Becoming A Person

Martin Woodhead

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415058292
• eBook ISBN: 9781134965441
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

The first volume of readings for the Child Development in Social Context series concentrates on the imporatnce of social relationships in the young child's life. Early readings summarise recent research on childres's emotional attachments. But relationships are also the context of much of their early play and learning. There are readings to illustrate how parents 'frame' , guide and 'scaffold' young children's development, with special reference to the way childfren are intiated into using language as a tool for learning. The cross- cultural dimension of early development is a particular focus of this volume, which concludes with readings on the construction of personal identity. First published in 1991. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Part One

First Relationships

Introduction

The baby … is … ‘adapted’ to speak paradoxically, to being unadapted, ‘adapted’ to a complete dependence on an adult human being. He is made to be cared for ….

(Macmurray 1961: 48)

Few would argue with the general point that children’s welfare and development depends on their relationships with others. The controversy starts once more detailed questions are asked. How many relationships can the child sustain? Does deprivation inevitably damage development? Deprivation of what kinds? The articles in this section illustrate a range of perspectives on these issues. (For other perspectives see Volume 3 of this series.)

Schaffer (Chapter 1) offers a succinct but comprehensive overview of some of the main themes of recent research, including his own detailed analyses of mother–infant interaction. The picture that emerges is of a dynamic, changing pattern of developmental priorities, driven by maturational processes in combination with the sensitive responsiveness of the caregiver.

‘Sensitive responsiveness’ is the key concept underlying Ainsworth’s research into crying and obedience in infancy. Following John Bowlby’s theory of attachment, she argues (Chapter 2) that proximity-seeking behaviours in infants and nurturant behaviours in adults are part of our biological inheritance, species-specific characteristics adapted to the environmental pressures in which humanity evolved. The implication is that there are strict limits to the range of cultural practices that is consistent with ‘healthy’ social development.

Cultural variation is the starting point for the chapter by Super and Harkness (Chapter 3). They offer evidence of remarkable crosscultural consistency in the emergence of smiling around four months, and separation-distress towards the end of the first year. Accepting that this does point to a universal sub-stratum of human emotional development, they introduce the concept of ‘niche’ to characterize the way universal qualities are differentially patterned according to the structural arrangements for care and the beliefs and practices of caregivers. Super and Harkness’s field work in a Kenyan society, where older siblings traditionally have major child-care responsibilities, draws attention to the insularity of much psychological theorizing, especially about the exclusivity of the mother–child relationship.

This theme is explored in the chapter by White and Woollett (Chapter 4). Research into the role of fathers has been something of a growth industry in recent decades, perhaps reflecting changing roles within the family and workplace. Much emphasis has been placed on fathers being present at the birth, but research is inconclusive about whether they are subsequently more involved in their babies’ development. One thing is clear. There are significant differences in the way fathers relate to boy versus girl babies, highlighting the cultural processes through which gender identity is constructed (see Part four).

Reference

Macmurray, J. (1961) Persons in Relation, London: Faber & Faber.

1Early Social Development

Rudolph Schaffer

Source: Slater, A. and Bremner, G. (eds) (1989)

Infant Development, Hillsdale, N.J.: Earlbaum, pp. 189–210.

Introduction

Research on early social development has a short history, confined to just the last 30 years or so. Yet even in this brief period there have been marked changes in the way the subject has been thought about, in the methods adopted to investigate it, and especially in the questions being asked in order to further our knowledge. These changes involve a progressive widening of the focus of interest which one can best represent in terms of three stages, concerned respectively with the individual, the dyad, and the polyad as the unit of study.

Initially social behaviour was seen as a class of individual behaviour. Thus questions were asked about the first appearance of particular social patterns in children (the first smile, the onset of attachments, the beginnings of cooperative play, etc.), or about the incidence of certain forms of behaviour (e.g. the amount of fear of strangers under various conditions, the amount of aggressive behaviour in boys as opposed to girls, the amount of social play at different ages, etc.). In all these cases behaviour was thought of as describing the characteristics of individuals; their activity may have been observed in the presence of other people, but the behaviour of these others was not taken into account.

In the early 1970s this changed; the focus became increasingly fixed on the dyad as the unit of study. The to-and-fro between child and social partner was now of primary interest. Interactions, rather than individuals interacting, became the main topic of research. The questions asked concerned such problems as how interactions are established at different ages, how they are maintained and developed over time, and in what ways the roles played respectively by child and adult interlock (see Schaffer 1977 for some illustrative studies). We have learned a lot from this dyadic approach: for instance, about the abilities children of different ages bring to social interaction and how they use them, about the techniques adults adopt to support these abilities, and about the nature of interpersonal synchronisation and how that is accomplished.

