Vortrag
Historical Perspectives on Infant Care and Child Education

PD Dr. Friederike Kind-Kovács will give the talk "From the Vajkai Sisters to Emmi Pikler: Women’s Child Care Activism in the Wake of the two World Wars" at the conference "Historical Perspectives on Infant Care and Child Education" in Budapest.

Emmi Pikler’s internationally well-known work in the mid-20th century was pioneering as it transformed notions and practices of child and infant care, especially in residential institutions. Her approach was grounded in the notion that children, even at very young age, are competent human beings whose development needs most importantly a safe environment, secure relationships, respectful care and free movement. Her understanding of children challenged contemporaneous models and practices of child and infant care. Yet, Emmi Pikler’s innovative work did not emerge in a vacuum. Her work relied on the groundbreaking theoretical and practical work of the pediatric nurses Julia Vajkai and her sister Rózsi. Their efforts to relieve children’s suffering in the aftermath of the First World War laid the foundation for respectful, relationship-based infant and child care in institutional settings. Already in the 1920s Julia Vajkai emphasized the importance of sensitive, individualized routines and stable caregiver-child relationships — principles that Emmi Pikler would later develop into a comprehensive pedagogical approach. Creating nurseries, kindergartens and children’s workrooms for impoverished, starving and disadvantaged children and youngsters in Budapest of the 1920s and 30s, Julia and Rózsi implemented progressive pedagogical ideas and practices. Drawing on the two sisters’ hands-on experiences in Budapest’s slums, Emmi Pikler systematized these practices in the 1940s, integrating them with her medical and developmental research to form the core of the Emmi Pikler Institute’s methodology. On this basis, this paper seeks to firstly engage with the continuities of progressive infant and child care practices from the post-WWI to the post-WWII period. Secondly, this paper seeks to compare and contrast the pedagogical ideas that were promoted by the Vajkai sisters and by Emmi Pikler. And lastly it aims to examine how instrumental individual child care workers were in shaping and altering the ways in which child protection came to be understood and implemented in one country in Central and Eastern Europe in the two postwar periods.