It’s fantastic that our society is finally talking about children’s mental health and what we can do to bolster it. But it’s sad that children’s mental health is at crisis point. In this section I will refer to the early weeks and months and the early years a lot, as they are so important when it comes to instilling a sense of security in our children, but, as I keep emphasizing, it is never too late to take steps to attempt to repair any rupture that may have happened during the early years if your child is older.
There are no guarantees that a deprived, terrible childhood will result in mental-health problems later, or that an ideal childhood will protect someone from losing their mind. Having said that, there are things we can do that will give your children the best possible chance to minimize any potential mental-health problems. We owe it to them and to ourselves to take a course that has the greatest likelihood of resulting in a healthy mind and body.
One of the most important indicators for good mental health is a strong bond between parent and child.
Humans are pack animals; we have lived in tribes for millennia. We are wired to bond to each other; it is how we survive as a species. The most primary bond of all is that of child and parent, parent and child. You will have a bond with your child and your child is hard-wired to form one with you. But how can you make that bond as rewarding as possible for both of you, and one that is most likely to create a capacity for health and happiness? I’ve talked about how important it is to keep a baby company, to be alongside them as they experience their feelings and moods so they don’t feel alone. I’ve also talked about how important it is for a baby to be physically close to their parents. But how, in addition to being physically close, do we get emotionally close to a baby or a young child? After all, it’s not as though you can both use words. What creates your bond and your relationship is give and take. By that, I am talking about the mutual influence we have on each other. It might seem obvious that I affect you, you affect me and we form a unique relationship together, different from other relationships we have with other people. And this is what will probably unconsciously happen, or has already happened, between you and your baby. I am starting with infants because that’s when the parenting relationship begins, but what I have to say about to-and-fro communication, about the desirability of dialogue being like a collaborative dance, is relevant to any relationship.
Initially, when your baby makes a noise, they are communicating with you. A baby’s noises, their gestures, their coercive cries and the way they initiate turn-taking games are the forerunner to conversation. With all of these, your child is looking for your reciprocity.
If you tell them to ‘shush’, you are telling them that their communication is not welcome. Over time and many ‘shushes’, this may make them feel that they are not welcome. I am no fan of the ‘shush’. I see nothing wrong with a pacifier when used in conjunction with attention and loving touch to help soothe a child, but I don’t like it being used as a stopper, to gag the essential to and fro of communication.
Before our children learn to articulate their feelings we learn their cues by observing them. They may be minutes or years old, but they will have their unique viewpoint of the world. I believe the happiest parents are those who are open and willing to learn from their children, to keep expanding their viewpoint by taking in their children’s. A child whose person and point of view is respected learns innately to respect others. They can take it for granted that there is more than one way of seeing things and experiencing things.
If you are parents to a baby and you just want to gaze at your baby and have ‘conversations’ with them made up of gestures and facial expressions, this is exactly what you need to do. This ‘game’ is what develops into the give and take of dialogue. And it helps to strengthen your bond, as it develops your relationship. Later on, we lose sight of our body-to-body communications with our children as words gradually take over, but it will still be there. It is still relevant to observe a child as well as hear them in order to fully listen to them and to allow them to impact on you. And indeed, this is relevant to adult relationships as well.
In a dialogue, whether it’s just looks and gestures or includes sounds or speech, both parties affect each other. When I say ‘gestures’, I am talking about all body movements, some deliberate and some more like body-to-body communication as we pick up on each other’s moods and intentions. It’s not one partner being all teacher and giver and the other all recipient and sponge. It’s not just one body affecting the other body but both bodies affecting each other. This is how a fulfilling relationship develops. Mutual impact is key to all our relationships – and that’s true for a child-and-parent pairing too. Too often it is easy to be in too much of a rush, and then a relationship, instead of being in a steady rhythm of to and fro and turn-taking, becomes instead about being what I call ‘Doing and Done to’, where one party is dominant and the other submissive rather than each being an equal partner in the communication exchange. This happens when we do not leave a gap for the other to respond and, if this becomes a habit, the relationship can lose its way.
Think of it like a teacher with a class. The teachers who engage their pupils are the ones who read a class and tailor their teaching to that class. They are not afraid to learn from the pupils in turn. They find out what the pupils know already, they keep them interested by getting them to brainstorm, they check they’ve been understood before putting the next piece of information in place. A classroom working like this is a peaceful place of to and fro, whereas when a teacher just gives out information to the pupils, they are likely to become resentful or restless and don’t learn as much.
