Parenting can be a hard road, but Jennie Johnson argues much of the stress of those first five years is self-inflicted, and she’s here to help
In 2003, with small children, a busy, demanding career and every stress and strain and ridiculous guilt of working mothers everywhere, Jennie Johnson had an epiphany.
“I’d had the morning from hell, which everyone can relate to, where everything had gone wrong and I’d realised that the answer to almost everything that had gone wrong that morning was to have high quality childcare. I wrote myself a list detailing everything I wanted to help make life easier in terms of care for my children while I worked.”
While most of us might stop at a list and a moan with likeminded girlfriends, Jennie actually went on to found Kids Allowed, a childcare group with, by 2020, eight state-of-the-art, purpose-built nursery to pre-school settings, providing childcare to around 2,000 children – and their grateful parents.
In 2020 Jennie took the hard decision to sell Kids Allowed, and it passed into the safekeeping of Clare Roberts, founder of nationwide childcare business, Kids Planet. But rather than sit back and chill, Jennie had bigger plans.
Jennie’s new venture, My First Five Years, is not a childcare business in the sense that she takes your children and cares for them while you work, but is very much a childcare business in that it provides support, guidance and reassurance to parents during the early years of their child’s learning and development, with one overarching message – relax, and enjoy it.
“It was a bit like Kids Allowed,” she says. “A genuine eureka moment. It was a realisation that all the years of experience that I have that’s in my head, and in the heads of others I work with, that if parents understood what we knew they would relax more and enjoy their child’s first five years. They’d know what they’re looking at, they’d see things that are important that most parents don’t recognise as important and they’d see progress and momentum.”
To this end, Jennie partnered with Alistair Bryce-Clegg (an Early Years educational specialist and author who Jennie worked with at Kids Allowed to put in place their own Early Years training and programmes) to create an app providing parents and caregivers with thousands of expert-created activities, ideas and interactions for users to help their child’s brains, character, and personality develop most effectively in their first five years. Written so baldly, it might seem like it’s just another way to help parents stress about milestones and ask themselves if their child is hitting them when they should, but dive deeper and it’s the exact opposite.
“It’s literally the antithesis of that,” Jennie explains. “We hate the fact that the whole parenting app space now is dominated by anxiety-inducing apps that make statements like ‘12-week-old babies should be doing this and this...’ and go on like that all through the child’s learning journey. It’s cruel. We don’t do that. We don’t refer to ages, at all. When you download the app, we ask you some basic questions to give us your child’s starting point, and then tell parents what’s likely to be next and what they can do to support their child to get there, and once they have mastered that skill, they can save a video or a text note, and then the app will open up what’s likely to be next. There are over a thousand little steps children take over their first five years, which we know about, but parents won’t - it’s the little things, like your child grasping for something which you probably wouldn’t notice and register as a development stage, but it is.
“I honestly think there’s never been a tougher time to be a parent,” Jennie says. “There’s a terrible thing we call ‘comparanoia’, where parents are constantly comparing their child to others and have a need for affirmation. This really isn’t doing your child any favours. Research has shown currently 85 per cent of parents don’t think they’re doing a good job.”
Jennie and Alistair’s app reflects parents’ need to measure their child’s progress, giving them a space in which to understand what that progress looks like, and a place to record each new step, but in a way that reassures, that calms and that gives those parents confidence to trust in themselves – and if not wholly in themselves, at least in Jennie and Alistair.
“So much of parental paranoia is driven by social media,” Jennie says. “It has a lot to answer for. The constant drip of these Insta pictures the perfect families having the perfect day out, the perfect playdate or setting up the perfect play opportunity – it's making it all look unattainable and making parents think they’ll never be good enough, because their day with their child doesn’t look like that. I feel that this Insta-worthy parenting is toxic, the whole toxicity around parenting. And these toxic apps, as we call them, they can have up to seven or eight million users, internationally, and we want to get parents off those platforms and onto ours.”
Alistair adds: “What we know is that universally, across the world, parents are, in really good ways, interested in their child’s development, but also that misinformation is just rife. It’s that parental insecurity about ‘my child will be best served if I give them lots of structured activities to do’ as opposed to ‘my child will be best served in life if they’ve got really strong and emotional attachments, if they’re resilient, if they’re curious – all the things that just come from being together in a family. Lots of parents think ‘if my child’s not signed up to Kumon maths, not horse-riding, not doing ballet, not doing... then my child will miss out’ and actually that’s the antithesis of really what massively benefits child development.’
Jennie is nodding in agreement. “The reason I know this works is that I’ve got three kids and Alistair shared these ideas with me when my third was two years old, and it was like somebody had lifted a weight, and the scales just dropped from my eyes. I changed the way I parented overnight, and it’s really simple to do. Life becomes easier, and it just makes a lot of sense, as well. I had a much better experience with my third one because of these things I changed, and I want to bring that to other parents too.”
In November last year Jennie and Alistair launched their own podcast, with their first topic being Good Enough Parenting.
“When I first heard the term ‘good enough parenting’ it jarred, as I thought well really our kids deserve the best of us, but when you dig under what it means, it means that what you’ve done today, is good enough – they'll be fine; what you were able to give them today is what you were able to give them today. There are so many ways to enjoy time with your children and give them what they truly need – a walk outside, a cuddle on the sofa, tipping out a load of pots and pans and handing them a wooden spoon... It doesn’t have to be anything big and grand. Our app has activity ideas for every single day, a mix of six, all really simple to do. Not insta-activities, but real, easy ideas for things in the house or outside that allow you and your child to spend some quality time together in a way that will help them develop but where there’s no pressure.’
In short, quality time doesn’t need a hashtag. My First Five Years has been designed to gift parents permission to ditch the guilt and the worry, to recognise the negativity of comparanoia, and find the joy in parenting.
#nailedit
