The mayor of Ann Arbor, Mich., the Honorable Ingrid Sheldon, announced at a city council meeting carried on community access television that Allen Creek, our psychoanalytic preschool, would “bring honor to the town.” The town's biggest kitchen supply company donated all the classroom cabinets for the new school building. The window blinds came from another firm, and the cement contractor took 10 percent off his bill. The local bank donated money to the scholarship fund, sponsored a benefit, and sent volunteers to do the fall cleanup of the grounds. What is going on here? Why has our small midwestern town given such support to our avowedly psychoanalytic preschool?
For the past seventeen years, a small group of child psychoanalysts has volunteered to provide regular consultation to area preschools and daycare centers. Meeting together monthly as a study group, we devised GRIP (the GRaduated Intervention Program) for helping teachers and parents address developmental issues in the context of school. Many cohorts of parents, influential school directors and teachers, and 800 children each year have come to see the psychoanalysts as resources for understanding more about early development and helping devise practical and economical interventions. The preschool community and the early intervention specialists in our school district were enthusiastic when we suggested a psychoanalytic preschool. They felt that it would be good for the community to have available a setting where techniques for supporting family development could be devised and tested, and troubles in growing up could be addressed before elementary school.
Allen Creek Preschool in Ann Arbor is one of a handful of preschools actually operated by psychoanalysts (the Al Solnit Nursery at the Anna Freud Centre, Hanna Perkins School in Cleveland, Houston-Galveston Child Development Center, and Lucy Daniels Preschool in North Carolina are others). It has been an amazing adventure for a group of enthusiastic and devoted clinicians and educators to start a grassroots 501(c)3 non-profit organization with no outside funding sources.
After incorporating in 1994, we began parent-toddler groups in borrowed church space, then built our own building, and now have an actively functioning preschool staffed by able teachers and experienced volunteer child therapists. The path through city government, making friends with our neighbors who worried that the children might be rowdy, construction, licensing, hiring, snow days, and so forth has been long and instructive. We could not have foreseen how varied and fascinating were the new things we had to learn about!
In the course of this first full year, we have had a major benefit, a concert generously donated by the Metropolitan Opera tenor Jerry Hadley. The funds raised at that lovely evening in our local historic movie palace were enough to match a challenge grant that bought the school equipment. A further foundation grant built our playgrounds. Ann Arbor is fortunate to have an organization called Non-Profit Enterprise at Work, which has granted us a scholarship for generating marketing and development plans. Our research plans have recently been honored by a grant from the Research Advisory Board of the International Psychoanalytical Association. So we have also been learning about fundraising. It does not always come easily to psychoanalysts, but it turns out that the best spokespeople are those committed to the ideas we value deeply.
What makes Allen Creek a “psychoanalytic preschool?” Part of the answer lies in our effort to integrate psychoanalytic developmental knowledge with the curriculum, educational practices, and tone of the classroom and the school as a whole. Fundamental to the Allen Creek approach is that each family has its own family consultant who meets weekly with parents, observes in the classroom, and confers weekly with teachers. We currently have more than thirty therapists who together volunteer over 7,500 hours each year (yes, 7,500!) to provide family consultation to the parents of Allen Creek pupils.
Family consultants bring many years of experience to Allen Creek. They are seasoned child therapists, child and adult psychoanalysts, analytic candidates, psychoanalytically oriented social workers, psychologists, and child psychiatrists. Among them are many members of APsaA. These are dedicated professionals who volunteer their time because they want to learn more about early development. They enjoy being out in the community, meeting the needs of young children and their parents, and sharing psychoanalytic knowledge about development with a wider audience.
Family consultants work with each other in a “buddy system” of peer supervision and meet weekly in a group conference with school staff. Once a month, consultants meet together to discuss what we are learning about the development of young children, aspects of the developmental phase of parenthood, and techniques of parent work in a population that spans the spectrum from optimal development to recognized developmental delays, interferences, or disabilities. It isn't always easy for us to shed the perspective of the consulting room and find new ways to articulate the application of psychoanalytic theory to normal development as well as pathology. We have had to expand our psychoanalytic language and understanding to revive the idea of psychoanalysis as a general psychology with application to the full range of children's functioning.
Allen Creek Preschool offers a rich curriculum designed with particular attention to the children's developmental levels. Mastering feelings and the tasks of self-care and learning about the expanding world around them, the toddlers and preschoolers in our classrooms are helped to put feelings into words, communicate their wishes and needs, and take pleasure in what they are doing. Knowing themselves and feeling understood by others allows for maximum use of the activities and skills offered by our sensitive and highly trained teachers. A curriculum based on the children's own environment — the weather, seasons, cycle of the year, their families and friends and the community — links inner and outer experience and develops self-motivated learning.
Thanks to the efforts and generosity of friends and colleagues, and the support of businesses and individuals in the Ann Arbor community, we have been able to offer scholarship
Kerry Kelly Novick is a child, adolescent, and adult psychoanalyst and a child and adult supervising analyst on the faculty of the Michigan Psychoanalytic Institute. She is the clinical director of Allen Creek Preschool.
support to twenty of the thirty families now enrolled in our parent-toddler classes, preschool, and pre-kindergarten. Our Early Childhood Outreach continues to expand to bring consultation services to various centers. Teachers, preschool directors, hospital pediatric departments, special education and early intervention programs, and community agencies all make use of Allen Creek's depth of psychoanalytic developmental knowledge to enhance their services through discussion groups, consultation, and lectures. Parent and community volunteers help with many school functions. We have been fortunate to receive in-kind help from many area businesses.
Together all these people devoted to the welfare and healthy development of young children and their families have created a new school community that brings psychoanalytic ideas to a practical application that all can appreciate and understand. It turns out that there is no special secret to generating enthusiasm for psychoanalysis in the community. Everyone cares about children's happiness and well-being now and in the future; everyone knows that parenting is a hard job that deserves support; everyone knows that primary prevention and early intervention make human and economic sense. When psychoanalysts share these concerns in a concrete way, giving of time and expertise with no strings attached, people respond generously.