However, very recently a new approach has emerged, which I shall refer to as the polyadic approach (a fuller treatment is provided in Schaffer 1984). It is based on the recognition that children live in a multi-person world; dyadic interactions occur but do so in the context of other interactions and relationships that the individual has with persons outside the dyad. What is more, how the child interacts with the group may well require different skills compared with those used in interacting with one other individual. Indeed it could be that a set of quite different concepts is needed to explain polyadic interaction compared with those in use for dyadic interactions.

We thus have three different levels at which social development has been studied. It should be emphasised that any one is not necessarily ‘better’ than any other; each is valid in its own right, each useful for answering certain questions distinctive from those found at the other levels. However, in so far as most of the recent work on early social development has been carried out with the dyad as the basic unit of study I shall confine myself primarily to the body of knowledge generated at that level.

Some Conceptual Guidelines

Let us first consider the nature of psychological development in general. It has become increasingly apparent that such development is best conceived of in terms of sequential reorganisation rather than steady quantitative accretion. The child’s mental life, that is, will periodically and relatively suddenly show transitions to new psychological levels that, in certain respects at least, are qualitatively different from preceding levels. As Piaget above all has shown, new sets of capacities emerge from time to time which drastically alter the child’s mode of adaptation to the environment and which thus reveal major changes in psychological organisation. Whether these take the across-the-board form which Piaget described or whether they apply to much more specific functions as Fischer (1980) argued remains to be settled. In the early years in particular, however, it is apparent that major transition points can be located when such realignments are evident, and various attempts have recently been made to list these (e.g. by Emde et al. 1976; McCall et al. 1977; Fischer 1980). In each case, development is conceived of as a step-like course, where progression to qualitatively different modes of behaviour occurs from time to time, bringing about new modes of adaptation on the part of the child. Each break represents a period of instability when, conceivably, the child is particularly vulnerable; each new phase requires the consolidation of whatever achievements were ushered in at the point of transition.

The following has been put forward (Schaffer 1984) as a developmental scheme that is particularly useful in considering infants’ social behaviour and the progressive changes that take place therein during the first 2 years:

1. The immediate post-birth period. At that time the most urgent developmental task for the parent–child couple is to regularise the infant’s basic biological processes such as feeding and waking– sleeping states and to harmonise these with environmental requirements.
2. From 2 months on. At the age of 2 months a marked increase in attentiveness to the external world takes place, with particular reference to other people. As a result the regulation of responsiveness in face-to-face interactions then becomes a central theme for infant and care-taker.
3. From 5 months on. Largely as a result of newly emerging manipulative abilities a shift of attention from people to objects is found at this transition point. Increasingly, encounters with social partners occur around objects. How to incorporate objects in such encounters and thus ensure topic sharing becomes the new developmental task confronting infant and partner.
4. From 8 months on. A number of profound changes take place at this age, in particular the emergence of the ability to interrelate diverse environmental features and to produce coordinated activity to more than one aspect at a time. As a result the infant’s behaviour becomes much more flexible; reciprocity and intentionality come to characterise social exchanges, and the relationship with the care-taker thus becomes a more symmetrical one.
5. From the middle of the second year. At this point the capacity for symbolic representation gradually emerges. Social interactions increasingly incorporate verbal aspects and growing self-awareness leads the infant to reflect more on its and on other people’s behaviour and to guide its actions accordingly.

Social development in infancy may thus be thought of as constituting a sequence of changes, heralded by various perceptual, motor, and cognitive events taking place in species-typical fashion. But whatever powerful inherent push may be responsible in the first place for the emergence of new capabilities and new levels of functioning, a propensity cannot become reality unless the infant’s care-taker supports, maintains, completes, and furthers the child’s efforts. All psychological functions develop in a social context; the younger the child the more important it is to regard it as part of a unit which inevitably includes the care-taker as a vital complement to the child’s state of immaturity. The intimate dependence of human development on the rearing environment must be acknowledged; each stage brings with it particular developmental tasks that can only be tackled by child and care-taker jointly. Thus changes in the child’s psychological organisation have implications not just for the child alone but also for its relationship with others and for the role that these others need to adopt. After every transition point the parent must be prepared to help the child deal with new tasks and offer new forms of support; only if this is done successfully can the child progress to the next level. Appropriate input from social partners must therefore be added to the list of perceptual, motor and cognitive factors that enable children to pass through the various developmental phases.

