Celebrating special occasions is a good way of helping children feel connected to their communities and families. The main celebrations you are likely to want to cover are, of course, Mother’s day and Father’s day.

Mother’s Day originated in the U.K back in the Middle Ages as Mothering Sunday, a day when children who had moved away from their home could return to their ‘mother church.’ As children often left home very young, sometimes as young as ten years old, this was also a good opportunity for them to meet up with their families again. The date for Mothering Sunday is set by the church and falls on the forth Sunday of Lent each year.

Nowadays Mothering Sunday is often call Mother’s Day and has become a day to celebrate all the mother figures in our lives.

Father’s Day is not as old as Mother’s Day and it is less clear how it started. However, lots of people think it was started in America by a woman called Sonora Louise Smart, whose father raised her and her siblings after their mother died. She thought that Father’s should also have a special day and local clergymen liked the idea, making the 19th of June 1910 the first unofficial Father’s Day.

The idea grew and in 1972 President Richard Nixon made Father’s Day a legally recognised holiday by law.

Families come in lots of different shapes and sizes and so you may find yourself caring for a child who lives in a family without a traditional mother or father figure. However, when you know the spirit in which both days started, I think helping children celebrate mother and father figures, however they may be represented, still stays true to the original intent.

Click on any of the links below for ideas and resources to help you celebrate the mother and father figures in your setting.