At birth babies are hardwired to engage with the world as quickly as they can for survival’s sake. A newborn’s rooting, twisting and crying are some of the things that many humans have been genetically trained to find irresistible and the arms of a sheltering adult, motivated to respond to these indicators, is where the newborn finds their first safe place earth-side. Very soon after this, infants begin to be influenced by and develop preferences within their cultural space and will start to recognize the smells, sounds and tastes of this place that they will come to identify as home (Derman-Sparks, 2012).

As early as four months old, babies gaze at recognizable faces and study unfamiliar ones. They will need time to grow accustomed to the new sounds, smells and visual images that a new person brings and will voice their displeasure quickly if they do not want to make the shift to new arms or if they need more time for the shift to happen. At seven months, babies will express curiosity towards other babies. It can be an enjoyable past-time observing what sometimes appears to be mutual recognition between infants who notice each other in public spaces. What seems like adoration of others who look like them is more accurately an early form of categorization that allows very young children to differentiate between other babies and adults. By their first birthday, most babies have become very good at this categorization. The urge to reach out and touch another baby within arms distance is an outward expression of this curiosity.

By fourteen months, “[young children] are starting to explore social skills, communicating without words, joining and not joining a friend [and] by eighteen months, a child will imitate much of the world around them” (Brazelton & Sparrow, 2006, p. 342). Our little one is a natural scientist, trying out and testing each new material and learning about their power to manipulate it. Making the leap from interpreting their surroundings as something separate from them to understanding the world around them as something that they have an impact on is a massive cognitive achievement. As a result, by eighteen months toddlers have begun to devote a great deal of time and effort to their symbolic play, for instance, building a tower as tall as themselves (see Figure 1.1) and then finding infinite joy in their ability to knock it down. The awareness that they are in control of both the tower’s building and destruction becomes just as exciting as the mild sensory shock of the sound and sight of the blocks tumbling to the ground.

These experiences of the impact they have on their world will continue to be explored throughout their childhood and will help to teach them about their positionality in that world as they grow older. The ability to consider their environment, to change it, and the response their environment has to them as they engage in this exploration – responses of acceptance, encouragement, ambivalence or rejection – will inform them of their value, their ability and their sense of freedom and safety in the world, even now.

By eighteen months the young child has also learned to recognize themself in the mirror. They may spend an extended period of time examining their reflection, gazing at themselves, and pointing at their own features. It is a wonderful time of exploration and realization and a time when they will begin to be curious about the ways their bodies work. Simultaneously, it is a time when they will have already started to make sense of messages that they come in contact with about the value of their physical features.

As mentioned, our brains have developed over time to make sense of the world by sorting what we encounter into categories and the toddler brain is working overtime to do this work for them. These messages will come more and more rapidly as they are introduced to indicators in their world such as books, television, the conversations around them, their physical surroundings, etc., which will assign different values to themselves and others. The Children’s Community School (2018) references Hirschfeld, who documented children as young as two years old connecting race to behavior and drew a direct link to their exposure to these social indicators. Sometimes adults worry that if they engage their children in an exploration of differences, it will encourage children to see things that they might not otherwise notice and lead them to discriminate. However, the science is clear that developmental sorting happens naturally (and early), whether we as adults engage children or not.

Often, the span between eighteen months and two years old is seen as an opportune time to begin to expose young children to interactions with their peers for longer periods of time. Firmly entrenched in this world of meaning-making, it is a great moment to give children opportunities to explore and articulate what it feels like to be in relationship with others. Alicia Lieberman (2018) identifies that it is here where we begin to see an “emerging ability to think about oneself and to make inferences about other people’s point of view [which] has been called ‘theory of mind’ because it enables the child to make predictions about how other people think, feel and will behave” (p. 47). The two-year-old child who lives in a community surrounded by people who accept her, love her and want her there will understand that she is accepted, loved and wanted and, as she grows, will move in ever-widening circles in the world with the understanding that acceptance and love towards her are reasonable expectations.