Thus, two conceptual guidelines should be borne in mind when examining the course of early social behaviour:

1. Development occurs through a series of sequential reorganisations.
2. Development is a joint enterprise involving the efforts of both child and adult care-taker.

Our account of some of the themes which arise from an examination of social behaviour in infancy will be based on these two general guidelines.

Social Pre-Adaptation

The new-born is not a formless blob of clay, devoid of all psychological organisation. On the contrary, it comes into the world with certain predispositions – certain tendencies, that is, selectively to attend to particular kinds of stimuli and to structure its responses in particular ways. What is especially striking is the way in which both perceptual and response tendencies are pre-adapted to mediate the infant’s interaction with the social environment.

Perceptual Organisation

It has become apparent that from the early days of life on, infants have surprisingly good perceptual capacities. But it has also become apparent that these capacities are selective in nature, and that the types of stimuli to which they are particularly attuned are those generally associated with other people, such as their faces and voices.

The topic of face perception has attracted a great deal of attention (see Sherrod 1981 for a detailed review). Most studies on this subject use one of two methodologies: the visual preference technique, whereby the amount of attention paid by an infant to each of a pair of stimuli is ascertained, and the operant sucking technique, which examines the amount of effort exerted by an infant to produce a particular stimulus (such as the picture of a human face) by sucking for it. It is now generally agreed that initially it is not ‘faceness’ as such that attracts infants’ attention but rather a set of more primitive qualities that are inherent in human faces such as contour density, complexity, three-dimensionality, and mobility. Each of these characteristics alone is attention-worthy; when combined (as they are in ‘real’ faces) they ensure that the social partner is a highly salient source of stimulation. This is particularly so as the optimal visual fixation point is initially confined to a distance of about 8 inches – a distance at which mothers quite naturally place their faces when interacting with a young infant. On the basis of this initial attraction infants can then in due course begin to pay attention to other features of the social partner, in particular those distinguishing one person from another, and thus become capable of differentiating familiar and unfamiliar people.

A matching process is thus evident between, on the one hand, the visual capacities of infants that are available to them from birth and, on the other hand, the stimulus qualities of those aspects of the environment that are biologically of greatest importance to them, i.e. other people. The same applies to auditory responsiveness: here too there is evidence (Hutt et al. 1968; Molfese and Molfese 1980) that human speech-like noises have a particular potency for young infants not possessed by other auditory stimuli. Thus the structure of the auditory apparatus at birth is such as to ensure that the voice of other people is a particularly attention-worthy stimulus. Taken in conjunction with demonstrations that infants appear to have a pre-adapted capacity to make meaningful phonemic distinctions within speech long before they themselves begin to speak (Eimas 1975), it appears that on the auditory as on the visual side infants arrive in the world especially attuned to the kind of stimulation provided by other people.

Response Organisation

As well as such perceptual sensitivities infants demonstrate a number of behaviour patterns specifically designed to bring them into contact with people. Of these, smiling, crying, rooting and sucking are the best known and most closely studied. Their survival value during the initial period of helplessness is evident; each is linked to a set of highly specific stimulus conditions and operates at first along somewhat stereotyped lines before assuming more complex, flexible and intentional form towards the end of the first year (Bowlby 1969).

One particular attribute of early response organisation to which we must draw attention is its temporal structure, for in this respect too there are implications for social interaction. They may best be illustrated by reference to the feeding situation – one of the earliest contexts in which an infant encounters another person. The infant’s sucking response has been shown (e.g. by Wolff 1968) to be a high-frequency micro-rhythm that is organised as a burst–pause pattern –i.e. bursts of sucks are followed by pauses, the length of each component varying somewhat according to a number of conditions. As Kaye (1977) has shown, this temporal patterning is highly suited for incorporating feeding into a more general social interaction sequence, for mothers tend to interact with their infants in precise synchrony with the burst–pause pattern. Thus during bursts they are generally quiet and inactive; during pauses, on the other hand, they jiggle, stroke and talk to the baby. The mother, that is, fits in with the baby’s natural sucking rhythm, responds to its signals such as ceasing to suck, accepts the opportunity to intervene offered by pauses, and in this way sets up a turn-taking pattern which, as we shall see, is typical...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Preface
• Part one: First relationships
• Part two: The process of development
• Part three: Relationships and early learning
• Part four: The construction of identity
• Names index
• Subject index