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‘Full-Time’ Nursery Children Need Our Attention

First to arrive, last to leave – the 'full-time' children of time-poor parents can present unique challenges in Early Years settings. Lorraine Jenkin explains more…

Lorraine Jenkin
by Lorraine Jenkin
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There are children in every nursery who seem to be there more than the staff. They are waiting at the gate in the morning – sometimes in a soggy nappy and pyjamas – and are picked up seconds before closing time, day after day.

These are the full-timers, whose parents work long hours and rely on childcare to do what becomes a great proportion of the child’s upbringing.

Crashing out

Whilst no child is considered more special than any other, full-timers can present certain issues that don’t occur with children who are brought in for two or three days a week, sometimes being dropped off late or picked up early.

Some manage admirably, but others can become tired due to long hours of stimulation, noise and company. In many ways they might be more forward than the average child, perhaps in speech, confidence or awareness of the setting’s rules – yet in other ways they might be struggling.

Poor sleep at night is often a problem. These will be children are often exhausted by mid-afternoon and will crash out for a couple of hours, then refuse to go to bed for their parents – thus making the pattern more established the next day, and so on.

Potty training might be deferred, too, with parents lacking the time to get it started, or simply expecting the nursery to initiate whatever the child needs and thus putting it off.

Identifying issues

In one nursery I spoke with, having a full-timer become more attached to the play leader than to her own mother seemed to be a looming problem. The play leader told me, “In some ways, a full-timer is easier. They are less needy and more used to the routine. Having a child who sleeps for two hours in the afternoon and bounces into the arms of their keyworker each morning is more straightforward than a child who misses mum and dad, refuses to sleep in the nursery bed and spends the afternoon tetchy.”

But when this particular full-timer decided she didn’t want to leave nursery in the evening to go to her mother, the play leader and her colleagues decided they had to do something. “We knew that the mother enjoyed her work and struggled with parenting. We had to admit that since the mother was unlikely to change, we had to manage the situation for the good of the girl and the future of her family life.”

Some of the staff were unsympathetic, feeling that parents should be fully responsible for their children’s lives, and that the nursery’s role was to simply to look after the children whilst in nursery. They didn’t want to take on greater responsibility for children’s happiness and wellbeing, as they felt this would negate the parents’ responsibility for making sure their families were happy.

However, the play leader decided that, morally, they needed to act.

Taking action

The nursery started by assigning two other members of staff to each full-timer (in addition to a key-worker) so that the children would have less reliance on a single individual. The three staff members took it in turns on different days to be the most important person; the child’s attachment was therefore spread wider, with the parents taking a comparatively larger share.

Staff knew that sleep could be a problem at home, and that this wouldn’t help the parents’ relationships with their children (nor their own health and temper), so they decided to be more proactive and give the children what they would want if they were taking them home at night. Sleep for the full-timers was either brought forward or cut to a more suitable level, to allow the children to fall asleep at home at an appropriate time.

The nursery also spoke to the parents, many of whom were struggling to balance work and their roles as mums and dads. Returning to a cold house after a long day with a bouncing child, and then having to prepare food was not conducive to easy parenting. The nursery therefore started giving their full-timers tea at 5pm, while the other children were getting picked up to go home.

Parents were given the opportunity to provide pyjamas and toothbrushes, too, so that their children could be dressed for bed before being picked up. Collecting an already-fed-and-changed child allowed the parents to spend the hour they had before bed together, perhaps snuggling on the sofa looking at a book.

These new measures were partly intended to increase the presence of the parents in their children’s lives. Staff talked more about Mummy and Daddy – not just about what a child had done with them over the weekend, but also “I expect Mummy is doing X at the moment, don’t you?”

They gathered family photos and put them on the wall, rather than just having photos of the children doing things. These could be looked at and talked about in a positive way to improve full-timers’ perception of family life.

The nursery became more proactive in children’s development, telling parents when they felt it was time to, say, start potty training, pointing out when a haircut might be useful, or when bigger wellies were needed. They paid more attention to what children ate in nursery, eventually offering to provide food themselves after seeing children having processed food thrown at them five days a week (and maybe more).

Making progress

Over time, the staff found that these policies appeared to be working, in that the full-timers seemed less reliant on one person, and talked more about their family members and parents as being their most important grown-up. The parents meanwhile commented on how their children were now better at going to be bed at a reasonable time, and were actually sleeping rather than bouncing, which had improved their own state of mind.

The nursery itself didn’t benefit hugely as a result of these changes; it was really the home environments that changed. If anything, the nursery staff had probably made life more difficult for themselves! Yet as professionals, they felt they had done the right thing, and hoped that their interventions had contributed positively to each full-timer’s family relationships, and their lives in general.

Added extras

Many full-timers have parents who are money-rich and time-poor. Extra services can be offered and charged for at a profit, giving you more income and using up hours when staff are under-utilised. Have you considered:

• Supplying nappies and wipes • Providing additional meals for eating in nursery, or to be taken home at the weekend • Keeping the child’s ‘wardrobe’ at the nursery and washing it, so that the parents only need worry about weekends and can just drop off and collect the child in their pyjamas • Taking children to town to buy shoes or clothes • Providing personal care, such as haircuts and cutting finger or toenails • Offering weekend trips out to the cinema or a pantomime • Taking them to doctor’s appointments – for routine jabs, for example

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