It was coming to the end of a
lovely day, Charlie’s Mum, Sam was baking meringues, Charlie’s Dad, Mark was
oiling the garden furniture, I was sitting on the garden bench drinking tea and
Charlie, aged 23 months was playing in the garden. Covering the ground at the bottom of the
garden beyond the lawn, next to the garage and stretching up to the back gate
are small stones. Charlie fell on the
stones and began to cry, “Mummy”. Sam
came out of the kitchen and thinking that he was not really hurt said, “Up you
get Charlie”. But on this occasion
Charlie was not going to get up and continued to call, “Mummy”. Sam judged that he wanted her to pick him up.
She ran down the garden, scooped him up in her arms and, cuddling him like a
baby, strolled back down the garden saying, “Do you want a cuddle Charlie, do
you want to be Mummy’s baby? Ah, what a lovely baby. Look at my lovely baby Nana, look at my
lovely baby Daddy.” Charlie was soon laughing
and giggling. Sam put him down near Mark
and myself and returned to the kitchen.
A few minutes later Charlie went back to the stones and pretended to
fall over accompanied by wails of, “Mummy”.
Sam looked out of the kitchen and made a judgment about Charlie’s needs
at this time and again ran down the garden, scooped him up and repeated her
actions, cuddling him like a baby and kissing him she said, “Oh, my lovely
baby, look at my lovely baby.” Charlie
laughed and relaxed in her arms. She
then put him down again and drew his attention to Daddy and Nana before
returning to the kitchen, “Look at what Daddy’s doing Charlie, he’s oiling the
chairs. Look at Nana Charlie, she’s having a lovely cup of tea.” Charlie watched Daddy for a while and then
ran down the garden and ‘fell’ in the stones and again called for his
mother. Sam again responded and the
whole scene was repeated two or three more times.
Whilst I was watching this it
occurred to me that I was having two possible reactions. I could hear my own
mother’s voice in my head, “You’ll make a rod for your own back. He’s just manipulating
you. He’s not hurt – leave him – he’s got to learn. He’s only pretending.” The second voice comes from my wiser self,
the self who wants to understand Charlie, the self who has been observing Sam
and Mark’s parenting and reading about child development and reflecting on what
a toddler can do. The second voice won
and in this blog I am exploring why I know that my daughter and not my mother
have the best understanding of how to raise a small child.
We know that context is
everything; to understand a child’s actions we need to know about their
life. Charlie’s mum is having another
baby and we all talk to Charlie about the new brother he is going to have. “Edward is in mummy’s tummy.” When we see
other babies we tell Charlie, “you’re going to have a baby like this, a baby
brother”. My daughter is also finishing her PhD and is working hard to get it
done before the new baby comes. Charlie
goes to nursery three days a week, spends Thursday with his Mum and Friday shared
with his Dad and his Grandpa. Recently at weekends Sam works on Saturday and Charlie
spends the day with Daddy. In the two
weeks before this incident occurred, I had visited to look after Charlie on
Thursday and Friday one week and Friday and Saturday the following week. We all noticed that Charlie found it hard to
cope when all three of us were there together; he was crying and fretful. I found it better to stay out of the way
first thing in the morning when we were all in the house. Once his parents had gone and we had waved
goodbye at the window Charlie was fine.
He didn’t cry and played happily enjoying the things we did
together. I wondered if his fretfulness
was because he knew that if I was there, both Mummy and Daddy were going away.
Sam knows that Charlie misses her
and she misses having time with him and when she decided to join in with his
game and make him ‘her baby’ I believe she made a decision to do what she
always tries to do – validate his feelings.
She was telling him it’s OK to want Mummy to come and pick you up and
cuddle you, you are still my baby, this is a game we can play together.
My own mother would have seen
this as manipulation, something not to be encouraged. I can remember being conflicted myself as a
young mother with my instinct to ‘give in to the child’ and guilt that I would
‘ruin her’. As a grandmother I have the
time to reflect and to try to understand this most complex of relationships
between parent and child. I have the
pleasure of watching and learning from my daughter who has very clear ideas of
how she wants to parent. And to this
observation I also bring the voices of researchers like cognitive scientist Alison
Gopnik[1]
and psychologists Terry Brazleton and Stanley Greenspan[2]
and the new sociologists of childhood who are able to tell us so much more about
the developing child than either myself as a young mother or my mother knew.