Where we feel most frustrated and find relationships to be the most unsatisfactory is when we do not have an impact. It doesn’t matter what we say and do, the person or organization does not heed us, even if they are doing things to us, and we can begin to feel hopeless, isolated or rebellious. So it is important to allow yourself to be impacted by your children – let them influence you. You will be modelling how to be influenced, which is important so that your children in turn allow themselves to be influenced by you.
An example of very early dialogue is breathing together. A baby’s breathing is automatic. However, with time, a baby learns that breathing can also be controlled voluntarily and that they can regulate their breathing. They may automatically tune in to the breathing of the adult they’re being held by or lying in contact with. The synchronization of breathing may be part of how we bond. I found lying by my baby and synchronizing my breathing to hers and noticing when she synched to mine both rewarding and moving. Perhaps this is why we sing to and with children, be it nursery rhymes or pop music, because to sing together is to both breathe and play together.
Breathing exercise
Face your partner or a friend and take it in turns to follow each other’s patterns of breathing. Notice how you feel when you follow, how you feel when you lead, and do this until you relax into the exercise. Give it a while, or at least until you do notice what feelings you are having in reaction to this exercise.
Another type of interaction you may have with a very young baby may be in the form of a game of looking at each other, then looking away, taking it in turns to initiate the game. This type of game has a uniqueness because you invent it together. During the game, the baby may turn away with a blank expression and, instead of turning back, stay looking away. The parent, in response, sits back and waits for the baby to make their next move. Then the baby looks at them once more with a curious and smiley expression. The parent may say, in a gentle, high-pitched voice, ‘Oh, hello again, you’ve come back!’ Then the baby may repeat the process many times until they feel satisfied.
When mothers and their four-month-old infants show patterns of turn-taking between give and take, watching, listening and responding, researchers can predict that, when the infant is a year old, Mum and baby will have a secure attachment bond. If we think about the desert metaphor, this is the baby feeling rescued from the desert and made to feel welcome. They can take for granted that their needs, including their relational needs, will be, more often than not, met.
Of course, like all things human, bonding can go wrong. As a parent, you can interrupt and interfere with the natural process by not observing, not listening, not seeing the world sufficiently from the child’s standpoint. So, if a parent ‘misses’ too many cues from the baby, or is too demanding of the baby, it’s unlikely the baby will learn to feel secure in this main relationship – that is, until the parent changes their pattern of relating by becoming observant and responsive.
You may find this kind of attuned reciprocity draining and demanding rather than natural and effortless. This is not your fault. It might be to do with how you were initially responded to when you were a baby, or you may not naturally attune to other people or only with difficulty.
Personally, I did not find reciprocity an easy thing to do. I had to work at it. Maybe this was because being listened to and considered was not an everyday experience for me as I was growing up. It may be that you have an unconscious rule or a belief that one person (the adult) should always be the doer and the other (the child) the done to. In that case, reciprocity gets stuck.
Do you naturally and easily let your child affect you as you adapt to one another and find listening and responding to your children natural, automatic and easy? Not everyone has this natural response readily available – some of us must work to recover it within us. Maybe you notice some resistance to letting your child, be they a baby, a toddler or even an adult, affect you. This is called diaphobia, a phobia of real dialogue, of being impacted upon by others, a fear of being ‘done to’.
We tend to do what has been done to us when we were babies and children. And it can be as though our natural innate ability to respond has been deadened. It may be that you were well cared for in practical terms but you did not experience reciprocity in your own infancy. If your feelings were not taken seriously, if you were thought of as less than human and more of an ‘it’, if you were seen only as ‘the baby’, ‘the child’ or one of ‘the children’ rather than as an individual, if you were not allowed to affect your adults, you may well have some diaphobia.
For babies and children, being responded to is a need, not a want. If we don’t respond to a child’s cries, glances or turn-taking games, if we don’t play our part in the give and take they offer us, there’s a danger of fostering in them insecure or avoidant attachment styles and personality traits. This will make it much harder for them to have functional relationships.
