Developing Self and Self-Concepts in Early Childhood Education and Beyond

Bridie Raban

• Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781839828423
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Early Childhood Education

It is widely accepted that interactions between adults and infants change over time and babies play a dynamic role in their interactions with those who care for them. Acknowledging that their sense of self is moulded by these experiences, and reflected in their own behaviours later in life, this book focuses on the development of an infant's sense of self from the moment of birth, into school, and beyond.
In the first part of the monograph, the author weaves together both theoretical speculation and empirical research on the topic. Studies from across the last century are tracked and reinforced with 21st century contemporary research. Moving on from this foundation, the second section presents an observation study of four three-year old children in their homes and first term in school, providing a real-life practical illustration of the theoretical background.
Drawing on analysis of children in their home environments and in school, including transcripts of conversations engaged in at home, and notes based on classroom observations, the author presents a cutting-edge insight into the adjustment and adaptation of the study participants' first experience of school, reflected against the background of their home lives.

Section 1

I am a part of all that I have met

Yet all experience is an arch where through

Gleams that untraveled world whose margin fades

Forever and forever when I move.

–Tennyson, Ulysses (1833).

1

Research Findings Concerning Mothers and Infants

During the first half of the twentieth century, studies about infants were concerned with what society in general, and families in particular, ‘did’ with their young child. They referred to the way in which the child was ‘moulded’ or ‘shaped’ by their environment. Emphasis was entirely on the external influences on the child, implying that the child was an ‘empty vessel’, a passive receiver whose final characteristics could be ascribed to others, not them. This point of view was also held by the empiricist philosophers of the seventeenth century, notably Locke (1632–1704) who believed, with Acquinas, that there was nothing in the mind that was not first in the senses. He argued that there was no knowledge in advance of experience (a priori), but only after experience (a posteriori); that knowledge is simply ordered experience, and this is indeed the theme of Locke's most important book An Essay Concerning Human Understanding 1690 (see Lowe, 2002).

This conception has been part of the study of psychology through the first half of the twentieth century and can be found in the works of James (1902), Watson (1924), Skinner (1938, 1953) and Hull (1943). However, babies, psychologically speaking, are far more competent organisms than they were originally given credit for. The baby is no longer discussed in such purely negative terms as the ‘blooming, buzzing confusion’ with which William James once characterised early consciousness, nor is the baby seen as an assembly of reflexes.

It seems clear that the main reason for these points of view being held was that no attention was paid to the possibility that even the very youngest babies manifest behaviour which is organised in a particular manner from the beginning of life, and that they have an individuality of their own that determines how they respond to parental and other care which even determines the nature of that care itself. The nature of the young baby was never really considered by psychologists concerned with cognition and socialisation, during those early days of psychological enquiry.

There are many more studies, however, which indicate from the beginning of life, that infants are structured in such a way that they will help to determine their own experience, and adults who care for them must take into account and respect the particular kind of organisation which they bring into the world. For instance, after carrying out a frame-by-frame analysis of film sequences of mothers and babies smiling at each other, two things were evident (Richards & Bernal, 1976); the infant's behaviour (in this particular context) went through a definite sequence, and the mother's behaviour was carefully phased to the infant's behaviour. The infant would, for example, be quietly attentive while the mother smiled, they would then gradually become more and more active, winding themselves up as it were, until fully wound, and then they would pause for a moment and smile. It seemed important that at this moment the mother stopped all activity, giving the infant time, so to speak, to smile. If she did not do this, the infant became tense and fretful, probably ending up crying, not smiling.

Any relationship must be a two-way process where the contribution of each person is to some extent dictated by the contribution of the other. Where studies have taken this factor into account, some intriguing observations have already come forward (Brazelton, Tronik, Adamson, Als, & Wiese, 1975). For instance, the very high percentage of mother–infant interaction sequences are initiated by the baby, not by the mother. The same applies to the terminating of such sequences; again it is observed that babies are surprisingly capable of dismissing their mother from their presence.

Similar conclusions have been drawn from observation studies of mothers and their babies in novel environments, with particular attention being paid to the way in which the visual behaviour of the two is synchronised (Schaffer, 1984). For instance, when the mother and baby are placed in a room that is bare except for large, brightly coloured and prominently placed toys, it can be seen that the baby's behaviour may well elicit the mother's response, and it is not always or necessarily the other way around. The ‘looking’ behaviour of the couple was examined further, and it has been found that the baby looked at the various toys in turn, and that the mother, closely and often most sensitively visually tracked the baby's gaze. In other words, the mother kept an eye on the baby, found them looking in a particular direction, and then also looked there. In this way, mother and baby shared an experience visually, an interest that was initiated by the baby and was synchronised and enriched by the mother's activity as she elaborated with gesture and language. It was also noted within this context that when the mother tried to take the initiative and attempted to draw the baby's attention to a toy they were not looking at, she tended to be singularly unsuccessful, particularly with the younger babies of about five months.

