My best friend Lisl is my go to person for all things early child development.
For the last four or five years she has been telling all those around her about
Emmi Pikler, a Hungarian paediatrician, and her infant education theories. She works in a nursery run along the guidelines of Pikler and has been doing a lot of course work alongside her job. It's a pleasure when you see her interacting with babies and toddlers, you won't find a more loving or patient person and to see her accompany conflicts is something you've never experienced before. (When I worked as a nanny, I was picking her brain on a regular basis)
Needless to say, I'm proud of her, have huge respect for her work and can't wait to see where it will take her.
On my day off last week I went along to the Pikler play group she runs. She had asked me to take photos of all mums and toddlers, but I was almost more excited to finally see her Pikler world in action :) You can find information on a horribly outdated website
here, see a bit of material
here or read about main guidelines
here. There is a lot more material in German to be found
here.
A couple days later we visited a
toy maker/carpenter, the only one who makes Pikler work materials in Austria. If you're ever around the Attersee region, it's totally worth to pop in.
If you have a baby or toddler, I can only recommend to check out one of the play groups. All the mums at the group I visited were raving about their time there, as is my friend Claudia who has been taking Miss K to one in her area.
