At the end of April I saw a tweet where a guy posted a video about what he, and others who had re-tweeted it, called ‘a baby cage’. I was astonished to see the words and couldn’t imagine what it might look like – I envisioned a playpen with a closed top. Or perhaps the cot (crib) that a little boy I know was zipped into each night in his first couple of years! (His family lived in a one-bedroomed apartment and obviously had no other means to confine him!) Can I say that his parents now find him ‘hard to manage’, he has been diagnosed with ADD and just been expelled from his second school and he’s only five years old?
So I clicked on the link for the ‘baby cage’ slide show, the alternate to the video. Well would you believe it! It wasn’t a cage at all, it was simply a small, very small, porch-like structure outside a window — not much different from the old fire escapes in most major cities in America.
This ‘cage’ was used in England in the 1950’s and unlike a real cage it was open into the room. The outside was covered with wire so that neither the baby nor the toddler who was with him could fall out and down to the road by accident. I should add that the baby pictured looked what we English would call ‘very bonny’, a robust healthy-looking baby.
This was not an impoverished family, they must just have lived in a flat a couple of storeys up.
I immediately recalled the balcony of the old London Hospital I was admitted to to have my tonsils and adenoids out, in the same era — I was about six years old. The balcony outside our second or third floor ward was likewise covered with wire but there was free access in and out, for the ‘fresh air’ deemed so necessary for that generation.
We British fresh air fiends will go to almost any lengths to make sure young children are outside! The winter after I was born in England was the coldest on record but during those months I was put outside in the pram! I was about six months old!
Of course you only have to read Richard Louv’s book Last Child in The Woods and you will learn about nature deficit disorder.
Whenever I dream about having my ideal childcare facility the amount of accessible outdoor space is a big part of the picture. Unless you have worked with young children, your own or in a facility, and seen the vast and positive difference in the developmental trajectory and emotional functioning of young children, even babies, who have adequate outdoor time and space you cannot know the difference it makes.
Just hearing about a very ‘green’ local Montessori school that only has concrete or artificial grass in its small outdoor space causes me pain! Particularly for the little boy who left our facility (which by then finally had two large outdoor spaces for the children to play) just because of parental convenience. He had poor eye contact and strange hand motions at four months of age — he was already on my watch list!
Do a drive by of any of your local daycare facilities and inspect their outdoor space, I suspect you will find that there is little to no space for outdoor play, some daycares are even in church basements — yes there are one or two basements in Florida! If you find a school or daycare with outdoor space work out whether or not there is free access to the outdoors for all children under five years of age. If there is no free access please find out how much time the children actually spend outside. In my experience children age three and up get approximately 30 minutes a day outside! Close to the ‘none’ that my son had at an American primary school in the mid-1980’s!
Even a small ‘caged’ balcony is better than being inside all day long.