Further research suggests that the activity of infants less than two months old, directed towards people, is more elaborate at this stage than any acts a baby may direct at the physical or impersonal world (Trevarthen, 2017). There is detailed evidence of highly elaborate activity that is specific to ‘communicating’ in all the infants studied whilst they were with their mother. In one of Trevarthen's studies the mother was simply asked to ‘chat’ with her baby. It is important to note that no mother thought this an odd request. Her presence, what she looked like, the way she moved, the sounds she made caused even babies a few weeks old to behave differently from a moment later when they were presented with a suspended object. The infant evidently showed two different kinds of interest, two ways of spontaneously responding; one for the mother and one for the object. Noticeably different were the expressions of face, voice and hands. These differences indicated two modes of psychological action: communication with persons and doing with objects, also identifying that the foundation for interpersonal communication between humans is ‘there’ from birth.

From these studies, Trevarthen concluded that human intelligence develops from the start as an interpersonal process. Clearly, infant communication needs a partner, and it depends on a number of special adaptations of the adult's behaviour. There is also a considerable emotional content which has been demonstrated by studies conducted in Trevarthen's laboratory (1998), using a partial reflecting mirror and changing lights. The mother, in this study, while remaining visible to her baby, ceased being able to see the baby, but to see an adult in the same place. This person silently asked the mother questions by holding up cards. The infant could see only the mother. In her replies to the other adult, the mother automatically changed her style of talking to that appropriate for an adult listener, and naturally, also stopped reacting to what the infant did. In every case, the eight- to ten-week-old infants were clearly puzzled by the change in their mother, and they made exaggerated appeals to regain her attention. Some infants quickly became dejected-looking and withdrawn. They seemed to experience a state of acute depression which took minutes to abate when the mother's attention was returned. It is now known that babies are strongly affected at this early age by any gross failure to obtain ‘proper’ contact with a person, and this can lead to the basis of deprivation in attachment, claimed by Bowlby (2005). He described the behaviour of babies separated from their mother and shows how the effects on the baby occur in three phases; protest, despair and detachment, with the first stemming from anxiety, the second from grief and mourning, and the third from defensive reactions. Bowlby suggests that social tendencies are primary, and that a number of inborn behaviour patterns (such as following, clinging, sucking, smiling and crying) serve to bind the baby to the mother from the beginning.

The conventional picture of a socially passive infant who, when fed and free from pain, lies quietly in their cot, ready to be moulded by whatever social forces happen to impinge upon them, seems far from adequate. On the contrary, from the early weeks onwards, the infant takes an active part in seeking interactions with their social environment, and it is the infant, rather than the adults around them, who is so often found to take the initiative in establishing and maintaining contact. Indeed, most of what the human infant learns is learned in the context of continuing, dynamic, social interaction processes. The inanimate environment, in and of itself, provides the infant with only the most impoverished stimulation towards understanding, in human terms, the world in which they find themselves (Newton & Newton, 2017). There is now no doubt that the human infant is pre-programmed with some kind of sensitivity towards reciprocal social interactions, as the infant's attention is captured most frequently and sustained the longest by ‘person-mediated’ events.

During the first year of an infant's life, the establishment of a dialogue between the infant and the mother (or primary caregiver) is of critical and fundamental importance. The mother assumes the infant is ‘intelligent’, she reads in and reads out meanings and intentions as significant factors which make the baby's behaviour intelligible. Initially, the ‘meanings’ are imputed and assumed, before the baby recognises them as significant. Any event that the mother knows to have significance and meaning in her own experience, she will naturally assume will have a similar significance and meaning to the baby as well. Possibly, in the light of this analysis, it is irrelevant that the meaning of infants’ own behaviours are not initially clear to themselves, but it is a matter of great importance that meaning is imputed in a non-arbitrary way because without this the infant could never enter into the social discourse of shared (though not necessarily identical) meanings.

Ultimately, human competence must be based on the fundamental assumption that most of the things we do are readily intelligible to others as theirs are to us. This is obviously not the case for the newborn infant who is quite unable to take part in most shared activities which adults take for granted. The baby gradually achieves such competence only as a result of being positively involved in numerous experiences of reciprocal activity with another person (Newton & Newton, 2017). As the infant's early experiences are all person-mediated they soon find themselves ‘caught up’ and ‘swept along’ in those shared activities by a person who intuitively initiates them into the ‘turn-taking’ of a communication event. It follows, therefore, that the basic human ability to structure knowledge in such a way that it can be shared – the ability to communicate – stems initially from the mother's quite natural inclination to treat her infant as if they were a person from the moment of birth, as if the infant already had ‘understandings’.

It is clearly the case that any notion that the newborn infant is a tabula rasa, waiting for the outside world to be impressed upon it, is not borne out by the facts. The infant is intimately involved in the construction of their own reality from the beginning of their life, and they enter the world with a nature of their own which requires adaptation on the part of the mother. There is evidence to support the view that the infant reacts to persons in specific ways, and they need feedback from at least one other person to support and confirm their existence.

