Kindergarten cancels Mother’s and Father’s Day celebrations in 2025 and renames the holiday ‘Family Day’

A preschool has canceled Mother’s Day and Father’s Day celebrations and renamed the holiday ‘Family Day’ in a bid to be more inclusive.

Early Childhood Management Services (ECMS), which runs dozens of preschools and childcare centers in Melbourne, emailed parents on Thursday just three hours after school ended for the year.

The email from St Helena Preschool in Eltham North explained that the two holidays would be celebrated differently, with both days renamed ‘Family Day’.

“Next year we will have Family Day to honor any caregivers or important figures in your children’s lives,” the email said.

‘Children will be encouraged to express gratitude and recognize those who play a supportive role in their lives.

‘We won’t be having festive celebrations like Mother’s Day or Father’s Day, but we will make it a fantastic Family Day celebration.’

The change applies to more than half of Melbourne’s 69 private centres.

Kieran Kearney, CEO of ECMS, said people sometimes found it difficult to accept change, but Family Day was a more inclusive holiday.

CEO of ECMS Kieran Kearney (pictured) said change is ‘difficult for everyone’ and emphasized that Family Day would be more inclusive than Mother’s Day and Father’s Day

“This isn’t just a micro issue, this is the recognition that family means different things to different people in different communities,” Kearney said. 7News.

‘Change is difficult for everyone and we find change difficult too, so it can be difficult to accept that change.’

Daily Mail Australia has contacted ECMS for further comment.

Parents with children in nursery school said they were ‘blindsided’ by the decision and had not been consulted about the new holiday.

Some took to social media to share similar sentiments, with one parent branding the renamed celebration ‘ridiculous’.

‘Ridiculous. It is not inclusive if it does not include people who want to celebrate Mother’s Day or Father’s Day,” they wrote.

“What could be more inclusive than excluding 97 percent of the population?” a second person commented.

But others defended the move.

“Isn’t it already inclusive though? We usually give gratitude to all the father and mother figures in our lives,” they wrote.

It comes after several early learning centers replaced gendered words like ‘mother’ and ‘father’ with non-gendered words like ‘parents’, ‘special person’ and ‘family’ (stock image)

‘It’s not an exclusive biological mother-and-father thing. If replacing them with a ‘family day’ is your idea of ​​inclusivity, then you never understood why we have those days from the beginning.”

Others argued that having one party instead of two was easier for working parents and that the holiday included all people raising children.

“Honestly, as working parents with a child in daycare, this wouldn’t be an issue for my household,” one person wrote.

‘If preschoolers don’t have parents or parent-like people in their lives, who is actually raising them? “God forbid a grown adult should feel left out of something happening in a preschool,” said a second.

It comes after an elite private school in NSW turned a Mother’s Day stall into a ‘Family Day’ stall in May this year.

Students from nursery to year 6 at Hunter Valley Grammar School, 310 kilometers north of Sydney, were invited to buy from the gender-neutral stall.

Last year, several early learning centers hosted events that replaced gendered words like “mother” and “father” with non-gendered words like “parent.”

The shift in thinking was sparked by a new resource from advocacy group Early Childhood Australia, which provided teachers with a guide to engaging diverse families on Mother’s Day and Father’s Day.

The resource urges teachers to give children the opportunity to make a gift for a ‘special adult’ who is not their mother or father, and to avoid gender stereotypes.