Chapter 6: Finnish Daycare: Caring, Education, and Instruction

In current educational discourse, children are looked upon as active, capable, and resourceful, even though their lives are highly dependent upon decisions made by adults. To grow and develop, children need love, care, concern, and instruction. Adults must respond to these needs in one way or another.

In Finland’s past, most children grew up in agricultural communities, where parents and grandparents both looked after them and expected them to work from the earliest ages. Children were taken care of in the context of daily agricultural work. They received attention as necessary and feasible under the circumstances. As Finland began to industrialize in the 1960s (Alestalo, 1986; Kortteinen, 1982), parents started to demand that society arrange daycare for their children. Publicly funded daycare commenced in Finland during the 1970s as support grew for daycare provisions to allow parents to work outside the home. Later, increasing attention was paid to “education” as a shared activity between families and public day-care. However, “education” in the Finnish early childhood context was (and still is) synonymous with “upbringing,” a more overarching construct than “education,” as the term is used in some other parts of the world to refer primarily to academic learning. The term “early childhood education” entered Finnish discourse in the 1980s.