Viareggio, Father’s Day activities canceled in kindergarten: “This is how we avoid discrimination”

From recurrence to discrimination. In Viareggio, Father’s Day becomes a coincidence and the kindergarten cancels the theme workshop, dividing the parents. It happened at the Florinda kindergarten, where the director Barbara Caterini canceled the didactic activity scheduled for March 19, to avoid discrimination against children who do not have a father. And that they should have remained in another classroom, separated from their classmates.

The director explained the decision, interviewed by the newspaper La Nazione. Upstream of the provision there would have been the complaints of “five or six parents”, who did not find the exclusion of their fatherless children from the laboratory just. “I found their complaints to be shared – Caterini’s words – because a laboratory organized in this way is discriminatory against those who do not have a father”.

The didactic director of the Florinda school therefore suggested organizing another activity in different ways, inclusive for all children and involving other family members: mothers, grandparents, uncles, sisters or older brothers. Among the other ideas hypothesized by Caterini, in a letter to families, there would be a workshop dedicated to spring or, in June, to the arrival of summer

The laboratory is a moment in which the parents (in this specific case, the fathers) share an hour or two with their children within the school. For the head teacher, “there is no longer a model family. Today there are open and particular situations that must be respected and protected”.
However, the decision did not convince the other parents, who contested above all the timing, explaining that some dads had taken time off to dedicate time to their children on this special occasion.