A kindergarten has cancelled Mother’s and Father’s Day celebrations and renamed the holiday ‘Family Day’ in a bid to be more inclusive.
Early Childhood Management Services (ECMS), which manages dozens of kindergarten and childcare centres across Melbourne, emailed parents just three hours after school finished for the year on Thursday.
The email from St Helena Preschool in Eltham North explained the two holidays would be celebrated differently, renaming both days to ‘Family Day’.
‘Next year we’ll be holding Family Day to honour all caregivers or significant figures in your children’s lives,’ the email read.
‘Children will be encouraged to express gratitude and recognise those who play a supportive role in their lives.
‘We won’t be holding titled celebrations like Mother’s Day or Father’s Day but we will have a fabulous Family Day celebration.’
The change applies to more than half of the 69 private centres across Melbourne.
ECMS CEO Kieran Kearney said people sometimes found it difficult to accept change but that Family Day was a more inclusive holiday.
‘This isn’t just a micro issue, this is recognising that family means different things to different people in different communities,’ Mr Kearney told 7News.
‘Change is hard for everyone and we find change hard too, so it can be difficult to accept that change.’
Daily Mail has contacted ECMS for further comment.
Parents with children at the kindergarten said they were ‘blindsided’ by the decision and that they weren’t consulted about the new holiday.
Some took to social media to share similar sentiments, with one parent slamming the renamed celebration as ‘ridiculous’.
‘Ridiculous. It’s not inclusive if it doesn’t include people who want to celebrate mothers or fathers days,’ they wrote.
‘What could be more inclusive than excluding 97 per cent of the population?’ a second person commented.
But others defended the move.
‘Isn’t it already inclusive though? We usually give gratitude to all mother and father like figures in our lives,’ they wrote.
‘It’s not an exclusive biological mother and father thing. If replacing it with a “Family Day” is your idea of inclusiveness, then you’ve never understood why we have those days from the beginning.’
Others argued having one celebration instead of two was easier for working parents and that the holiday included all people who raise children.
‘To be honest, as working parents with a kid in childcare this would be fine by my household,’ one person wrote.
‘If kindergarten kids don’t have parents or parent-like people in their lives, who are they being raised by anyway? God forbid a grown adult feels left out of something happening at a kindergarten,’ a second said.
It comes after an elite private school in NSW changed a Mother’s Day stall to a ‘Family Day’ stall in May this year.
Students from kindergarten to year six at the Hunter Valley Grammar School, 310km north of Sydney, were invited to purchase from the non-gendered stall.
Last year, several early learning centres hosted events that replaced gender-centric words like ‘mother’ and ‘father’ with non-gendered words like ‘parent’.
The shift in thinking was sparked by a new resource from the Early Childhood advocacy group, which provided educators with a guide to including diverse families on Mother’s and Father’s Day.
The resource urged educators should give children the option to make a gift for a ‘special adult’ who wasn’t their mum or dad and to avoid gender stereotypes.