I am doing my Masters and my current course is about play based learning, the value of play, in early childhood. I took the course thinking it was about play based learning fullstop, I just didn’t notice the ECE caveat because of course ECE is play based (aparently not!!) I thought.

There are so many words. Words I have to look up. There are so many concepts. For fun, I read some of the paragraphs to Dad and H, and they tell me when all they hear is blah blah or start laughing. All this about play for kids learning…. It has struck me that we have forgotten our nature. Forgotten that we are animals and that our young, like the young of our closest relitives, are unable to survive without adults as children. We have also forgotten that as a species, we can’t survive as individuals… We have forgotten that we have been successfully rearing children for years.

So I was thinking about why we need all the words. This is my theory – childcare is woman’s work, it is for the simple minded, the un-educated, it is lowly paid. It has low esteem. Childcare is a victim of neoliberalism.

As women have tried to climb the equality ladder (encouraged to get money making jobs to support GDP), they are perpetuating this idea, yet at the same time, having children that they adore, that they want to be successful within the system, like they are… so their expectations about what they expect of someone else who is looking after their child have increased, and what childhood even is, has changed. They are after professionalism. The government has also become involved, and they like quantifiable results, and wait, there is now money involved. So, to cover the cognitive dissonance of this low value job that calls to some, we start to intellectualise as a way of justifying the value of the profession, we find ways to feel respected. Parenting itself becomes undermined as only professionals know how to look after children properly.

When my ansestors, who were so above their animal nature and even nature itself, to the point of rejecting it thanks to religion, the class system, progress and status, arrived in Aotearoa to see Māori treating their young naturally- as people and in a loving way, they forced their culture on them and made a whole population damaged. I include the white supremacists in this damage as I think it is unnatural and hurtful to one’s self to think of children as lesser people. We have just had a government inquiry into state abuse of children that we will not learn from. Children are being institutionalised at even greater rates than ever before, despite professionalising and monetizing early childhood parenting is not valued and children know this. They know that their parents expect better for them than a job in childcare. People think it is odd that I prioritised my child and Homeschooling her over getting a job, a house, a profession..

I love looking after kids. I get my energy from them. It isn’t rocket science, but it is more important and requires skills that we would be better people if we had them.