Our future leaders are currently busy running away from pre-school

OF COURSE we must condemn it, and we do. Whenever it is revealed that toddlers have walked out of creches or nursery schools or playgroups and headed for the M1 or whatever dangerous road is nearest to them, we rightly wonder what the hell kind of operation the people in charge think they are running.

They should be closed down, we say. We stop short of wanting them put in the stocks so we can throw tomatoes at them, but that’s really only because stocks are in short supply around Ireland at the moment and in addition, we’re all so broke, any softish tomatoes are going into soup, not onto faces, no matter how much those faces deserve them.

Once the moral outrage dies down, we forget about the whole thing, mentally filing it under “Things that should never happen”.

What we don’t ever do is talk to the children who went AWOL. Not to ask them why they did it, because child development experts say you should never ask a kid under six years of age the “why?” question because they don’t know the answer to it and if they make up an answer under pressure, are likely to be dubbed liars. No, just to explore what happened.

If we talked to the children who wandered away, we might find the experience much more interesting and productive than giving out about the people who allowed them to escape the repellently positive atmosphere of the pre-school: “Have you SEEN Suzi picking up ALL her BRICKS?” (Yep, and even at three, Suzi has all the hallmarks of obsessive compulsive disorder. Have you SEEN her wipe the GERMS off her bricks?)

It’s an area crying out for research. I would posit the theory that children who slide out of pre-schools and head either for home or for a more general wide blue yonder, later prove to be innovators and fearless explorers.

I doubt if Ranulph Fiennes attended a nursery school, but if he did, I’d lay money he tried to escape a couple of times.

I’ve been doing some research on this unexplored early years category: The Early Escapers. Some of them seem to have waited until primary school before consciously setting out to run away from home. What they packed up to take with them is instructive.

One runaway weighed himself down with an elaborate car-racing toy, not because he planned to use it wherever he ended up, but because he was damned if he was leaving it behind for his younger brother to play with. The weight and shape of the box grievously slowed his progress, allowing his father to catch him before he reached the main road and negotiate with him about the conditions under which he could be persuaded to return. He still feels guilty over caving in.

A young woman who works with me ran away, having spent several days planning it. What scuppered her escape attempt was an issue she failed to consider until it was too late: Fodder. She found herself with her little pink wheelie suitcase at the end of the cul-de-sac where she lived, and there she halted while she weighed up which of her schoolfriends’ mothers provided the best food. It became clear to her that none of the meals on offer matched those put up by her mother. Despite this realisation, she couldn’t face the come-down of going back home but was stymied in her search for a good excuse to do so, when her father drew up in the car, rolled down the window and suggested she regard this attempt as a rehearsal. “It’s not great weather for running away,” he pointed out. “But you’ve experimented with it today and know how to do it better in future.”

Her father, she explains, was a chemistry teacher, as well as being pretty hot on child psychology. She got into the car and went home. He promised he would sneak her case into the house so her mother never saw it.

In my research among child runaways, it’s nearly always their father who negotiates the return to home base. Sometimes an older brother plays a conciliatory role, and now and again, the escapee just gets fed up with the whole thing and sneaks home by themselves. One variant on the theme was offered by the man in my life, who, as a kid, together with his younger brother Seamus, annoyed their mother so much that she told them she was putting them out of the family home. “Pack your stuff and get out,” was her order to the eight and six-year-olds.

The older brother figured he was not the one to seek rapprochement, since his mother had long ago decided that he was the ringleader in any wrong-doing, was seriously smart, and that any promise of change from him would be no more than a ruse. Accordingly, he prepped his younger sibling, who had the advantage of angelic looks, to go to their mother and plead, using the line “Please can I stay one more night in my own wee bed?”

It worked, if only because it made their mother laugh and brought her down from the rage rafters.

The difference between primary school wannabe runaways and pre-schoolers is that the latter are so young when they make their break for freedom that they have no useful recollection of it later. It becomes a war story for the adults surrounding them and a point of accusation against those supposed to be taking care of them, but is never used as an indicator of unique talent or instinct on the child’s part. It’s as if the child were a passive prop in the production or an accidental catalyst in the experiment, whereas they were the spark that lit the flame, the instigator of the entire crisis.

MY RESEARCH has not yet been peer-reviewed or published in an internationally-recognised scientific journal, but I’m pretty damn sure, nonetheless, that the aspirant runaways aged between five and 10 that I interviewed last week were showing their later leadership in that first episode.

I would further suggest that childhood runaways rarely turn into unexciting plain vanilla adults. Just as torturing small animals seems to be a pretty good indicator of trouble in later years, so trying to get away from family life seems to be a pretty good indicator, not just of success in later years, but of success based on innovation or obvious leadership. While nobody would wish to promote it as deserving a gold star for major potential, it may well be that seeking to get out of pre-school is an unsung indicator of promise.

Part of my day job is to look at the CVs of individuals seeking high-level jobs. I often think, as I plough through their post-post-post graduate degrees and diplomas, that we attribute value to the wrong things in the wrong period. MBAs and other post-graduate degrees prove someone can study, not that they can initiate, lead or drive, whereas proof you tried to run away from pre-school when you were three and a half establishes that, even as a toddler, you quite literally thought outside the box.