A Great Place to Be a Child

09/27/2017

To love and be loved is to feel the sun from both sides.
David Viscott, 1938 - 1996, American psychiatrist and author

In the book, Caring Spaces, Learning Places, originally written by the highly admired late Jim Greenman, and newly revised by Mike Lindstrom, Greenman wrote:

"Good space for children (and adults) is the result of asking the right questions to establish goals and thinking through the important feelings and behaviors that are to be supported: independence, interdependence, respect for property, adventurousness. Good space doesn’t force behavior contrary to goals, such as dependency, or overemphasize unimportant goals, such as a tolerance for waiting.

As child care settings face many of the same tasks as those at home, inhabitants should ask questions that are asked at home: 'How does it feel to live and work here all day, day after day?' That question is often pushed aside by: 'What do we do here?' and 'What should we accomplish?' These are critical questions, but without asking the former, we lose sight of the primacy of the day-to-day quality of life.

Perhaps the most fundamental evaluation of a child care setting is to ask:

'Does it feel like a great place to be a child?'
'Does it feel like a great place to be with a child?'"

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