However, if you feel you may be diaphobic, do not admonish yourself, blame yourself or feel ashamed. Now you know what you are doing to interrupt the give and take, you can make the changes that enable you to attune to your child. Be proud that you have detected it and faced up to it. It can sometimes be easier to spot diaphobia in others than it is to see it in ourselves. But try to notice when you are shying away from the contact of give and take with your baby or child, teenager or adult child. Notice if you tend to talk at them, rather than with them. Learn to give in to that instinct and give your child the sort of give-and-take attention they need.
You may be reading this while having regretful pangs: ‘It’s too late, I’ve already been diaphobic with my child.’ Don’t. You have a bond with your child and you can always work on making it better. You can start listening, you can start to see the world from their perspective as well as your own, you can allow them to be different from you and you can allow their influence on you. It means a great deal even to adult children when their parents can see them as equals and take on board what their children show and tell them. Of course, you can repair the rupture before they are adults. If you realize that you have been batting your child away, you can stop. I’m not saying that you should completely surrender your standpoint, all your opinions and defer only to the child’s – not at all. What I am saying is that their way of seeing the world is as equally valid as yours.
Let’s hear from John, aged forty-two.
My partner recently asked, ‘Why can’t you bear to be told anything?’ It quite shook me. It got me thinking and I realized I have a real shame of not knowing things. She also told me that my catchphrase could be ‘I know.’ I pepper all my sentences with it, apparently, whether I do know or not.
Then I visited my father. He was getting in a muddle with his medication so I drew up a chart for him – what he should be taking and when. And he said, sarcastically, ‘You think I’ve lived eighty-six years on this earth by not knowing how to read the labels on these pill bottles, do you?’ I realized that he too hated being told something he might not know.
If I’m honest, I can see that Dad’s long-standing you-can’t-tell-me-anything attitude has always been and still is hurtful to me. A more appropriate response from him would have been, ‘Thank you for doing that, I was getting in a muddle,’ but he could not bear to be told, and especially not by his son. I may be over forty but I am, to him, still a boy.
Then I realized I never really listen to my own son, as I don’t consider he may have something to tell me that I don’t know. I noticed he was developing the ‘I know’ habit from me.
My partner has been helping me to be more open and to listen more and not to feel ashamed when I don’t know. I now let my son show me things too, and not in a patronizing way, and it is really improving our relationship. I didn’t use to leave the space. It was as though I thought the communication should be one way only, from me to him, from the teacher to the pupil, but now I’m learning to leave space for him to show me who he is. And I’m learning to find out who he is rather than assuming I know.
I was the classic man cliché, not wanting to ask for directions because I couldn’t bear to be told something I didn’t know by someone else. So now I’m asking everyone for directions all the time, letting myself feel that shame of not knowing things. But I’m not acting on the shame, I’m not allowing it to crush my curiosity any more or stop me listening to my boy like it used to. And it isn’t destroying me, quite the opposite. In the short space of time since I have been aware of this, I already feel so much closer to him.
Sometimes, making a change, such as deciding not to give in to diaphobia, which is what John decided to do, even though he did not have the word for it, feels like it will have terrible consequences, but it turns out this small change in behaviour brings forth a lot of benefits.
Exercise: Notice your behaviour patterns
If, when your child wants some attention, you nearly always think of something that’s more urgent, such as doing chores or work or making a call, and you use this as an excuse to yourself and to them to push them away, this is probably your diaphobia in action. Notice when you are doing this. Stop, override the instinct to push them away and instead engage and include them in whatever task it is you have to do.
Exercise: Can you be told things?
What does it feel like to be told something you already know? What does it feel like to be told something you feel you should know but don’t? Try not to answer these questions with what you think you should say but with what you really feel when this happens. Whatever feeling is brought up for you doing the exercise, can you trace its origins in your childhood?
You don’t have to be in constant, 24/7, face-to-face action and reaction with your child. But what the research shows is that when you are with your child and you ignore most of their bids for attention it is distressing for them. In one experiment, mothers were instructed to sit with their baby face to face but not to show any mimicking or gesturing in response to the baby – that is, not to show any emotional responsiveness. After the mothers did that for only three minutes, the babies reacted with distress. They showed anxiety, shame and sadness that lingered for several minutes. You can think of it as the baby being left to dance on their own.
Children need reciprocity from their caregivers; otherwise, they learn helplessness, that their actions have no effect. If a baby could put their experience into words they may think, ‘If I cannot affect you, then I do not exist.’ This is why some infants seem to give up. By not responding to enough of our infant’s cues, we accidentally teach them not to try.
