A Meeting Place

The Covered Garden is a space for conversation, play, and rest where, through encounters and separations, bonds are forged between children, parents, and caregivers. This transition from a family environment to a more social one is a fundamental experience for both children and adults. The experience lived at the Covered Garden, acknowledged and symbolized, allows bridges to be built between family and society.

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The Covered Garden opens the family unit to the wider community

 With the support  of their mother, father, or another close relative, children meet other children and adults. Everyone has the opportunity to speak and be heard. In a safe environment, children can experience their desire for separation or connection, explore, take risks in sharing, and thus prepare themselves for future separations and encounters: those of daycare, preschool, school... those of life.

At the Covered Garden, everyday experiences find expression, allowing children to more calmly face what is unfamiliar and new.

 

The Covered Garden supports children in their early years

The arrival of a child creates a family. It gives each member a new place. The loving atmosphere in which the child grows up has a profound impact on them. They respond with their smile and the intensity of their gaze, with their joy, but also with their tears, their tantrums, and changes in their appetite or sleep. When this body language is understood by those caring for the child, it opens the door to meaningful communication. At the Covered Garden, children and adults alike can find these connections of words and heartfelt affection that give them a sense of security and identity.

 

The Covered Garden welcomes children and adults alike

 The welcoming team changes every afternoon. It consists of four people, men and women, one of whom is a psychoanalyst. It offers everyone the discreet opportunity to express the difficulties, sorrows, and joys they experience with their child. With a welcoming person, they can find the words that break the isolation and give meaning to the intimate movements of our lives: fears, sadness, laughter, happiness, anger, and wonder.

 

The Covered Garden: A place to grow up in the heart of the city

At the Covered Garden, children from all over the lyon metropolitan area and beyond come together. They discover, alongside other parents and the welcoming staff, the unique and multifaceted ways of communicating and living together. The Covered Garden isn't just for young children and their caregivers. Expectant parents are also welcome. Children and their caregivers are welcomed into a spacious and comfortable environment equipped with toys, books, walkers, a slide, water features, a drawing board, and a sandbox.

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