Yes, I admit it. I was a playcentre parent. For some that may conjure up a vision of an opinionated earth mother with children running riot and whose boobs are probably dangling around what was once her waist because she breastfed all of her brood until they were at least 5.
It's rubbish of course - boobs head waistward without such prolonged encouragement, I assure you.
And let's not forget Dames Cath Tizard and Jenny Shipley were both playcentre parents.
Playcentre was the only early childhood education organisation in my community when I first became a parent.
It was a godsend for me, living well away from my own extended family and in a community where I knew no-one.
As playcentres are run as parent co-operatives it was impossible not to get to know other people.
It wasn't all plain sailing. No organisation is. Like any group there could be politics and pettiness. The commitment of those involved ranged from zealotry to those who were only there because there were no other options in the immediate vicinity.
There were those whose talents were suited to leading the supervision of the sessions, while others learned how to run an organisation - skills often put to good use elsewhere in the community.
We all had to do parent help duties and undertook basic training in what was required.
Even the most resistant parent could not help but learn something about child development, the importance of children's play and how to manage difficult behaviour, simply by being there and seeing what others did.
I make no claim for my parenting skills (the boys are still threatening to write the book about my sins), but I believe I would have been a worse parent without playcentre.
It was also often a place where women who may not have had much formal education gained self-esteem and later went on to pursue further training and paid work in a variety of fields.
Playcentre has a policy of emergent leadership designed to encourage people to develop skills and move through the organisation rather than have a small group holding positions for years and years.
Perhaps this has all been too much for successive education authorities, for playcentre seems to have been in the midst of constant bureaucratic battles to do with measurement of its worth for decades.
Now playcentres fear their funding may drop by up to 70%, if the recent report of the Early Childhood Education Taskforce is adopted.
It's a document which seems to have muddled ideas about the purpose of early childhood education.
It talks about an agenda for amazing children calling for a shift in values and commitments. Such claptrap is enough to start me shuddering.
There is mention of reprioritising expenditure to allow increased support for high-quality early childhood services. From what I can gather, and I wouldn't say it is the easiest report to decipher, it regards quality as having much to do with high adult-child ratios (something playcentre has always had) and uniform teaching qualifications.
The report speaks of wanting to target support to children whose parents engage,or seek to engage, in the paid workforce.
In other words, if you are a stay-at-home parent, for whatever reason, your children do not deserve to have the same sort of money spent on their early childhood education as those of parents who work.
Is that really what early childhood education should be about?
Then, confusingly, it talks about centres agreeing to become community hubs, where appropriate, allowing an integrated response to the needs of local families.
Isn't this the very sort of work playcentre has been doing for decades, often in rural areas?
Where does the importance of people developing parenting skills fit in to any of this?
Given our horrendous family violence statistics, have we got to the point of giving up on parents, believing that the longer we have young children away from their kith and kin and in the clutches of nice people with early childhood education qualifications, the better off we will all be?
Are parents merely to be viewed as economic units?
According to this patronising document, one of the ways in which parents must "step up" is by viewing themselves as on a career path, avoiding long gaps in their participation in the paid workforce.
At the same time they are also asked to become more actively involved in their children's early education and their learning.
None of it makes sense to me, but since I had a long gap in my participation in the paid workforce and have never stubbed a toe on a career path, what would I know?
• Elspeth McLean is a Dunedin writer.
