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Section I
Growing up with cohesive coparenting
Optimizing triangular communication
In section I we present the case of Lucas, a child, and his parents from our community sample, whom we followed from the prenatal stage until he was 5 years old. Each chapter captures Lucas and his family at a different stage of Lucas’ development, allowing us to follow the natural trajectory of infant triangular or multiperson communication. We also present examples of other children from the sample, in order to elaborate further on certain key concepts.
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Chapter 1
The baby and the couple
Some theory and research foundations
In this book we use case examples and vignettes to illustrate the development of infants within the context of the family. In particular, we are interested in how parents coordinate their efforts as coparents and then how babies manage and adapt to different coparenting styles. We felt it was important, however, to begin with some of the background thinking and research that laid the groundwork for the material we will be presenting later in the book.
The decision to study infants within the context of the family involved something of a paradigm shift. Historically our understanding of infants was based on studies of mothers and their babies or what we refer to as dyads. More recently there has also been interest in the father-baby dyad, but the bulk of our current understanding of infant communication and social skills is based on the research from mother-baby dyads. Despite this bias, several investigators began suggesting that infants are actually more often in multiperson contexts than they are in dyadic ones (Dunn, 1991; Schaffer, 1984). Infants are often cared for by more than one person and from the outset they often interact in a group (Tronick, Morelli, & Ivey, 1992). In other words, infants need and appear to have an innate ability to deal with a variety of caretaking contexts (Stern, 2004). This ability may in fact be evolutionarily advantageous. If part of our survival depends on group cooperation, then it would be critical to be able to read social situations in order to communicate and coordinate with more than one person at a time. The first and most basic group unit that most of us will encounter is the family, with our parents providing the conditions for us to develop the skills we need to manage.
Lausanne Trilogue Play
The Lausanne Trilogue Play paradigm (LTP) was the first model that allowed researchers to begin exploring the infant in the context of the family (Corboz-Warnery, Fivaz-Depeursinge, Guertsch-Bettens, & Favez, 1993; Fivaz-Depeursinge & Corboz-Warnery, 1999). We briefly describe the basic format of an LTP next. There are now a number of variants of the model, depending on the age and stage of the child. We will describe these variants in the relevant chapters as we explore normative and maladaptive development of family communication.
Figure 1.1 The four parts to the Lausanne Trilogue Play situation (LTP):
I A “2 + 1,” where one parent is actively playing with the infant while the other parent is the observer, in a third-party position.
II The parents reverse roles.
III “3-together,” where the two parents play with the infant.
IV Both parents directly interact with each other while the infant is the third party. This format is applicable to any age, providing the task is adjusted to the child’s developmental stage.
During an LTP, families are asked to play together in four different configurations corresponding to the four possible combinations in a triad (see Figure 1.1).
When the child is an infant, the parents are seated in chairs angled to form a triangle, allowing them to face the infant. The distances between all three of them encourage dialogue, as well as allowing them to keep each other in their peripheral vision. The infant is seated in a chair that can be inclined according to the baby’s motor development, as well as oriented toward either of the parents or between them. The following instructions are given:
We ask you to play together as a family, following the directions for the four separate parts of the exercise. In the first part, one of you plays with your child, while the other is simply present. In the second part, your roles are reversed. In the third part, you both play with your child together. In the last part you will talk with each other for a bit; and it will be your child’s turn to be simply present. It is up to you to decide the inclination of the seat, in which direction to orient it, and how long each part is to last. Generally, at this age, it takes about 8–12 minutes. Please signal when you are done.
Once the child is older, the family sits at a small round table, with the child in a high chair, and a small number of toys are provided. The instructions remain the same, except the direction the high chair is facing remains fixed, and the time range is slightly longer – generally around 12–15 minutes.
When asked to interact with their young baby in an LTP, most parents intuitively behave in ways that help the infant understand what is expected. In parts I or II, when playing actively with their infants, parents turn the infant’s seat to face them and lean forward at dialogue distance from the baby. When parents are in the third-party role, they sit back, resonating with the play, but giving a clear nonverbal message that they are not involved. Similarly, when playing as a threesome, parents orient the baby’s seat midway between themselves and align their bodies at dialogue distance. Finally, during their own dialogue, parents typically leave the infant’s seat at the midway point. They sit back in their chairs, away from the baby, and face one another. Even very young infants are quite sensitive to these nonverbal signals of orientation and distance between people.
The family alliance
The family alliance is in the fabric of daily life. It is how the mother, father, and infant work together toward a common goal. Consider a couple getting their infant, Olivia, into the car.
