A Children's Oasis

There is a massive misconception out there that children need ‘stuff’ to learn and be happy but guess what they don’t.

I have been working with children for more than 15 years now in various capacities, from a fulltime live-in nanny in Sydney’s beach city suburb of Coogee to a family on a farming feedlot property just out of Moree I neat the NSW/QLD border. Between those two families the difference in lifestyle, child rearing and my own upbringing, I have seen the difference between the lifestyle of all will be ok, we will just throw money at it to the lifestyle of, what can we use to make this or that with. And to be honest the differences have nothing to do with how much money people have, but how they choose to use that money to provide life lessons and environments for their children. And I will say that all 6 of these children (scarily enough) have grown up to be wonderful members of society contributing in their own ways.

I guess it’s the classic argument of nature vs nurture. And what I say isn’t law by any means, it is honestly just my experiences and what I have learnt from those experiences which has shaped the family day care environment that I run today. I believe that raising children and educating children definitely isn’t one or the other instead a varying split between the two! And not just a split, but a varying split from child to child because in my experience I have never met two children exactly the same. The nature vs. nurture debate centers on the contributions of genetics and environmental factors to human development. Some philosophers, such as Plato and Descartes, suggested that certain factors are inborn or occur naturally regardless of environmental influences. I believe that while genetics obviously effects children in more ways than I can count, however I also believe that genetics doesn't mean we will or won't thrive in an environment which allows for the basic needs of children to be met in which will allow for them to belong, be and become.

So lets get to it.

We are a family of 3, my husband Greg, myself and Addy, our 3-year-old independent and stubborn little girl who loves the outdoors. Our family day care service is just that ‘OURS’.

It’s made up of not just our family, but every child and family that enrols becomes part of ‘our’ service and an extension of our family. Our community is made up of every person who walks in the door, or that we are connected to through our excursions to the various playgroups around, the cafés we visit frequently visit, the playgrounds we play at and the shops we shop at. ‘Our’ service is shaped by all those things, and it brings us amazing opportunities for the children to engage and get involved in anything and everything within our community and our service.

I love Family Day care, I love that I get to be at home, guide Addy’s learning and development in an environment which she gets to be part of, gets to create and contribute to every day. Yes, I run a family day care service, but first I run a home and a household. We live out of town, which means our service is also out of town, which means families need to travel to us and for the families that choose to travel to us, they are rewarded for their extra travel, with an environment for their children which is filled with natural engaging experiences in a huge outdoor environment which they have all helped create with suggestions and getting involved in our amazing working bee.

Yes, I said working bee, because our service is based around our community, the community gets involved to help us develop our service. This is something we plan to do at least once every year at the end of winter or at the start of spring, as the weather starts to warm up and the sun starts to shine a little bit more and a little bit longer each day. We do this to keep parents involved in the running of our service, to engage them together to create a sense of community between our families not just the children as they interact with our local community.

This year our working bee created an incredible natural flowing sandpit, mud kitchen and veggie patch, while also creating the children the flower garden that they so desperately wanted. But it also creating something for Addy, a native garden in memory of her grandad, my dad who brings our main grassy yard to completion with wide open space for the children to run around, create obstacle courses. Allows for picnic rugs to be thrown out on the grass with child chosen activities, in the great outdoors, in an environment which is welcoming, and is hive activity.

Talking about a hive of activity, everything we plant in our garden has a multipurpose, the flowers are important for bees, and once the garden is slightly more established, we will be adding an amazing flow hive to our service to provide honey for the children and our community. The bees then pollinate the huge range of fruit tree flowers which we grow throughout our entire service. We grow the things the children eat and eat the things we grow. For example, the children all love blueberries and strawberries, so we grow them, we have 25 blueberry plants throughout our garden, and now I think 100 strawberry plants. But we also grow mandarin, orange, lemon, grapefruit, finger lime, apple, and a cherry tree for the children to be able to watch grow and then eat the produce or preserve the produce in a form which will or is different to something have had before.

Our environment has been designed to be a children’s oasis, to engage and enthral the senses, ignite a passion for being in the wide-open spaces and encourage children to be engaged in the things their parents do outside and encourage parents to get outside with their children to create something together. Together with parents leading children and children leading parents, we can change the experiences from video games and screen time on the weekend to developing a garden in their own backyard allowing for connections between home and day care.

As a generalisation you will not often find set activities set up outdoors, instead you will find a stack of resources in a pile that the children will choose to create their own experiences from. You will find them collect the balls from around the yard and set them up in a line and see how far they can kick them across the yard, you will find them set up sticks and branches to jump over, or to show Chops the lamb how to jump over them. You will find the children searching for flowers of every colour you can imagine, smelling them, feeling them, just observing them or observing the insects collecting the nectar or pollen from them.

As I said at the beginning, children don’t need ‘stuff’ the experinces they create themselves from the things they collect allow for greater learning and development than I could ever hope for. During the first five years, children grow and develop at a rate that will never be matched later in life. These early years are crucial and the impact of children’s early experiences on their total development shows how necessary it is to meet their needs as babies, toddlers and pre-schoolers.

Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs tells us that for children to thrive, their greatest needs are physiological (food, water, warmth and rest) followed by safety ( security and health) and so on, and while I agree with this and a lot of my service is based around this, I have recently learnt more about the in-depth needs of children and ‘Phoenix Cups’. Phoenix cups theory is based on the ides that we all have 5 cups of varying sizes which need to be filled to thrive, it takes the idea of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and shuffles the pyramid around because once again not every child is the same and they all have varying needs to be meet in order to thrive.

For example, looking at the connection cup, we would be comparing this to the level of love and belonging with Maslow. I personally feel that the cups theory has helped our service develop exponentially and create faster and stronger bonds with the children and our families. Knowing how an empty cup looks in each child and how to fill that cup means I can create an environment which constantly fills the cups of each child from the time they enter our service to the time they go home.

Our outdoor environment has been designed with the children in mind and their needs for security and freedom, for self-expression and exploration and a sense of belonging, allowing them to be children and develop their own sense of connection to the environment. Their ideas are expressed, jotted down, and turned into a reality as often as possible giving them the ability to feel respected and recognised for their opinions and their achievements.

I believe that our outdoor environment is a growing project, there is always something new to create, something new to develop and grow. I believe that as children leave our service and new children begin, their own experiences, needs and requests will need to be accounted for, and we are very lucky to have the space to be able to do this and we are very lucky to have the community around us to help support the constant growth and development of our service.

A children’s oasis is ever changing and so are the needs of each child. So there is no need to fill your yard with ‘stuff’, children need to be allowed to be bored to allow their imaginations to grow. Children need to be children and by having opportunities to develop create and design they able to do that here. Children have the opportunity to grow and develop in a nature based and nurturing environment!