It is interesting to note the finding that the duration of the mother's gaze at her infant is very much longer than that found within a comparable context with another adult, except perhaps that found between lovers (Stern, 2002). Whatever the explanation, these are valuable descriptive data showing us what is involved in ‘mothering’ and begin to capture empirically much of Winnicott's notion of ‘devotion’ and ‘good-enough mothering’ (2012), discussed in greater detail in Chapter 2.

It seems that this notion of the infant needing another person, not only for physical survival but for psychological survival as well, should be more definitely defined by saying that not just anyone will do. The particular relationship of a mother with her infant, not surprisingly, is of a special kind. Special, in as much as the mother is required to give herself over to the infant during the first few weeks, and naturally it is the mother who is particularly well suited to take on this role. During pregnancy the infant is the mother; during the early stages of life they become themselves through their relationship with their mother. It is through this relationship that the mother mediates the outside world and initiates the infant into the significance of their social and cultural worlds.

Perhaps the most important thing we now know is the fact that the mother treats her newborn infant like a person from the start and, more importantly, the infant both requires this to happen and ensures that it does through their own behaviour. This process of interaction between mother and infant creates the possibility of the development of the structure of Self in the growing child. The difference between this relationship and others in our lives depends on the mother's ability to be ‘used’ psychologically by the infant in the same way as she was used physiologically during pregnancy. The infant's need for social interaction compels them to employ a variety of responses which are available to them at particular times of development, and which have been found effective in keeping the person, towards whom they are directed, within their vicinity and thereby ensuring the adequate and necessary supply of protection, love and care.

In summary, contemporary studies provide us with the opportunity to return to the writings of Buber (2002) and establishing again for ourselves what he considers to be the ‘twofold attitude’ of humankind. As seen earlier, Trevarthen's work (2017) indicates that infants act differentially with persons and objects, and come into the world with this propensity. The quality of the infant's personal survival and development is seen to be intricately dependent upon the mother's ability to enter into an unconditional relationship with the infant, and this clearly must provide the basis for the later structure of the individual, as babies come to differentiate themselves from their mother within the context of their own life experience.

In contemporary society, however, the need for mothers to return to the workforce early after giving birth is an increasing necessity. Therefore, the need for all early childhood professionals, and others, to be both aware and knowledgeable concerning their role in each child's earliest years becomes increasingly important. While the research reviewed in Section 1 (Chapters 1–5, Chapter 2 in particular) refers to the role of the mother in relation to their baby, the findings are relevant for all concerned with the daily experiences of infants, toddlers and young children. Roberts (2002, p. 4) refers to ‘mothers and other important people’ acknowledging that fathers and other people in the life of infants have significance. At the time of the studies reported next, mothers typically stayed home until their children started school, or even beyond that time. Divorce was less frequent and marriages were typically one mother, one father and children in one home. Increasingly, in the twenty-first century, families are blended, same sex, single parent, with infants, toddlers and young children in different and multiple foster care arrangements and adoption as well as spending whole days in early childhood settings. It is, therefore, even more important that we learn from these studies and incorporate their findings throughout the work of the early childhood profession.

2

The Psychodynamic Perspective on the Mother–Child Relationship

With Particular Reference to the Work of Winnicott (Caldwell & Robinson, 2017)

Many years before the experimental studies discussed in Chapter 1, Winnicott (1965a, 2018), in his numerous published papers, presented his systematic observations of mother and infant pairs within the context of his own clinical, paediatric and psychiatric work. Many of the papers, prepared for lay audiences, captured intensely sophisticated hypotheses about child development in a style, though apparently straightforward, should not misguide the reader into too simple an interpretation. In the same way as the studies in Chapter 1, Winnicott chose to describe the developing human being as a person in relationship with other persons (initially, only the mother) with the main thrust of his argument concentrating primarily on the development of ‘Self’ within the baby, how ‘I’ and ‘not-I’ are discovered and maintained.

We can all observe babies with their mothers sharing the routines of daily life; few could be as insightful as Winnicott and make sense of this apparently random and arbitrary activity and pull it together to form a coherent theory of ‘Self’ development. Winnicott (2012, 2018) maintained that observations of babies enable us to see, by what happens, that it is not just a baby with a physical body, but a person with a psychological correlate. If we look at a baby, being interested in the person who is there, it can be seen that there is also psychological ‘feeding’ (or taking in) and eliminating, and that the bodily and psychological activities are each based on the other. What is implied here is that a baby may well be given complete physical care by some automatic means, and yet still be undernourished as a person. The baby, therefore, builds something out of all its experiences. Mother's and carer's love is taken in, just like food.

Winnicott intentionally assumed that each baby is a person from the start of life because each baby is their mother as a single system, obviously during pregnancy and during the early post-natal period. He classified some of the ways in which a mother and her baby are one, maintaining this is necessary because leaving the baby to their own dev...