The mother is carrying Olivia, and the father has brought the diaper bag and the car seat. The mother talks to Olivia about their plans for the afternoon while the father quietly puts the diaper bag on the back seat. As the father now leans over to install the car seat, he talks with his wife about how they need to first stop to fill up the car. The mother listens and Olivia alternates between playing with a button on her mother’s coat, and looking at each of her parents. With the car seat now strapped in, the father turns to take Olivia. Her mother lets her know, “Daddy’s going to put you in your car seat now.” Olivia initially protests, burying her head in her mother’s coat, but with some coaxing by both parents, she eventually reaches her arms out to her father and her mother passes her to him. As he buckles Olivia into her seat, the mother waits, holding a bottle to give to the baby once he’s done. In the meantime Olivia tries to pull off her father’s glasses, and he smiles and tells her, “I need those to drive!”
While not in the order prescribed by the LTP and with some adjustments along the way, the family has passed through all four parts of an LTP. Each of the parents interacted directly with Olivia while the other was simply present. The parents worked together to coordinate the transfer of Olivia from her mother to her father, and Olivia complied. Finally, while the father was installing the car seat, he and the mother had their own discussion, while Olivia distracted herself or watched them. Families may not always do every single part of an LTP in their daily lives, but these configurations of family interaction are something they will do in many contexts through the course of development. Sometimes it will go smoothly, and at other points they will encounter bumps along the way.
Since real-life situations pose all kinds of unexpected variations, the simple structure of the LTP allowed for a standardized way to observe families in these configurations. It was then possible to develop a number of coding schemes to look at the family alliance, the coparenting, and the infant’s capacity to participate in three-person or triangular communication and later multiperson communication. The cases we present in sections I and II are drawn from a longitudinal sample of 38 non-referred volunteer families who came in periodically to do LTPs at various stages of their children’s development. They were seen at the Centre for Studies of the Family (Centre d’Etude de la Famille – CEF), part of the University of Lausanne Institute for Psychotherapy.
Historically, the first question explored in this data was the family alliance. In a well-coordinated alliance there seemed to be four components to consider when evaluating a family’s LTP:
- Participation – Is everyone included, even if each person’s role is different at any given moment?
- Organization – Is there a division of roles, and a respect for each person’s role in the interaction?
- Focalization – Is everyone sharing a common focus?
- Sharing of affects – Are similar or complementary feelings experienced and shared by the family members?
These four functions are hierarchically embedded. If the family struggles with the very first function, participation, and instead excludes one or more partners, then by definition they are not able to play as a family. Moving up the hierarchy, even if everyone is included, if individuals do not keep to their roles, once again the goal of play in each part may not be reached. For example, if the third-party parent keeps commenting on what the active parent and infant are doing, then she has violated the goal of that part; that her partner and infant are supposed to be playing actively while she remains simply present. The same applies to focus and sharing of affects; each of these is a necessary ingredient in the LTP in order for the task to be experienced as the shared pleasure of playing together. With this system it was now possible to compare families that were able to coordinate this task well in a functional alliance to those families who struggled (Frascarolo, Favez, Carneiro, & Fivaz-Depeursinge, 2004).
The use of the term “alliance” is a reference to the work of Salvador Minuchin (1974) and Structural Family Therapy. According to Minuchin, family alliances occur when intergenerational boundaries in a family are clear and flexible. More specifically, he considered the coparents as a “subsystem” within the family. The parents are in charge and make decisions together for the family, but they are also responsive and can occasionally break the “rules” of the boundary. In contrast, Family Coalitions, another Minuchin term, is used to describe certain families presenting with difficulties. The parents are unable to cooperate and struggle with creating that clear and flexible boundary. They implicate their children in some way in order to avoid dealing with the distance or frank conflict between them, so that the intergenerational boundaries are distorted (see chapters 7–9). As we will see at the end of this chapter and in sections I and II of this book, these same family alliances and coalitions are linked to findings from families doing the LTP.
The infant’s triangular communication and the triangular bid
The term triangular communication refers to the ability to interact with two partners at the same time, including any of the configurations possible in the LTP. In addition to assessing alliances, the LTP was developed to ask the following question: when an infant is in a group of three, does he exclusively use a dyadic template and interact with one person at a time, or does he also have a triangular template of communication?
Let’s take a hypothetical situation with baby Jesse in part I of an LTP. His father has turned his seat to face him and is playing with him while his mother sits back, simply watching and resonating with what is happening. If Jesse exclusively engages with his father and ignores his mother, then he would only need to activate a dyadic template. But suppose Jesse briefly shifts his gaze towards his mother a few times, as if to share with his mother the delight he is experiencing playing with his father. In that case some sort of triangular template would be required.
Now suppose they are in part III of the LTP and the parents invite Jesse to play all three together. Perhaps this is a bit unusual for Jesse, but for many families play can happen spontaneously, like on Sunday mornings in the parents’ bed, or at the kitchen table during family meals. Note that this three-together play condition may be more challenging for Jesse than dyadic play. All of a sudden he has to coordinate with two parents at the same time rather than just one. Within this three-together situation, a ...