Charlie was doing what toddlers
do; he was playing, using his imagination to create a game and using that game
to manipulate the world around him. Gopnik documents how from around eighteen
months toddlers are able to start pretending and can present counter-factuals,
imagining the way things might be different from how they are. Charlie was pretending to be hurt in order to
get his Mum to pick him up and cuddle him, he was imagining a world where his
Mum was totally available to him and when she responded to his game and
‘pretended’ he was a baby, he responded. It became a collaborative game.
What does this tell us about
Charlie’s development? He obviously has
a good understanding of both physical and psychological causality. If you fall on stones, you can be hurt. If you cry because you are hurt, someone will
comfort you. He was using play to
experiment, ‘if I pretend to fall and be hurt, will my Mum comfort me?” Charlie
was trying to get his mother to give him what he wanted, her attention and
comfort through his pretend game. He has
a theory of mind; he knows that other minds are different from his and that he
can influence them.
Charlie also knows what the
people around him are like. He
understands the psychology of his mother; he knows that his mother and father
always try to validate his feelings (even if they don’t always succeed). Since
he was a baby he has been watching her and listening to her, he has learned
that she will respond to his needs. We can’t fully understand Charlie’s
behavior without considering the psychological, social and cultural influences
on him. The nurturing environment that
Charlie has grown up in has influenced his behavior.
Charlie’s feelings and
behaviours, like all toddlers are complex and Sam’s ability to empathise with
his feelings and respond compassionately to his behavior is nurturing his
capacity to feel empathy and compassion.
Brazelton and Greenspan argue that nurturing emotional relationships in
this way is the most crucial primary foundation for intellectual and social
growth.
Sam and Mark seek at all times to
develop a secure, empathetic and nurturing relationship with Charlie. I believe that his behavior in the garden
shows he has learned to communicate his feelings, reflect on what he wants and
share that with his mum. In sum, I would
argue that Charlie’s actions demonstrate his ability to be an active agent to
get his own emotional needs met. By
responding to Charlie as she did, Sam shows him that it is OK to ask for her
attention. She is helping him to build
his mental understanding of relationships through their emotional
interactions. Just as Charlie learnt as
a small baby that he can cause other people to smile by smiling at them, he has
learnt that pretending to be sad can cause his mum to comfort him. We know that the ability to understand
another person’s feelings and to care
about how they feel is learnt from the experience of such nurturing
interaction.
In recounting this story to others
I have found that lots of people react like my mother would have done; they
believe that in responding as she did Sam was not doing the right thing. I disagree. I believe that this experience,
along with many other similar experiences will help Charlie to grow up able to
feel empathy because his parents have been empathetic and caring with him.
Let’s for a moment consider what
it would mean not to validate Charlie’s feelings at this time. What is it we saying about children if we are
to deny their feelings and override them with our own interpretation of what
they mean. What if Sam had decided not
to respond to Charlie’s call for comfort and justified this by saying, ‘it’s
for his own good; ignore him, he’s only trying to manipulate me, if I give in
this time, I’ll set up a pattern and make a rod for my own back’ etc etc. Following recent work by Elizabeth
Young-Bruehler[3] I
would now name such attitudes as childist.
If Sam had denied Charlie’s
feelings she would be saying her needs as an adult should be privileged over
the needs of her child. It would reinforce
the view that Charlie as a child couldn’t know his own mind, that as a child
his emotions were somehow less important than hers. It denies the ability of the child to judge
their own emotional states and needs and denies children’s agency and
competence. Such attitudes position children as ontologically different from
adults and that ‘difference’ is couched in terms of children being somehow
incomplete, which allows adults to justify their behavior towards them in terms
of the adults they will become, not the children they are. It
legitimizes the exertion of adult power over children, as adults are both judge
and jury in deciding what emotions/behaviour should be attended to and which
not. It reinforces an adult view of how children’s lives should be lived, how
they should develop and respond to events in their lives. Such attitudes render individual children
invisible and legitimate children’s subjugation to the world of adults. It means that the needs of children are not
met. This is what I mean by childism. However,
such childist attitudes are so embedded in our culture that we find it
difficult to name them as such. The most
recent research from sociology, child development and psychology shows us that
children have been underestimated and this has led to childist attitudes. We
know differently now and our job is to unpick these attitudes, realise they are
based on false information and change them.
From Charlie’s point of view, it is his parents’ attitudes toward
him that matters most. However, he is
growing up in a society where childism is prevalent and he will encounter many,
if not the majority of adults who have childist attitudes and will deny him his
right to be heard and fail to meet his expressed needs. Confronting childist attitudes and naming
them as such has to be both a personal and a political act. I am on that journey – join me.
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