Is Love Important in Early Years?

Love is not a word that is commonly used in early years education and care contexts in England. And yet, studies have shown that love is important. In my own research (Cousins, 2015) with practitioners from a range of settings, including a children’s centre, love was constructed as important and related to wide aspects of practice. A broad definition is needed for love in settings in order to facilitate professional discussions.

HISTORICAL REFERENCES TO LOVE

The word ‘love’ was in wider currency until around the 1960s. De Lissa (1949), for example, wrote about children’s generosity in showing love to their teachers:

The child gives his love very generously to the adults in the nursery schools and expects love from them. (de Lissa, 1949, p.143)

Gardner (1956) wrote that a child often shows very marked improvement, in many and often unexpected ways, once he is convinced that he is really loved. (Gardner, 1956, p.19)

Fletcher (1958) wrote about the importance of love between adults and children and stated that “it is a love of children which is real, unchanging and very, very understanding” (p.19).

By the 1960s, however, love was less widely encouraged. Winnicott (1964) wrote about the importance of love between a mother and a child but suggested that a teacher should adopt a very different role:

She has, in contrast to the mother, technical knowledge derived from her training, and an attitude of objectivity towards the children under her care. (Winnicott, 1964, p.195)

Langford (1968) wrote that teachers’ attitudes to children “should reflect the necessarily temporary nature of their relationship” (p.144).

Love began to re-emerge in the USA from the 1990s. Goldstein (1997) wrote about the intensity of love in settings. Although practitioners only have children on a temporary basis, the quality of their love for children may be just as intense as the quality of love in families. Noddings (2007) argued that people need love, and recommended that loving encounters become an integral part of the professional role.

In England, Gerhardt (2004) stressed the importance of love from a biological perspective, arguing that people’s psychological make-up is, to a significant extent, shaped in relation to their formative experience of being loved, or not. Gerhardt demonstrated that there is a direct correlation between feeling loved by particular others as young children and becoming emotionally balanced for life. Manning-Morton (2006) argued that “children do not thrive if they do not also receive loving attention” (p.45) in the form of touch.

Page (2011) found that mothers wanted practitioners to love their children. She developed the concept of “professional love” to denote a style of love that was like the love parents offer their children, while at the same time posing no threat to the parent-child relationship. “Professional love’ was conceived to “support dialogue between carers and parents” (Page, 2011, p.11). Page (2013) found that the mothers regarded love as more important than education or cleanliness when choosing providers for their children, and suggested that “for too long the subject of love has been neglected” (p.8).

Manning-Morton and Thorp (2015) wrote that children benefit from knowing that they are loved by practitioners. In my own small-scale, qualitative research (Cousins, 2015), I found that practitioners constructed love as important in their work. The topic stimulated discussions about varied aspects of their practice, including teaching children lessons for the future, showing love through touch, relationships with parents, the extent to which they drew on their training or life experiences in relation to love, and allocation of work within teams according to people’s natural propensity for love. Page (2015) later carried out research with a wider sample and developed a toolkit to support practitioners with this aspect of their work.

In Australia, White (2016) wrote about teaching with love. Children learn by the way they are touched and the loving sounds of those who communicate with them. From White’s perspective, practitioners need to tune into children’s diverse understandings of love, and love children in ways that children recognise as love.

SOME DIFFICULTIES ASSOCIATED THROUGH LOVE EXPRESSED THROUGH TOUCH

Although love is finding its way back into educational discourse, there are confusions and complexities associated with it. The subject of touching young children has become associated with paedophilia, and sometimes seen as sexual. Physical contact between adults and children is constructed as dangerous (Sikes and Piper, 2010). And yet experts (e.g. Gerhardt, 2004, Manning-Morton, 2006) argue that it is important to touch children.

In a study by Powell and Goouch (2012), baby room practitioners acknowledged the importance of loving children in their care, whilst at the same time reporting that child protection concerns influenced their day-to-day approach with the children. Thus there were unwritten restrictions on the extent to which they felt they could be demonstrative in their love or act fully in accordance with their beliefs about the importance of love. Powell and Goouch found that restrictions on what practitioners felt they could do, arising out of cultural concerns with child protection matters, had an impact on the quality of love offered in settings.

On the one hand, teams must draw up robust safeguarding policies, and on the other, they must make sure that these policies are not over-restrictive. Over- restrictive policies in relation to touch may inhibit the intuitive side of people’s professionalism and create a tension between what they consider privately, as ethical people, and what practitioners are prescribed to do as public professionals.

SUPPORT FOR COMPLEX WORK INVOLVING LOVE

There is a need for a new awareness about the complexity of work that involves love. Manning-Morton (2006) emphasised the importance of practitioners developing as mature, emotionally intelligent, self-aware adults, and “becom[ing] experts in themselves” (p.48). She recommended that practitioners receive high levels of support in order to meet day-to-day challenges, including instances when they may be rejected by children, and emphasised that work with very young children involves practitioners’ hearts as much as their minds.

