Cinco-marias: why this title?

On July 9th, the publication of the section titled Cinco-marias, an allusion to a joke that few children now know and which are part of a group of play activities considered a World Cultural Heritage, began.

From time to time readers ask us: Why was the name given to the name Cinco-marias?

Eugênia Pickina^(*), the responsible for the section and author of the texts that compose it, chose this title to communicate to readers that playing is a serious thing in childhood and implies a series of experiments carried out through family dynamics and regular contact with nature: backyard, garden, neighbourhood square...

As soon as she got her first job as a teacher, Eugenia sensed her interest in childhood, child care. Still very young – not even twenty years old - she had been hired by a private school to help a nine-year-old boy who could not read properly. He had, at the time, a diagnosis of cognitive disorder. Throughout the year she worked with this boy, she had to deal with her inexperience, her fears and the boy's resistance, and still help him, for despite the difficulties he was a child eager to learn.

She remembers thinking, "I'm worried. This boy is here and I do not know how I can help him read." Intuitively, however, she recalled that children like to feel safe and that there is a figure of authority in control. Time passed, then in the course of class, she read firmly to him out loud. She chose short stories and read them in a leisurely and patient manner, because intuitively she knew that this would give a positive result. After three months, the exercise was reversed and the boy began to read aloud to her what he himself decided, according to the texts she selected for each class: poetry or short stories, and both felt life improve.

While teaching for adults at the University, she also encountered older people and diverse backgrounds with learning difficulties, and in many of them there was distrust, frustration and resistance to learning, often proving negative in the way of looking at the world - with little creativity, misunderstanding and non-acceptance of what life has to offer good and bad, and lack of empathy and inability to accept mistakes, draw lessons from them and move on.

Later, when she studied the master's degree, dedicating herself to the studies of the woman and the family, the taste for childhood reappeared. At the same time, at that time, she had taken classes in Childhood Anthropology in a specialization course in Homeopathy and, with this, she concentrated more vigorously on children's topics, later seeking in Spain a training related to floral therapy and, in a particular and deeper way, with a focus on family and child development.

Nowadays, an important part of her work is guided by and through childhood, through various writings, talk meetings in schools, floral service, children's books permeated by socio-environmental care and other means.

Eugenia Pickina says: "I consider the child a subject of the present, a being-in-the-world. With the changes of society, especially in the last decades, exceptions respected, the situation of the childhood has worsened a lot. Because of the economic needs and the role of women in the labour market (which is fair), the child began to be delivered earlier in crèches, nurseries, schools, suffering the consequences of early weaning. I struggle, then, in my own way, that parents help their children to develop their potentialities, trying to show them that attention to childhood is essential for emotional and cognitive development, for the formation of the character of the human being - learning love, joy, kindness, community spirit, humanistic feelings, artistic sensitivity, among others."

In this sense, the texts published in the Cinco-marias section fit together to remind parents that they need to be informed and to make the most of the child, because she/he needs those moments with them to grow well. The family home is the ideal space for the child to learn to be and to live with. The daily life in the parents' house is the most important thing in the formation of the child. Those who have time to care for and give them due attention will form human beings who can improve the world.

Parents, those who have children or want children, Federico Mayor Zaragoza makes a timely warning that should guide the care of children, especially in childhood: "The issue is not the world we are going to leave for our children, but the children we are going to leave to the world".

^(*) Specialist in Philosophy (UEL-PR), Master in Political and Economic Law (Mackenzie-SP), floral therapist (Madrid, Spain), writer of children's books.