Loveland-Coen: In a developmental sense what can a new parent do to assure her newborn will not only survive, but thrive?
Travis: There is some diversity in developmental theories, but also many commonalties. These commonalties suggest that there are basic laws or principles that drive the growth of every human being. I'm convinced that teachers, healers, leaders and certainly parents should have some understanding of these basic principles. So, my first suggestion to new parents is: learn the basic laws that guide human growth. They are really quite simple, yet profound. Not easy to learn necessarily, but some understanding of them is critical.
Principle #1. Action or Intentionality. Human development is intentional. Growth is driven from within. We are self-developing entities. Human beings don't grow because of something someone else does to them. They grow because there's this deep urge within them to grow. What this means to the parent is that the baby comes in with a "self." The baby is not in extension of the parent. The baby is a being unto itself, and that being has an agenda. That agenda is that the child will grow toward unity and wholeness. That agenda is in the seed, the zygote. In other words, there's a plan. None of us knows how to turn an infant into an adult. The infant knows how to do it -- not consciously of course, but something in the genes or psyche knows what it's doing. Parents should have a deep respect for that, if not reverence. That doesn't mean that parents should let their children do anything they want.
Loveland-Coen: Right. So parents can either interfere with that process or help it to unfold the way it should?
Travis: They can facilitate it. Yes. They can give it what it needs. This plan within the baby has a lot of needs. There are developmental opportunities or "windows" that open up and the child will need something at that point. The parents' job is to be aware of that need and to meet it.
Intentionality is a fundamental principle of psychology and fundamental principle of development. Babies are beings -- they are active agents. They are not just acted upon. We have no business coercing them. It's very easy to forget that, especially with your children, because we think we made them. As Kalil Gibran reminds us, "Children come through you, not from you. They are trailing clouds of glory." It's important to remember that children come in with a trajectory and that trajectory has a wisdom. That is action-intentionality -- the fundamental principle of developmentalism.
Principle #2: Epigenesis or Interaction. Epigenesis suggests that there is a ground plan, but that it unfolds through interaction. So we're intentional entities and we have an agenda, but if you take a human zygote and put it on the floor it will never become a human being. It has to interact with other human beings. Children that are raised by wolves (yes, there are such cases) don't become functional human beings. A child becomes human by being with other humans. Babies have to interact with the family and community in order to become fully human. They have to interact with Mommy or Daddy, or some primary caregiver. So, what the intentional entity needs is human interaction.
Interaction needs to be reciprocal. In other words, it's a give and take. When you bring your baby home from the hospital, you will indeed have a profound impact on him or her. You will definitely shape your child's future to some degree. But your baby will also have a profound impact on you. He or she will change your life. The interaction is reciprocal. Peek-a-boo is a wonderful game for understanding this concept. You have to be reciprocal. If I'm not sensitive to the baby's responses when I play peek-a-boo, I can be either too scary, or too boring. You have to be sensitive to baby's way to play it.
So, it's not just Mommy molding baby. Baby is a person who will make demands. In studying all the developmentalists from Piaget to Erikson, to Maslow and Kohlberg and in teaching and watching human beings in settings from preschool to graduate school, I've discovered that what really causes human being to grow is an interaction between intentionalities. And whenever you forget that the infant or child (or adult for that matter) has intentionality too, you're not helping them grow. If I overwhelm the will of the person, by any sort of coercion, then it's going to be very damaging. I need to be aware that there is a person in there, and that person should be respected and honored.
Loveland-Coen: So on a practical, day-to-day level for a new mother or father and their infant, how does that work?
Travis: In the face-to-face interaction, you have to learn to read cries and smiles and looks. Some parents possess this skill more naturally and others need to learn it. For example, if I'm Dad and I'm coming to my baby with a game like tickle or looming (where you bring your face really close to baby's face) and if the baby turns her head away or yawns, it's too much for them. I need to lighten up a little bit. If the baby's smiling…then it's a game. Monkey's have this. It's called the "play-face." Monkeys can play very rough. And as soon as somebody gets hurt, the play-face is gone. The baby monkeys will stop playing. Children who don't learn this are in for a really hard life. I'd bet most of those in prison did not learn this as a child. When the play-face stops, it signals that someone is distressed and the game should be over.
Loveland-Coen: So, it's parents being very perceptive to the moods and expressions of their baby.
Travis: Yes. When I was a child they used to believe that infants don't remember experience. The thinking was, you could do almost anything you wanted to a baby until they were three years old or so, and they wouldn't remember a thing. That's wrong. Children remember right from the beginning. On some level every experience gets recorded.
When a child is misbehaving or acting out, people will say, "He's just trying to get some attention. And that's right, babies needs attention. A parent's job is to respond to that need and not to say, "Oh that's nothing, he's just doing that for attention." Equally erroneous is the thinking that if you respond to a baby's every need, they'll become spoiled. Or that they'll become a cry-baby. Infants are not capable of manipulating adults. If an infant is crying, it's for a reason, and your job is to figure out what it is. And they have different cries. The "I'm wet" cry. The "I'm hungry" cry. The "I'm freaking out here" cry. And some parents are just naturally sensitive to that and they know how to meet baby's needs, and then some parents need to learn it. I think mothers should form co-ops to learn from each other. Or somebody should teach that class. It's a need. But essentially, if you watch a baby's face carefully, he's telling you what he needs.
