Nursery World - Positive Relationships: Working with parents

Look at the information that children and their parents are giving you inadvertently to build communication with them, says Helen Bromley.

At first sight, the comedian Jack Dee might not appear to be the most useful starting point for considering effective communication with families. However, a sketch of his that I saw recently during an episode of 'Live at the Apollo' had much to teach everyone about the reality of being a parent of a child in the early years.

Briefly, Dee describes the pressures that parents face as soon as their child starts nursery, likening it to 'having another child that you have to keep happy'. He tells the story of discovering a note from the nursery, late at night, requiring his child to dress as an insect the following day. He describes his frantic attempts to produce something suitable, only to turn up at the nursery the following morning to find that one mother has created a costume for her daughter that enables her to fly and produce honey! (His own child, incidentally, is in a yellow T-shirt wound around with black tape, trying to figure out why she's dressed as a bee.)

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