Happy eaters

The way to a parent's heart is through role play, as one Sure Start team has found. Judith Napier reports.

Parents tend not to be switched on by the prospect of a workshop on how to communicate with their child. But offer a bit of slapstick featuring a giant baby, and it's a different matter. Gateshead Sure Start workers are prepared to don a bib and throw a temper tantrum for a fun way of conveying serious messages about child development.

Speech and language therapist Beryl Hylton Downing says: "My work is to do with communication, but I have to ride on the back of parents' concerns, and I am keen to jump anywhere that parents and babies have worries and where we can input into communication. Feeding is a very fraught issue for parents. If you hold an event about feeding, sleep, behaviour, you will bring in the parents. But communication on its own will not."

Beryl is a member of the multi-disciplinary team, led by health visitors and community nursery nurse Helen McIntosh, who run a two-hour Baby Bites programme at Gateshead Blaydon Winlaton Sure Start. The monthly sessions are billed as a weaning group, but the scope is in reality much wider-ranging, and includes speech and language. It is a useful way of getting communication messages across to a range of parents who would be otherwise unlikely to sign up to the topic. Feeding is something that concerns every parent. The group has attracted everyone from teenagers to a consultant psychiatrist.

I'll be mother
Beryl says parents are often so concerned about simply refueling their child that they forget that babies might appreciate the same sorts of relaxed mealtime experiences that adults value. Instead, they are fed separately from everyone else, often with a video for distraction.

That issue is addressed as part of each Baby Bites session, which covers a number of weaning issues. Parents enjoy a small buffet and are offered practical guidance, food tasting sessions, quizzes, and role play. During the speech and language slot, Beryl (or whoever is in the highchair hot seat that day) and her 'mother' act out various feeding scenarios.

Mum may talk to a friend rather than her baby, chatter without pause, feed the baby silently, or put on a video - all missed opportunities for communication between mother and child. In the final sketch, Mum is attentive and attuned, minimises distractions, and has a conversation with the baby, allowing the baby time to respond. Group members are invited to comment on the different scenarios, and decide what works best. The parents are invited to raise any queries or concerns with speech and language therapists, and leave with a Talk To Your Baby handout.

Beryl says: "Our practitioners understand the aim of each sketch, and are prepared to ham it up a bit to make it amusing. The mums just laugh and laugh and laugh. And it evaluates well. Parents enjoy it, they are offering solutions themselves, and remember some of the silliness of it. "

Approachable
She believes Baby Bites works for several reasons. "It reaches a wide cross section of parents, not just the usual parents who come to everything. The group is informal, and we try not to be 'preachy teachy', and step back from the 'expert' model. Practitioners seem more approachable in this informal setting, and parents feel more comfortable talking to them."

Helen McIntosh agrees that the informal, parent-led sessions work well. "I've been involved from the start in 2004, and seen numbers build up from two or three parents to 12 to 15 per session. We have a community café at the cent re and parents tell me what they've tried at home, based on what they've heard about at our group, so it's a continuous thing. Parents say how useful they find the group. And I really enjoy the role play!"

The concept is being highlighted on the Literacy Trust's Talk To Your Baby website resource. Liz Attenborough of the Literacy Trust says: "Because we thought it is such an interesting idea, we wanted to share it more widely. I am always on the lookout for such imaginative approaches. I think it shows the incredible creativity of early years professionals in finding ways of getting talk high up the agenda. This way, parents may not even know they're learning anything, they are just being amused by it."

Beryl sums up: "As far as communication is concerned, our slot means that parents are able to put baby's mealtime into the context of what they themselves feel is the ideal mealtime: good food, good company, good conversation, no rush, no distraction. And it's very simple and easy from my point of view. I can just turn up with my baby hat and do it!"

(Judith Napier, Nursery World, 09.02.06)