At three, with increased exposure to their peers and opportunities for play, children’s experience with others is building a sense of confidence. Simultaneously, we see at this stage an increase in the development of empathy. When a child offers a toy, shares a piece of food with a friend, sits close to a playmate who is crying with notable concern or hands back a material dropped by an adult with joy, what we are witnessing is a more concrete understanding in the child that something is happening within someone else. Brazelton and Sparrow (2001) confirm this when they observe that with empathy “…[the child] can begin to understand that his world encompasses the needs and feelings of others, not just his own” (p. 38). Scaffolded learning is also occurring because the child understands, by now, that they can have an impact on these recognized feelings through their actions (see Figure 1.2) in the same way that they had an impact on their building blocks.

They are still very much in need of support in these explorations and safe, secure attachments with trusted adults provide a strong foundation on which to continue with confidence. A child with adults in their life who offer a secure base has the confidence to explore and the knowledge that they can come back to that base to be cared for and protected whenever they are in need (Bowlby, 1980). Armed with this support, young children enter an endless loop of 1) exploring with confidence and 2) seeking shelter in the safety and security of their community.

Lieberman (2018) notes that this learning about the world is the primary motivation of our busy three year old. Everything is something new and exciting and the majority of the child’s time is spent making sense of it all. The human brain continues to problem solve rapidly. Leiberman states that “childhood is an early laboratory for the challenges and dilemmas of adult life… this period brings us face-to-face with two powerful impulses: the longing to feel safe in the protective sphere of intimate relationships and the exhilarating thrust of carefree, unrestricted, uninhibited exploration” (p. 13).

This desire for uninhibited exploration is joined, in the third year, by a form of pretend play that is used with greater fluency to build “their capacity to put themselves into the position of another person, when they understand that what they see from their specific physical location is not necessarily what other people see from their own different location” (Brazelton & Sparrow, 2001, p. 48). More complex than the realization that others feel things too, here the child is realizing, for the first time, that others don’t necessarily think, feel or experience the world in the same way that they do. At this stage, children may observe or be very curious about such differences. They may ask lots of questions or be deeply reflective. The beauty here is that, although developmentally, our three- to four year old may not grasp the concept of the “global”, what they are deeply engaged in is the experience of being a child and, by this time, can recognize both that other children exist and that those children may not necessarily have the same experiences or feelings as them.

Approaching four years old (Figure 1.3), the child is becoming concretely aware of the differences between themselves and other peers (as well as adults) and they will have already begun to vocalize their observations. “Why?” may be the question we hear the most from our inquisitive explorer and noticings will fill their conversations. It is a glorious time to engage children in an exploration of similarities and differences. They may want to touch a new person’s face, hair and clothing but now, in addition, they “may feel [their] own hair and face to be sure of [their] own assets” (Brazelton & Sparrow, 2001, p. 347). What are perceived as socially controversial differences such as race, gender and ability will spark open and honest curiosity.

Again, the adult’s role is one of safety and security, a place where the child can ask questions without judgment and receive answers without embarrassment or shame. In their effort to categorize and make sense of these differences, children are studying the adults in their lives and their reactions to new experiences. While fear is a natural response to the unknown, distaste, disdain and other negative emotions will come if the child observes, and then internalizes, the emotionally loaded responses of the adult during these explorations of differences. As the adults in young children’s lives, it is not the observation of difference that we should attempt to suspend (it wouldn’t work if we tried). Our work is in removing judgment from these conversations.

There are times when the inundation all around children of imagery loaded with judgment about which characteristics are valued and which are not can take the adult’s place and has been shown to have a profoundly negative impact on the self-image of the young child. Psychologists Kenneth and Mamie Clarke’s doll studies (1950) exposed the damage that these cultural indicators have. The research, which focused on African American children between the ages of three and seven, revealed that the derogatory images, beliefs and structures that children encounter at an early age were directly responsible for internalized beliefs about their own inferiority. We are now aware that when young children are surrounded by positive images and perceptions of themselves, they are more likely to develop into confident, emotionally healthy individuals.

Quite a lovely complement to the emotionally healthy child’s awareness of the differences of others is a seemingly limitless capacity for connection and the development of friendships despite these differences. On my commute home, I pass by a large playground created to accommo...