Also, if you see a look where the baby is alert and calm, that's actually a very important state. It's called the Alpha state. The baby is calm, but he's alert -- paying attention to you, but relaxed. If you can learn how to catch that optimal moment and sustain it, you can have a powerful interaction. That's the learning moment. Montessori used to say that when a child is concentrating, that focus should be respected and honored.
You can help to create that moment with your infant. Find that thing that interests baby -- the first year that's going to be you mostly. When a child gets focused and you are with them, and you're playing with them, that's not "nothing." That's not just play. A lot of people think they should be doing flashcards or something. No. That alert, calm moment is the foundation for everything. Some day, perhaps, that baby is going to want to be a lover, a friend, a husband, a wife, and maybe serve humanity in some way as a a teacher, a healer, a leader or whatever. And at that level, it's the same thing -- it's the ability to attend to and respond to one another. I believe this ability to interact reciprocally is foundational for all success in life.
I've seen so many people in my field who don't have that ability and it makes me very sad for them because I think they didn't get it as a baby. Their parents were not respectful or weren't able to honor them as a human being, or maybe were even abused or neglectful. It's that presence -- "I'm here with you. I'm listening. I'm watching. I'm trying to understand what you're trying to communicate to me." That confirmation of our humanity is so precious and really powerful. That's what creates the great lawyer, the great doctor and also the great parent. It's that shared moment, that ability to be present with another human being.
Loveland-Coen: So a parent can facilitate that moment by being aware of it and allowing it to happen?
Travis: Yes, by allowing it to happen. Even structuring it to happen. You can't force it though. It's presence. It's both being present together. When it does happen you can be aware of it and notice what it took to make it happen, and you can honor that. It's two entities connecting with each other. It's an interaction of intentionality.
As a parent, you can do everything right: buy all the stuff you're supposed to buy and have all the stuff you're supposed to have, and feed them everything you're supposed to feed them, but if you're not simply being present to them, then something critical is lost.
I've taught in some of the poorest regions in the country and I've taught at some of the most affluent areas, and I encounter people with the same issue. It's a deep sense of loneliness, of isolation and abandonment. The affluent parents buy their children every material thing they need, but they don't necessarily given them this presence.
To nurture this ability to be present you have to be aware, responsive and sensitive to what the needs are that are arising within the baby. It's very demanding. And the most important time to give that is in the first year or so. For parents with newborns, the first year or two is such an important time to lay that foundation.
Loveland-Coen: So that's sort of that window of opportunity which needs to be exercised or it's lost for good?
Travis: I would say that the early experiences are foundational. But for those of us who didn't get that foundation in infancy, we can go back later and rebuild the foundation. A lot of people are "re-parenting" themselves as adults.
When the Dalai Lama was here in the U.S. teaching about compassion, he said that the foundation for compassion is self-love. He said that you have to have empathy for yourself first, and then you expand the empathy outward to include other people. He was startled to find that many Americans do not have self-love. Many of them said, "Well, I don't love myself." He was astounded by this. In Tibetan culture, children are regarded as precious. We in American culture have all these material benefits, but we may be losing the ability to love ourselves. Often mom cannot even stay with her baby for the first year. But if we want people to become functional, compassionate, responsible people, then we have to give them this basic element -- it's really love.
Intentionality is the Truth of our being. We are beings, each with an agenda. That agenda is that we will become. Being and becoming. That's the Truth of what we are. The way we interact with others -- by caring, mutuality, understanding, interconnection and relationship -- that's love -- treating each other as beings. That's what I mean be the interaction of intentionality -- that's what causes human beings to grow. The mother/child dyad is the foundation for how people learn this.
Loveland-Coen: Well it is easier, I think, for a parent to be present to her newborn than an older child because babies are so fascinating. It's really awesome to be present with a child who is exploring her world for the first time.
Travis: That's that reverence. That's reverence for the intentionality of the baby. That baby has a purpose -- the purpose is to learn and grow -- a being driven to become. You're watching that and saying it's awesome. That's reverence. That's the appropriate attitude for encountering a baby, and for encountering anyone really.
Loveland-Coen: So, the follow-up question is, what happens to the child if these things are not provided?
Travis: There's an emerging disorder called Attachment Disorder. There are people who have difficulty forming attachments with other people. My sense is that it is related to sociopathy and psychopathy. The extreme case of Attachment Disorder would be a psychopath or a sociopath. I think if children do not form bonds that are respected and honored, if their bonds are continually broken or degraded or violated or exploited, then they will cease to form them. There's research to support that. And you don't want to meet that person in the parking lot after dark when they're eighteen or so. Because they don't care how the encounter turns out for you. Why should they? Of course, that's the extreme case. But we certainly have a lot of people with intimacy problems and commitment problems. And if lay out a spectrum of responsible and compassionate individuals on one side, and psychopaths or sociopaths on the other side, we can see a wide range between those two polls. So we have lots of people who cannot form commitments and cannot handle intimacy and I think what they have is an inability to interact with another intentionality in a functional manner.
Again, we are humanized by the interaction of intentionalities. That's what makes us human beings. Without that we get these monsters that are appearing and a bunch of us that are in the middle struggling with relationships and vocational issues. Somewhere along the line our society forgot to teach us the basics -- truth and love.
Brock Travis, Ph.D., is a developmental psychologist living in Ventura, California. He conducts ongoing presentations on human development, consciousness and spirituality. He can be reached at mailto:abtravis@earthlink.net
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