Nursery World - Nursery Management: Working with Parents

The benefits of messy play are well known to practitioners, but many parents are still wary of it for a number of reasons, reports Julie Mountain, who carried out a survey on the subject

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When did allowing children to become dirty through play become a problem? Is it, in fact, a problem? Mainstream media reports would suggest that modern childhood comprises helicopter parents and cotton-wool kids; that resilient, adventurous children are an endangered species.1 Yet the rise of Forest Schools and increasing demand for mud kitchens contradict this. A quick glance through the photographs in any copy of Nursery World indicates high-quality learning taking place outdoors in settings across the UK, much of it involving hands-on, practical, messy play.

My own conversations with practitioners, alongside observations in their settings, suggest that while there is a degree of resistance to messy play, the direction of travel is towards more opportunities for children to explore their world using their whole bodies. I invited practitioners to share their experiences to provide a messy play ‘snapshot’ and offer advice for settings looking to establish or consolidate messy play as a core offer.

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