Quite often, when we think we are listening, all we are doing is waiting for a gap for an opportunity to speak back; we use our energy to compose our response or our reply rather than to try to understand what the other person is trying to communicate. Stopping doing this, and allowing instead the other person to impact upon us, can feel scary. It doesn’t feel scary if we put this fear into words, but it does when we have an unspoken fear that, if we really listen and allow ourselves to be impacted, we ourselves will disappear. We will not disappear – quite the opposite, we will grow. This is Jodie and Jo’s story.
In our first few weeks together I often felt drained by the neediness of my baby, Jo. I wanted to be open to her, to respond to her cries, but it was a struggle. It felt as if giving in to her demands would mean losing myself, that I’d be taken over by her.
What helped me become more open towards Jo, rather than trying to defend myself against her demands, was watching her. When I was with her, giving her my attention, she’d call on me less. I slowly got the knack of pre-empting some of her crying by learning to read her cues before she got distressed.
I began to talk to Jo with a running commentary as I did any housework or tasks, leaving spaces for her to ‘chat’ back at me. When I didn’t need to do anything, instead of playing with my phone or picking up a book, I would pay her attention.
I realized that, instead of always trying to show her stuff, if I looked at what she was looking at too, let her show me what she liked, it was more rewarding. She would look at things and I’d bring them closer to her or take her to them and look at them with her. She taught me to stop and to look, because I’d forgotten how to do that. It’s not that I got a thrill from examining a leaf or a ladybird, or watching SpongeBob Square-Pants, but watching her concentrate on things filled me with something; perhaps you’d call it awe, or even just love.
As Jo got older and started to talk I noticed my relationship with her was always better when I listened. Sometimes, I’d forget and talk at her or over her. And then she’d be less responsive – and I’d realize I’d fallen back into an old way of communicating, one that didn’t work for either of us.
Leaving space for Jo has mellowed me, made me feel more loving, not only to her but to other people and things. Jo is nearly grown up now and I think I’m more of a grown-up than I was because I expanded my own view so much from watching her, listening to her, seeing things from her perspective. Talking now about how she affects me fills me with love. Love that maybe I was incapable of before I was a parent. I feel expanded by her.
Jodie’s experience is about her relationship with her baby, about a new pattern of being with and responding she learned in relationship to her child. By really listening, rather than just thinking about her response or only about what she wanted to impart, she formed a deep loving and liking relationship with Jo. We can all do this, with our babies, children, adult children and, indeed, with anyone.
If you’re physically close to your child but are missing their cues because, say, you are on your phone or computer, it will trouble them. Think how you feel when you go out with a friend and they spend too much of your time together on their phone. Annoying, right? Because you have, more or less, already formed your personality, it isn’t going to damage you, although it won’t help the relationship. Your child, however, is in the process of forming their personality and their habits in relationship with you.
We know that alcoholics and drug addicts do not make the best parents because their priority is always the substance they’re addicted to, so their children are denied a lot of the attention they need. I’d say phone addicts are not so far behind. I do not recommend playing or checking emails on your phone in front of a young child for long periods of time. Not only will you be depriving them of contact, you will be creating an empty space inside them. And not to be dramatic, but this is the sort of empty space that may make addicts of people later in life, when they try to fill it with addictive substances or compulsive activities to stop a feeling of being disconnected – feeling empty – haunting them.
You also risk your child becoming addicted to a screen too, as a replacement for contact. You may get more of an instant sense of connection from a screen than from meaningful contact with another person – but it is not a viable substitute.
You may well be attached to your phone because of your need for contact. Well, your child has the same need for contact, but more intensely, because they need contact with you to connect up their brain. People do not develop normally in isolation. People need people.
Anyone who cares for your baby or child needs to know this about screens too, whether it’s a nanny, a childminder, a friend or a relative. If you or they are always staring at a screen, your child will want a screen to stare at too. If you have suddenly realized on reading this that you often ignore your child, do not think, ‘I have ruined them for life,’ because you haven’t. Simply by stopping and making the space for them instead, you can repair your relationship.
There was another observation from the maternal-response experiment, and that was how difficult it was for many mothers to maintain a still face when looking at their baby. This shows how powerful the infant’s signals are, how we’re wired to respond. We just need to let it happen.
