My Conference Papers
11th Biennial Fröebel Conference 2025
Fröebelian Pasts, Present & Futures
University of Erfurt, Thuringia, Germany
31st July - 2nd August,2025
Friedrich Fröebel (1782 - 1852) was a pioneer of early childhood education and the kindergarten. His philosophy, including his Family Song book, is often studied from an early educator’s perspective.
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I argued that rest and sleep routines and rituals can be a form of play, a therapeutic restorative, calm play that infants can engage in, co-regulated by their carer. The uniqueness therefore is the position of both the child and the parent's voice, often secondary or absent in many parenting advice books. It also raises agency of voice within the parent partnership relationship, whereby the parent's voice is strengthened. This focuses on how settings meet the parents and families approaches rather than the families following the settings approaches.
By exploring the data through a Fröebelian lens - with specific attention to rest and sleep rituals and routines in the home - it potentially offers families a meaningful and educational approach to enhance relationships and bonding, through relational care. Rather than viewing rest and sleep as a ‘problem,’ it also raises understanding about unity and connectedness between the parent and infant, with critical thinking about the successes and tensions of its relevance for parenting and relational care in the 21st century.
BSA Auto/Biography Study Group
Summer Conference - HOME
University of Reading
16th July - 18th July, 2025
Infant Rest and Sleep Routines and Rituals Within the Domestic Home
This project is informed by both professional information and often contested commercial advice about rest and sleep routines and rituals, both in England and internationally within the domestic home. This paper shared alternative scholarly considerations by exploring rest and sleep routines and rituals within a Fröebelian lens, with reference to his publication The Mother Songs, Rhymes and Stories, contributing to the wider narrative about unity and connectedness during rest and sleep routines and rituals.
My research offers a new perspective in the light of a Fröebelian philosophy to the wider connections of infant restorative care during rest and sleep rituals, with infants in the domestic home. In securing a British Academy grant, this paper shared the initial findings of the interviews carried out with mothers about their experiences in the domestic home when caring for their infants.
The focus of this paper was the human and non-human materials interactions in the domestic home. Some preliminary analysis was also included, with the long-term objective of publishing a monograph in 2026. By arguing for the relevance of a Fröebel approach to the introduced term ‘Restorative Care’ during rest and sleep in the home, I introduced how interactions, and transitional approaches build and maintain positive healthy relationships, contributing to, as well as challenging, the existing advice and literature within rest and sleep praxis.
