘breathe… prepare yourself… be calm’’, and finally ‘‘Your plans for today are now officially over, what are some of the first things you need to do once you get off this phone call considering that you will need to go and fetch your child/ren immediately?’’.

Of course, the kids come first and my concern is primarily around them. However, the daycare phone jolt is definitely a thing and I’ve had the full gamut of calls ranging from ‘‘he feels warm and might be coming down with something’’ to ‘‘we’ve just called GREER BERRY an ambulance’’.

The one thing I have never doubted behind any of these phone calls are the care and concern offered by those who look after my little ones.

Early childhood educators are quite simply angels on Earth.

I cannot for a second imagine looking after numerous children of varying ages, personalities and stages of development that could see you changing nappies one minute and having intense discussions about the extinction of dinosaurs the next.

And then doing it all over again 20 minutes later. What’s that definition of insanity again?

I don’t know how all these ladies and gents (yes, I have come across male teachers and they are 50 shades of amazing – more fantastic male role models, please!) don’t turn to the bottle – wine, that is – before lunch each day.

Maybe they do? It wouldn’t be unheard of by a mother, so I can’t say I would bemoan them for doing so, although I imagine the authorities and management would look down on it. And fair enough, too, but seriously; I just don’t know how they do it.

ECE teachers do incredible work and yes, they get paid to do it, but I can guarantee whatever stipend they take home each pay, it is not even close to being reflective of the level of work they provide for it.

It’s big business. In Palmerston North it feels like there are new daycare centres popping up as fast as alcohol outlets – wait, there’s that link again – and parents are increasingly deciding to put their children in care.

And with every daycare setup comes different philosophies, learning techniques, staffing levels and beliefs.

When choosing a suitable ECE centre for my kidlets, one thing that was important to me is how they deal with play, exploration and dirt. Glorious dirt.

I judge how well my girl’s day has gone by just how filthy she is when I pick her up. The dirtier, the happier she is.

One of my favourite things to do at pick-up time is sneak out to the outside play area and watch my toddlers in their happy place, outside, exploring, with their friends or sometimes alone, picking up bark and eating it or crafting some glorious mud pie birthday cake for an imaginary party. This, to me, is everything about childhood and confirms that a helicopter parent, I am not.

Don’t get me wrong. The rules and support are there, and the place isn’t some type of Hunger Games experiment gone wrong.

But there is some focus on risky play, a concept that preliminary research released last week confirmed creates more confident, safety-aware kids who have better risk-assessment skills.

The findings, due later this year from an Australian university, showed that kids who had supervised access to things like fire pits, power tools and high climbing equipment changed how they approached risk.

It also changed the language they use around risk-taking, and created a lot more awareness around their brain-body connections.

One of the best results from this study, in my opinion, came from the changes they saw in confidence around assessing and managing risk.

I know adults who struggle with this concept, so the thought that these connections could be made from such a young age heartened this mum who still, even now, from time to time, struggles with the mummy guilt lumped on me by having my children in care parttime.

That guilt, whether selfimposed or felt from those close to me or even strangers, is hard to shake, but made all the more easier to swallow and move on from when I look at research that tells me that maybe, just maybe, these experiences I’m giving my children while outside of my mother-bubble will become some of the most formative and amazing dynamics of their adult lives.

And I’m not too proud to say that I firmly believe it takes a village.

I don’t have all the answers or experiences for my kids and neither do my daycare village, but they sure as hell do a bloody good job and so much of what I have learnt about my kids and this whole crazy world of parenting I have learnt through them.

I owe them all a really large drink.