We are born with this innate capacity for dialogue, to interact, to take turns. This process begins from birth and it does not stop. Maybe it starts before that; maybe the birth process is a form of turn-taking too, contraction followed by rest?
In dialogue, one person’s action produces a turn-taking response in the other. In the turn-taking the parent and the baby meet with their own different rhythms. Both tune in and learn from each other. Together, infants and their parents develop unique patterns of being together. A baby and one parent may develop one pattern and the same baby and their other parent may develop another, a baby and a sibling another, and so on. Each relationship has a different pattern.
These patterns are not adult led but co-created between the baby and the other person. They are not all fixed – they change depending on the moods and the input of each partner. Sometimes the partners ‘get’ each other and sometimes they miss, then some readjustment needs to take place.
The way you’ll find out what your child wants is by observing, by trial, by repairing former misses by trying again and succeeding. You may learn to read a certain glance as ‘I am ready for more smiling’; and at another time you may learn that a similar glance means ‘Feed me.’ It is very normal not to be able to understand what a baby means with their cries or gestures, and that’s okay, but you can still respond in your own way. It isn’t the sense that matters so much as the pattern of turn-taking. I felt inadequate as a new mother when more experienced parents told me I would be able to interpret the cries before too long and that one would mean the baby is thirsty and another that the baby is too hot. Cries to me were not inadequate language, they were sounds, communications of a different sort, requiring my attention and observation and engagement but not a non-existent baby-dictionary. It felt easier once patterns of observing and turn-taking were established.
A baby learns to communicate and find connection by being with their family, and members of that family learn by being with that baby, as each pairing develops their unique communications system. It’s like the way in which the best stand-up comics read a room and adapt to it to give their performance. No two audiences and no two babies are the same. After a few months each partner knows each other better and has learned how to be with each other in ways they can each find more satisfying; observing and turn-taking has a major part to play in this, even though, for the most part, it is done unconsciously.
This is Simon’s story:
By watching my son, Ned, I realized he was communicating right from the off. I didn’t always understand what he was telling me, but watching him helped me get there. I got to know the signs I needed to do something about and the ones that weren’t so urgent.
Ned has just turned two and he can say quite a few words and use short sentences. But he still doesn’t always know what he needs – so we still have to watch him to get that.
Last weekend, we were at a restaurant with another family who have bigger kids and Ned was loving chatting to them and playing. Then I noticed his eyes glaze over, and he’d stopped looking at them. We have learned this is what Ned does when he’s had enough of something, needs a bit of quiet time. If we don’t notice it, what happens next is he can start crying, even go into full tantrum mode.
This time, I spotted it, so I got up and asked Ned if he wanted to go for a walk, and he nodded. I picked him up from his high chair and carried him out of the restaurant. We sat on the grass outside and he leaned against me for a minute or two. Then he started to pick daisies and give them to me. We began a familiar game where I count whatever it is he’s handing me: one daisy, two daisies, three daisies. Then he takes them back, to hand them to me again.
I could see Ned was calm and engaged once more and had lost that spaced-out look. When he’d finished with the daisies, he was looking around for something else to take his attention, and I said, ‘Shall we go back inside and finish the meal?’ He nodded, took my hand and led me back to the table.
What surprises me is that it wasn’t a pain to have to leave a group of friends because I feel so engaged with Ned. He has taught me to communicate more on a bodily level, by watching him and learning what his triggers and needs are.
When a baby has a low impact on their parents – isn’t ‘demanding’, is ‘easy’ or ‘good’ – it is often, in some childcare philosophies, considered a good thing. But manipulating a baby into having the least effect on you is dehumanizing. You need to allow your baby to impact you. If you don’t, the child will have to overadapt to feel like they belong and in so doing they lose a sense of themselves and some of their humanity (like we may have lost some of our own when we were babies). Babies may not yet know words, but we can learn to understand them by observing them. If we practise this skill of observation, it will help us to understand and relate better to our children, whatever age they are.
As adults, we know it’s respectful to be mindful of any person that we come into contact with. But sometimes people forget that babies are people too. Try to think of your child as a partner in the enterprise of being cared for.
