"Childhood is a verb"

"Play is joy, when we play we are fully integrated into ourselves and we feel at one with the world. This is the wisdom of childhood. It does not have to be taught and yet, in order to bear fruit later in life, it needs to be sustained and appreciated."

1. Over the course of this COVID lockdown, we’ve gotten many requests for advice from acquaintances and Parent’s Nook group members on how to design a space where their kids could play. I tried to help out with articles/research articles and book suggestions. Many times I tried helping with the documents our Play Director wrote in the founding stages of PN. But I also think that in our Nook community, we have a huge set of early parenting experts, who are doing the incredible work on which much of our foundation lies.
2. When I started thinking in this line, I also figured out that we initially started out as a community and space to support the new parents of the community and thus over the course of last few years we are in touch with the vast number of like minded doulas, lactation consultants, mental health experts, baby wearing experts, educators, play-experts, outdoor play therapists  who have been super appreciative and supportive of our project. They may be collectively called early Parenting Experts (to make it easier for all of us to understand) who would support our parents through the incentive oriented collaboration. We will come up with details soon.

What we are proposing :

1. I wonder if the collective guidance of the early parenting experts could be introduced to the parents of our community. (I researched and chatted again with a few community members and early parenting experts and they are excited about the idea)
2. There is obviously a need for accessible resources and open ended childcare+ parent care  to help us build an environment where our kids can flourish the best they can in these strange and solitary times, and as these resources are hard to find we find that many times, we as parents take the options which are easily available. The best resources still need a lot of research, for which we might need time which is super rare with a baby in tow and also the support of a parenting community which gets time to build specially if you are a first time parent. With evolving times childcare and parent care needs to evolve.
   
3. What we are iterating to build is an incentive oriented collaborative network where parents, educators, lactation consultants, mental health experts, baby wearing experts (vouched and referred by Parents’ Nook) can collaborate to create enriching experiences for parents and children. We believe in the strength of our community and how working together is the best way to ensure our children experience and value the support we can collaboratively provide for them while they build their own understanding of the world around them.
4. For the first few months it would only be available to parents who are using Nooks, we would love to be seen as the one stop solution for early parenting from birth till age 6.

Thanks to Made Yates for their help in editing and bringing the article to life. Thanks to Samantha Infeld, Christina Assirati, Virginia Moreno and Melissa Gomez for helping me conceptualize the idea.

Thanks to all those parents and educators who gave me their time and patience to pitch the idea to them while it was still evolving. I am grateful for their time and trust in Parents' Nook.