Kindergartens: healthy and inclusive places for all?

Avoid building Kindergartens with large rooms with parallel ongoing activities. Relational competence must be learned through guidance from available and reliable staff in concrete social situations.

Background: All children in Norway have a legal right to access Kindergartens from the age of one year. According to the national Framework of Kindergartens these institutions are defined to be health promotive and health preventive and to combat social exclusion. The purpose of this presentation is to questions (i) if kindergartens are healthy and inclusive institutions for all and (ii) what is needed to make them one step closer to the frameworks’ ambitions.

Methods: In collaboration with 24 children with a huge variety of abilities (aged 4-5 years) we carried out a cross sectional multi-method study design, based on huge range of qualitative methods. All children included had enough verbal language to enter a group dialogue. A constructivist grounded theory analyzes were carried out.

Results: Children do not talk spontaneously about health, physical activity, or social inclusion. When listening to children’s voices, all children preferred stable organizational structure, physically small places indoor or outdoor equipped with different types of construction materials and available and reliable staff. At such places children made meaningful play and social interactions with each other, and such activities made them physical exhausted, created joy and well-being in everyday life. When activities and everyday life rhythm allow them to participate in the peer-community it seemed to give rise to increased self-confidence.

Conclusions: There is a huge potential in constructing healthy and inclusive milieu for all children independent of abilities in kindergartens if children’s voices are heard. Then staff must follow up children’s initiatives and guide them in a tolerant direction, which will contribute to social inclusion and strengthen their self-confidence. Self-confidence is in existing literature described to be developed in primary-relations, e.g. parent-child-relations, and fundamental in identity-construction. With an institutionalized childhood staff in kindergartens not only become employees but they become important primary-relations and actors in children’s health- and confidence-building.