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Following the accounts by Manna Friedmann and Nancy Brenner of the history of the Anna Freud Nursery, its recent trends and current practice, I should like to look at the impact of the Nursery provision on the development of the children in its care.
Children who have been deprived in their first years have a special need for a Nursery experience which helps to redress early shortcomings by offering those things which the environment may so far have been unable to provide: routine physical care, warm and consistent relationships, careful clarification and verbalization linking inner and outer experiences, and stimulating play and learning situations. Nursery provision of this sort can encourage body management, enhance self-esteem, improve relationships, stimulate speech development and intellectual functioning in general, and so facilitate adjustment to the community at large.
Where early deficits have not been such as to damage the capacity for forming positive relationships or meeting normal educational demands, most children will select from all that the Nursery has to offer whatever was lacking in their home environment and so spontaneously make good any developmental delays. The positive relationship which develops between the Nursery teacher and the child then encourages further development. The teacher flexibly and playfully meets the individual child at his or her developmental level, with respect for individual needs, interests and abilities, and the child moves forward, from the initial wish to learn primarily in order to please the teacher, to greater autonomy in all areas, because success has become an internalized source of self-esteem. Such a process encourages development along the line from play to work, and has a beneficial effect in the areas of object relationships, self-reliance, impulse control, body management, orientation in the external world and adaptation to its rules.
Most under-fives are amenable to a teacher's influence because their perso