Paolo Sarti
Corriere della Sera, December 8, 2009 - Chronicle of Florence
When in 1974 the OMNI (Opera National Maternity and Childhood) closed its doors, the Italian Communists were faced with managing a complex and cumbersome legacy made of maternal counseling, childbirth preparation classes and nursery schools. Those kindergartens were built on farms, in factories or near or next to the offices, with the express purpose of "assisting" and child care for working women to protect their jobs (of course, was protection for the employer or leave the child to the nest or leave work!).
Assistance made above (and often solely) of care and hygiene, attention, food, physical protection. The children lived space and time on stereotyped behavior and inescapable: time of potty meant that "one should" pee or poop together and hour there: and there were bandages to anchor the recalcitrant children potties.
hour of jelly they put all the children lined up on the chair to go and fill their mouths with the spoon. But it was perhaps a bad personnel, sour?! Absolutely not, because the staff of a nursery was asked to return the child to his mother reassuring her that he had eaten all had sleep ... and did not hurt (this was less easy to ensure that a nanny could also have twenty children of different ages and in all areas over inadequate and poorly protected). Thanks to enlightened
assessors, in the nests of Florence began to enter the teaching: fewer doctor visits and more attention to the complex needs of children. It was not easy to explain to staff that had worked for years without taking the child's hands and fed him by force, that food was also exploring the food, maybe a bit spargendoselo 'on face: it was not wasted, it was growing. This premise
"historic" to remember that the evolution from old nests Business was a complex process, and only through a long process it was possible to transform structures of pure stands in places where children can express their full potential.
It was just psychology, pedagogy, attention to the needs of growing child who deeply innovated the nests, since the early eighties onwards. To give more strength to change it also decided to delete the word "nursery" to speak more correctly of "nests", sweeping away even from the end of welfare as might remain.
Since then great strides forward. Of course I am not all roses and flowers, and still needs to be done. But today especially alarming the feeling that those involved in the nests where its "lost his memory."
are the new condominium projects and nursery business that scare, and even more credits are private: solutions "incomplete" and without warranties of competence and quality.
So you envisage new structures that offer opportunities to stand alone and I'm referring to the nests company, which does not guarantee or connected with the territory or cultural openness. The nest, because of its preparatory function, can not help but participate in initiatives and cultural stimuli, the neighborhood in which they arise.
Then there is the communal nest, with no guarantee of pedagogical skills / education, and finally voucher to spend in private for the family that has no place in public.
The concept is that public service is not able to open new spaces and then passes the ball to the private: it recognizes its limits and "make good" parents, with public money, for his failure.
The direction is inexorable new baby-parking. Lost
any attention to childhood, lost all sense of social and political place of "public" training of individuals (see school), lost a valuable piece of childhood, seen more as an obstacle to production rather than as instrument of investment in the future.
But in some areas, also lost a certainty of physical protection for children, such as episodes of Pistoia, with ill-treatment in a private nursery, probably could have been avoided if the existence of a system of training and retraining of personnel requirement was mandatory (as in public) the ability to open and manage these spaces.
Paolo Sarti, pediatrician - Florence
sarti.paolo @ tin.it