This is why it matters to get into the habit of telling your child what is going to happen, then leaving a pause before making something happen. So, for example, suppose your baby is in a pushchair and you’re going to lift them out and put them in a car seat. Say, ‘I’m going to lift you into the car seat,’ then leave a pause so they can take it in. Then tell them what’s happening, as it happens: ‘Now I’m unbuckling you. I’m going to lift you out and put you in the car seat.’ You may feel awkward because the child might not have language yet, but we learn language by hearing it. What is more important than the words is the to and fro between you and your child, the turn-taking.
Over time, when they get used to this, as the give and take of dialogue beds in and you leave spaces for them to respond, they will put out their arms to help you lift them. Do the same when you are going to change their nappy or their clothes. Involve them in as many of your activities as you can, but especially those that are to do with them.
People develop in relationship with each other. The more open we are to the other and the more sensitive we can be to the subtleties of glance and gesture, agitation or relaxation, the more we can ward off unhappiness and despair in our babies and therefore in ourselves. We can learn to relax and to observe our babies and children, to respect their individual activities and communications and learn from them. It makes parenting, which, as you know, can feel long and boring in the early months and years, seem less so, because it gives it meaning.
Positive attention given to your child is never wasted. I think we can sometimes err in thinking it’s the grand gestures that matter – the trip to a theme park, the big Christmas present, the birthday party. These things can be nice but it is the everyday interactions that count. With trial and error on both sides, the minutiae of everyday interaction will become as satisfying as possible to both of you and give your young human a capacity for happiness.
Exercise: How to get better at dialogue
To get even better at dialogue, think about how you listen and observe when you are listening well – to your baby, to another child or to an adult. You’ll realize that what happens is you notice the movements, tone, gestures and expressions of the speaker, you concentrate on what is being said and you may be aware of the feelings the speaker brings up in you.
So what can get in the way of your listening and observing? Often, it’s prematurely preparing your response in your head, or your mind otherwise wandering off. Of course, these things will always happen to some extent, but what you can do is notice when you’ve stopped focusing on the speaker or the child or baby – and return your attention to them. With practice, you’ll get better at being a good listener and being an equal partner in this dialogue.
While doing some research for a TV programme I made about surrealism, I learned that when Salvador Dalí was at school he once charged headfirst into a marble pillar, hurting himself quite badly. When asked why he’d done that, he said it was because no one was paying him any attention.
If babies and children don’t get what they need at the beginning of their lives, if they don’t feel seen, if they can’t be certain they will be responded to, they may get locked into the stage of trying to get attention. And that’s when you – and other people – might experience them as annoying.
I can put this another way: you can’t ‘spoil’ a baby with too much sensitive responsiveness to their cues. Time invested in the beginning gets the child used to having their needs for connection met. They internalize this, know they can rely on it and don’t have to keep looking for it. If they don’t get enough attention, the child can get stuck in feeling real only when they have a direct behavioural or emotional impact on those around them.
A child given enough attention will feel secure, won’t have to be preoccupied with relationships, neither obsessing about them nor feeling they must perform – jump through hoops or charge into pillars – to be sure of them. If you don’t respond to most of a child’s bids for attention, they will make those bids louder or, as they get older, naughtier. Negative attention from a parent is better than no attention at all because at least then they know they exist in your mind. They feel compelled to be disruptive, which, of course, ostracizes them further.
Once a child is a pain, they are harder to get along with and to pay attention to, which is a shame, because they need attention even more, to repair the early rupture.
What if your relationship with your child feels as if you’re both locked into some sort of battle where all the attention seems to be negative attention and you experience them as an irritation? First, you might want to find somewhere else, away from your child and home, to safely release the anger that has built up in you. This might be talking to someone who won’t judge you, or it may be going into a soundproof room, beating a cushion with your fists and having a good old roar.
To reverse the relationship you have, and what you have been doing, you can do what psychologist Oliver James calls ‘love bombing’. James says, in order to reset the emotional thermostat of your child – and, I add, probably yours too – you need to spend some time with your child. Not ‘quality time’ when you just hang out together but love-bombing time. This is a time with a marked beginning and an end when your child, within reason, calls the shots. It’s the child who decides what you’ll do and where you’ll do it.
Love bombing is one-to-one time, so make it either at home when the rest of the family are visiting relatives or, perhaps, if you can afford it, at a hotel. For the whole period – of twenty-four hours or a weekend – your child, so long as it’s safe and legal, is in charge of what you both do and eat. And during that time, you also frequently express your heartfelt appreciation and love for your child.
