Toddler Time: Building Tiny Communities, One Playgroup at a Time

Sherry Aidaz has run playgroups in church halls, community centres and rented studios. None of them, she says, worked quite like the ones held downstairs from where the families live. “A tired parent will always come if it’s a lift ride away. That proximity is everything.”

Her Toddler Time sessions are loosely structured — sensory play, songs, a little chaos — but the real curriculum is connection. “The children make friends in twenty minutes. The parents take a little longer, but they get there.”

Months in, she watches those bonds spill out of the room: shared school runs, borrowed prams, a WhatsApp group that never sleeps. “You start with a playgroup,” she says, “and somehow you end up with a village.”