Reflections from Finland - what if we gave childhood a little more space?
Emily Clarke
Principal of St Alipius Parish School-Ballarat East
There are some things from Finland that have sat with me over the last week since my return. I came home with pages of notes, ideas about leadership and learning, education and research, conversations with educators from around the world and plenty of things I want to think about in our own context at St Alipius. But strangely, one of the things I keep coming back to is much simpler: children, and what it means to actually let children be children.
One of the things I noticed in Finland was the independence of children. I saw children walking and riding to school by themselves at 7 years of age, serving themselves lunch with real plates and cutlery, navigating their way around spaces without an adult constantly hovering around, and being trusted with responsibilities that we might sometimes be hesitant to give to children here. There seemed to be an underlying belief that children are capable. It wasn't that adults weren't caring or attentive; rather, there seemed to be a confidence that children need opportunities to do things for themselves if they are ever going to become independent.
It has made me think about how much we do for children in our society and how we are constantly removing the roadblocks for them so life feels easier. We want them to be resilient, independent, confident and good problem solvers. We want them to cope when things don't go their way. Yet sometimes, in our desire to care for children and make things easier for them, we remove some of the very experiences they need in order to develop those qualities. We step in quickly when there is a problem, solve the friendship issue, find the lost jumper, tell them how to do something, remove the risk or fill the silence when they are bored. Most of the time, we do these things because we care. But I wonder whether, sometimes, caring for children can also mean giving them the space to struggle a little, to make a mistake, to have a go and to discover that they are actually more capable than they thought.
I think this is something worth considering for parents and schools alike. We have gradually developed a bit of a culture of ‘rescue and fix’. As parents, it is incredibly hard to watch your child struggle, particularly when you know you could probably make the problem disappear with a phone call or an email to the teacher or principal. A child comes home upset about something that happened during the day and our instinct is often to find out what happened, contact the school and make sure it is sorted. There are certainly times when adults need to step in, and our responsibility to children should never be underestimated. But there are also times when perhaps the most helpful thing we can do is pause and ask, "Have you tried to work this out yourself? What do you think you could do?" Maybe the child needs to sit with the discomfort for a little while, have a difficult conversation, make a decision, try something that might not work or simply discover that the problem wasn't quite as big as it first felt. I don't think this is about parents caring less. In many ways, it is about trusting our children more. It is about resisting the urge to make everything okay and instead giving children the chance to experience themselves as capable.
This has also made me think a lot about play. We talk about play quite naturally when we think about young children, but somewhere along the way play seems to become less valued as children get older. It can almost become something that happens before the "real learning" begins and then once learning begins, there is no need for play. Perhaps play doesn't disappear as children grow; perhaps it just changes.
A five-year-old might spend an afternoon building an imaginary world with blocks. An eight-year-old might invent a game with complicated rules. A ten-year-old might be outside with friends, building something, making up a challenge. A twelve-year-old might play sport, create something, experiment, compete, or test themselves in ways that don't necessarily look like traditional "play". There is an enormous amount happening in those moments. Children are negotiating, solving problems, managing disappointment, taking risks, creating, communicating and figuring out how to be with other people. I think one of our problems is that we step in so often during these experiences when we sense it’s not working or not going how we would like.
I've been wondering what children learn when we don't organise the experience for them. What happens when we plan the day from the minute they get to school to the minute they go home. Then when they get home their afternoons are filled with organised activities and technology.
A really interesting question for me is:
What experiences of childhood are currently being displaced?
For example:
- boredom
- outdoor play
- imaginative play
- face-to-face negotiation
- physical activity
- tinkering
- waiting
- exploring
- making
- taking risks
- being unsupervised
This brings me back to risk, which is probably another idea from Finland that has stayed with me. Of course, we have a responsibility to keep children safe. But I am increasingly interested in the difference between keeping children safe and removing every possible risk from childhood. They aren't the same thing. There is a difference between danger and challenge, between putting a child in harm's way and giving them an opportunity to test themselves, and between protecting a child and preparing a child for the world.
I keep coming back to the question: what are our children capable of doing that we don't give them enough opportunity to do? In Finland it was automatically assumed that ‘children can’. I feel we have slipped somewhat into the ‘children can’t’ style of thinking. When it was gently suggested that we adopt a ‘no shoes inside for Term 2 and 3’ the first initial comments related to ‘imagine them trying to get their shoes on and off!’. We slip into this deficit thinking and then we avoid the change to avoid the challenge.
We have Scope and Sequences for all things academic, maybe we can develop a Scope and Sequence for building independence from F-6. Do we understand what children actually need at different stages of their childhood? What does play look like for a six-year-old? What does it look like for a 12 year old? What should independence look like for a nine-year-old? What kinds of risks should an eleven-year-old be able to navigate? How much adult direction do children really need? What might happen if we gave them more agency and space to create?
I wonder what our classrooms, playgrounds and routines might look like if we started asking these questions more deliberately. Perhaps we would think differently about the environments we create, the expectations we have, the way we respond to behaviour and even the amount of time we protect for children to simply play, move, create, explore and be with one another, separate to ‘academic learning’.
And finally, the role of technology in classrooms. It was so refreshing to walk into Finnish primary classrooms and not see chromebooks all over the desks. I wonder how much the use of chromebooks inhibits the parts of childhood we want to preserve. To what degree do the use of chromebooks in the classroom minimise genuine connection and engagement between each other. How is the continued use of screens at a young age altering the ability to attend and focus? What would it look like if we went back to teaching without the use of a chromebook? So much to think about.
I have enjoyed the struggle of pondering these thoughts over the last week without actually having the answer. I'm wondering whether, in our effort to prepare children for the future, we sometimes forget that they are living their childhood right now. Perhaps our job isn't only to get them ready for what comes next, the next progression point on their report, the next assessment, the next year level. Perhaps part of our job is to give them the space, freedom, challenge and trust to truly be present in their childhood (without us hovering around so much and without them staring at a screen as often as they do!).
My final questions that I’d like to explore further are:
- What would a developmentally responsive school look and feel like?
- What do children need to flourish at each particular stage of their lives, and how does our school create the conditions for that flourishing?
- What does a rich childhood need to contain?
- How do we work together to raise capable, confident and independent children?
