When I watched the television series My Children's Secret Life, I did not understand it at all. It didn't match my view of and experiences with preschool, educators, children – and it contrasted sharply with an exciting reflection I had experienced that day in a work team here in Västervik, where they are constantly working to bring out the best in children, says Eva Andersson, preschool teacher and development leader in the municipality of Västervik, a few months after her article "The perspective Our children's secret lives make me despair" was published here in Modern Barndom. The article received a lot of attention and appreciation at the time, and now again when the magazine Förskolan has published it along with several articles about this TV series. So how does Eva Andersson view the series today and what she wondered about then?

"I still don't understand why people can't see the series as a portrayal of a preschool context and wonder about that," says Eva Andersson when Modern Barndom contacts her after rereading her point of view in the magazine Förskolan (no. 2, 2021), where it was published in a special feature on "How could the SVT series 'Our Children's Secret Life' create such a polarized preschool debate?"
In a long introductory article, Förskolan's editor-in-chief Kjell Höglund writes about this debate – and that Eva Andersson's letter gave him a better understanding of the critics' reasoning, but also that it "says something about the misunderstanding of this whole pro-and-because he believes that the answer to her question about which preschool the series depicts and what its purpose is, is actually very simple: "'Our Children's Secret Life' does not depict preschool activities at all."

The explanation provided is still difficult to understand when the entire context of the program series is structured like a preschool; even though it does not depict a real preschool, the environment is still that of a preschool. They use concepts and teaching methods from the preschool context, they gather a group of children as if they were in a preschool, they use preschool teachers, they talk about preschool... So it's difficult to understand how you're not supposed to think of it as a preschool, says Eva, adding:

Furthermore, I still find it difficult to put children in some of the situations they are put in in the series, because we are all shaped by the different contexts we find ourselves in.

"And I react strongly to the program series' psychological portrayal of children, saying that this is how a four-year-old is and this is how a five-year-old is. That's not how I see or think about children."
Eva Andersson says that she wrote to Kjell Hägglund after reading his editorial entitled "Unfair criticism of SVT's celebration of preschool" in Förskolan No. 8, 2020, and sent him her Synvinkeln.

"Now I don't understand anything," I wrote, and that he must help me understand what he had written about the program respecting children on a rare level and demonstrating the academic excellence of the preschool, and about the educator's mission to create a proximal zone for each individual.

Eva says that he responded quickly and respectfully, liked what she had written, and shared his views on the matter—and that her text was eventually published there as well, alongside articles by Kjell Hägglund and the child psychologists in Våra barns hemliga liv (Our Children's Secret Lives). But as Eva Andersson has been careful to point out, she is not looking for debate but for understanding, and even though she does not yet understand, the articles in the magazine Förskolan (which have also given her a new wonder about how something can be seen as a "preschool tribute" and at the same time as something that has nothing to do with preschool) have given her many insights into "Yes, that's another way of looking at it," as have all those who have contacted her directly or through the discussion threads she has read.

Thanks to my text, I was actually invited to Komvux childcare training here in Västervik. They had worked with this series and watched one episode in groups and worked with it. When they were ready to present, I was invited to join them, and in the dialogues that followed, Eva recounts, looking incredibly pleased, as if recalling another memorable day recently.
– I'm thinking about the lecture Ann Åberg gave here, when she gave so many good examples of how to work in preschool. Imagine if you could make a TV series about something like that, a series where different preschool teachers get to talk about how they actually work, in so many different ways, and thus contribute to a different perspective on children, pedagogy, and preschool.

Text: Maria Herngren
Image: Charlotte Sohlman