The advice from a former Nursery World reader - to smack a crying toddler to sleep - hit the national headlines when we looked back in our 80th birthday issue at some of the more bizarre childcare guidance that has been offered over the years.
Nannies nowadays are horrified that one of their number could have suggested such a brutal practice, even if it was in 1936. Similarly, early years practitioners today are aghast at the suggestion, made in 1925, that the cure for a fussy eater is to starve the child for 24 hours so: 'The wicked boy may be transformed into a likeable young person who appreciates his mealtimes.'
But what will people in 80 years' time make of our current customs and practice? Nursery World asked practitioners, experts and academics which aspects of advice and guidance future generations will spurn and scorn.
Outdoors
Settings still being registered with no or inadequate outdoor provision. I believe that all settings should have good outdoor facilities where children can engage with the natural world.
* Margaret Edgington, early years consultant
Literacy
I think people will look back and think we were absolutely mad to try to make children read fluently at four. When I say to anybody here in South Africa, where I have been staying, that this is what we intend to do in England, they say it is far too early. Here, right across the Rainbow Nation, they start their children at seven, regardless of which of the seven languages they speak. My hunch is that we will look back at trying to teach children of four years old to read as a complete waste of childhood.
* Professor Tina Bruce, Roehampton University
Junk food
Thank goodness for Jamie Oliver. I sat on the NDNA's quality assurance panel. You would look at a nursery's educational programme and it could be quite impressive, and then you could see the menu and be struck by the lack of knowledge about healthy, balanced nutrition.
* Linda Baston-Pitt, proprietor, Old School House Nursery, Stetchworth
Childcare and education
The crazy piece of policy is the continuing insistence, despite all the money that's being spent, on seeing childcare and education as two completely separate constructs in relation to young children's learning.
What the Government should be doing is making provision for young children on the basis of their rights to play, learn and grow in a stimulating environment where adults fully understand that well-being comes from being both cared for and educated in equal measures.
I hate the terms 'educare' and 'setting', but until a national debate is initiated, we'll be stuck with outmoded language and outmoded thinking in relation to young children and with a piecemeal policy where new bits just get 'stuck on'.
* Professor Pat Broadhead, Leeds Metropolitan University
Driving up standards
The piece of Government policy Newspeak that drives me to distraction is 'driving up' standards. This appals me on so many levels.
To start with, there is the underlying assumption of inertia or laziness or lack of any kind of proper concern among those who are responsible for the education of the nation's children. Then there is the macho language of 'driving up'. The implied model of human motivation - that we will try harder because we are told to, and made accountable, and made to feel inadequate - is also strangely absent from the scientific literature on this subject. This is because this has to be just about the stupidest, most ineffective and most counter-productive way of motivating anyone to do anything.
What they have very effectively done is to drive thousands of able, committed and imaginative young people away from being involved in the education of our young children. The only thing they have driven up is us - up the wall!
* Dr David Whitebread, University of Cambridge, Faculty of Education Extended schools
I am against putting very young children on school sites. The school environment is too formal. The trouble is the birth rate is dropping, school roles are falling and it seems to me that the Government is trying to justify school buildings being open. It is driven not by children's needs but by managing resources.
* Sylvia Archer, co-principal, the Children's House Nursery, Stallingborough, Lincolnshire
Rigid advice to parents
I think what is fundamentally wrong is the way we expect parents to behave in a very calculated way when they are doing things with their children.
This completely bypasses the possibility of parents being spontaneous and relying on their own educated intuition as to how they should be with their children, like when they should pick them up. It makes people calculated about the way they behave and I think it is the starting point of a lot of the problems that we have with relationships.
* Professor Frank Furedi, University of Kent
Televisions in bedrooms
Televisions in bedrooms. Children are just not getting to sleep early enough because they are watching TV. At one time, a child went up to bed, had a story and a soft toy and went to sleep. But now bedrooms are places of refuge, and places to play on the computer or watch television. You don't know what the children are watching and whether they are being frightened or disturbed.
* Meg Jones, NVQ assessor
Childhood
We have no respect for childhood. We sexualise our children. We do not give them a childhood and the freedom to explore and play and enjoy being children rather than the adolescents we seem to expect them to become from the moment they are out of nappies.
I am not saying bring back smocked dresses, but I have seen young children dressed in revealing, skimpy clothes that appal me. I wish we could celebrate in childhood the attributes that we would want our children to be imbued with: courage, strength of character and honesty, rather than this celebration of celebrity.
* Rosie Pressland, principal, Pocklington Montessori School
Pushing children too fast
I think we are trying to make young children do too much too young. My mantra comes from Magda Gerber who said, 'Observe more, do less'. Instead of pushing young children harder and harder we should sit back, be with them, see where they lead us and listen to them. We need to start a 'slow childcare' movement to match the 'slow cooking' campaign. I think in 80 years' time people will be saying, 'Why didn't they spend more quiet time with young children?'
The trouble with this push for formal education too young is that you don't just turn off the children - you put off the practitioners, too, because they no longer have the time to enjoy being with the children.
* Sue Owen, director, Early Childhood Unit, National Children's Bureau
Forward facing buggies
I am against putting very young children in forward-facing buggies. Up to the age of one the brain is at its most flexible, its most plastic. Being in a forward-facing buggy at this age is over-stimulating in the wrong way.
Babies have an instinctive fear of 'looming'. By being pushed forwards, babies are experiencing a constant rush of the world 'looming' at them.
They are deprived from looking at their mother and they are exposed to traffic fumes. I think mothers are affected too, because they can't talk to their babies as they walk along, so they switch off.
* Robin Balbernie, consultant child psychotherapist
Isolated mothers
We don't value families enough and we don't draw communities together, so we isolate young mothers with their babies. I know we have Sure Start, but that is operating in the most disadvantaged districts. Yet in so many parts of the country, in suburban and rural areas, young mothers are isolated.
Another aspect is that we seem to assume that babies are like a blank slate just waiting for us to pour everything in to them without appreciating how brilliant they are, and how they are active, competent human beings.
* Tricia David, Professor Emeritus
Training
What is currently bizarre is the whole issue of training. The Government is trying to get us to consider the early years as one profession, but we all know that it is made up of people with virtually no qualifications through to those with higher level teaching qualifications, including some PhDs. In what other context would they expect everyone to be dealt with in the same way?
The current fiasco over phonics is just one case in point. The Rose Review implies that it will only be necessary to offer minimum 'value for money'
training across the whole early years workforce, but what about the differences in initial training and intellectual understanding?
* Janet Moyles, Professor Emeritus