Osgood (2010) argued that practitioners need “improved support” (p.131) for this work. She proposed that early years practitioners be allowed to draw on their “life experience and wisdom” (p.130), as indicated within her concept of “professionalism from within”. Harwood, Klopper, Osanyin and Vanderlee (2013) found that love was very important to practitioners and proposed that more opportunities be established for them to talk about the emotional aspects of their roles.

Elfer (2012) and Page and Elfer (2013) recommended that managers facilitate opportunities for staff to talk about complex aspects of their work. Leaders should establish a climate in which it is acceptable for there to be no clear answers to questions, problems and issues may be raised, uncertainty can prevail, and practitioners are able to talk about their feelings and concerns.

Goouch and Powell (2013) found that “critical spaces” (p.83) for talking and thinking helped practitioners “to develop a sense of their own worth in their work and to develop a ‘voice’” (p.87). “Time for talk” (p.84), they found, helped practitioners to think about their practice and gain a better understanding about their work.

Professional conversations needed to define love in early years settings

My own research (Cousins, 2015) found that a wider definition was needed for this complex topic. I suggest that this definition be generated by practitioners in the field. Accordingly, leaders should facilitate discussions about affective aspects of work with children in out-of-home contexts. The following questions could be used to stimulate such discussions:

• Is love desirable in settings?
• How does love in settings differ, if at all, from love in familial contexts?
• What support is needed for key persons when children they have grown to love leave their care?
• Is love connected to learning, and, if so, how?
• Can education and care be offered without love?
• How is love the same as/different to compassion?
• Can everyone love as children need to be loved?
• Should applicants to training programmes be selected on the basis of how they love?
• How should trainees be prepared for affective aspects of their work?
• How should practitioners be supported with affective aspects of their work?
• What can leaders do to better support this love work?

References

Cousins, S. (2015). Practitioners’ constructions of love in the context of Early Childhood Education and Care: a narrative inquiry, (Unpublished EdD research thesis, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, England). Retrieved from: http://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/8855/

de Lissa, L. (1949) Life in the nursery school and in early babyhood. London, England: Longman, Green and Co Ltd.

Elfer, P. (2012) Emotion in nursery work: work discussion as a model of critical professional reflection. Early Years, 32 (2), 129–141.

Fletcher, M.I. (1958) The adult and the nursery school child. Toronto, Canada. University of Toronto Press.

Gardner, D.E.M. (1956) The education of young children. London, England: Methuen.

Gerhardt, S. (2004) Why Love Matters: how affection shapes a baby’s brain. London, England: Routledge.

Goldstein, L.S. (1997) Teaching with love: a feminist approach to early childhood education. New York: U.S.A.

Goouch, K. & Powell, S. (2013) Orchestrating professional development for baby room practtiioners: raising the stakes in new dialogic encounters. Journal of Early Childhood Research, 11 (1), 78–92. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1476718X12448374

Langford, G. (1968). Philosophy and education: an introduction. Basingstoke, England: Macmillan Education Ltd.

Manning-Morton, J. (2006) The personal is professional: professionalism and the birth to threes practitioner. Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, 7 (1), 42–52. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.2304/ciec.2006.7.1.42

Manning-Morton, J. & Thorp, M. (2015) Two-year-olds in early years settings: journeys of discovery. Maidenhead, England: Open University Press.

Noddings, N. (2007). Philosophy of Education. (2nd Ed.). Cambridge, MA, USA: Westview Press.

Osgood, J. (2010) Reconstructing professionalism in ECEC: the case for the ‘critically reflective emotional professional’. Early Years: An International Research Journal. 30 (2), 119–133. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09575146.2010.490905

Page, J. (2011) Do mothers want professional carers to love their babies? Journal of Early Childhood Research. 1 (14), 1–14. DOI: 10.1177/1476718X11407980

Page, J. (2013) Will the ‘good’ [working] mother please stand up? Professional and maternal concerns about education, care and love. Gender and Education, DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09540253.2013.797069

Page, J. (2015), Professional love in early years settings (PLEYS), Attachment toolkit. Booklet 2. University of Sheffield.

Page, J. & Elfer, P. (2013) The emotional complexity of attachment interactions in nursery. European Early Childhood Education Research Journal, DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1350293X.2013.766032

Powell, S. & Goouch, K. (2012). Whose hand rocks the cradle? parallel discourses in the baby room. Early Years, 32 (2), 113–127.

Sikes, P. & Piper, H. (2010). Researching Sex And Lies In The Classroom: Allegations of sexual misconduct in schools. Abingdon, England: Routledge.

White, E.J. (2016) Introducing dialogic pedagogy: provocations for the early years. London, England: Routledge.

Winnnicott, D.W. (1964) The Child, The Family, and the Outside World. Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books.

Sarah Cousins is Director of Early Years Programmes in the Centre for Lifelong Learning at the University of Warwick. She has experience as an Early Years teacher trainer, teacher, leader, consultant, and inspector.