It may feel as if, by letting your child call the shots and showering them with love, you are compounding their bad behaviour, but you are not. Imagine you felt unseen, unheard or mistreated (it does not really make any difference if you are mistaken in this – if you feel it, it is your experience) by the people whose love, good opinion and attention are your source of connection and everything that matters, and the only way you were sure of getting their attention was to make a nuisance of yourself. If they gave you that love and consideration, you would not have to play up to get attention. The love-bombing exercise gives the child a concentrated dose of that attention. It also interrupts your mutually coercive patterns of behaviour and resets both of you in a rhythm and pattern of give and take.
In my practice as a psychotherapist I have met adults who get stuck at the stage of wanting attention all the time; otherwise, they feel shame or they feel that they don’t really exist. If you don’t respond to most of your child’s cues, you might be training them to be manipulative like this too. The other outcome is that they will give up on relationships altogether and become hard to form a connection with. There is no avoiding, no short cuts, to giving your child the attention they need.
Doing this doesn’t mean telling them that they have done a ‘good job’ all the time or that they are the ‘greatest’, which isn’t necessarily a good idea. It’s not about judging them. What they need is the ordinary turn-taking, the to and fro of spoken or unspoken dialogue. The more of this type of attention you invest in your baby and child, the less catching up you, and they, will need to do later.
Think of it like this: there’s a parent and a child on a train. A child sitting still on a long journey is liable to get bored. The parent can either play with the child, draw with them, read to them, play a game with them – or spend the time instead telling them to be quiet and sit still. It is more pleasant for both of you to play with or read to a child – spend that time in give and take – than it is to spend the time in admonishment, or enduring noise that is unpleasant for both yourself and other people in the carriage. It often happens too that when you put the time in at the beginning of a long period, such as a train journey, your child can become absorbed in an activity you initially did together, and you may be able to have some time when they don’t need you to read your book or relax by doing your own thing.
Don’t worry if your child goes through a stage of only wanting you, or only wanting your co-parent. This is, in fact, a good sign. It means the child has formed a very strong bond and that they can form strong bonds, which is helpful for their capacity for happiness.
It’s natural for a child to prefer their parent and members of their own immediate family to other carers. The more secure they feel in their bond with you, the easier they will separate to form strong bonds with others – but only when they are ready. Do not be in a hurry for this to happen. The clinging, the longing and the loving of you may seem overwhelming at times, but enjoy it: it is a sign that they have formed a strong attachment to you. The more certain they become of this attachment, the less reassurance they will need of it.
I remember one mother saying to me, ‘My child adores me and needs me so much. I’ve never had a man this keen!’ This child eventually did, like other children will, learn to take his mother so much for granted that he is now keen to go for playdates and sleepovers. The key to fostering an independent spirit is, paradoxically, allowing them to separate from you when they are ready and want to, rather than pulling away from them.
It’s not that there is anything wrong with the more sensitive child who needs to keep you close. Nor is there anything wrong with a child who wants time alone. We’re all different and have different needs. We all go through stages in development, but we do so at our own pace. I am not going to give you a milestone age-marker for smiling, or sitting up, or remembering a song, because it does not mean we are any less worthy if we develop at different stages and at different speeds. The way to get through any stage a child is at is to meet their relational needs at that stage so that you and they can go through it and not get stuck in it. You cannot rush it, or ignore it, or a child may get caught there. The more positive energy you invest in your child at the start, the less of your energy you will need to invest further on.
Some parents struggle with the early years because they find them boring, or unstimulating. It’s true there is a lot of manual labour and the intellectual or social stimulation you get from being with babies and young children is different to what you were used to at work or in your before-baby life. A way through these struggles is to allow yourself to be interested and curious about your baby, to notice where their focus is, to try to work out what they are trying to do, rather than thinking of being with your baby as boring – of your baby as something that is ‘done to’. If you get stuck in the trap of feeling that they are little more than an obligation to be fed, wiped and entertained, you are limiting what meaning you could be making from caring for your child. A meaning I made was that my care, respect and attention were an investment in my daughter and in our relationship. Looking back on those early months and years from this distance, it seems they went very fast after all. It is more useful to make a meaning like that about childcare than it is to look around the mess in your home and feel you have nothing to show, no results, for your day’s work. The results will come, just not at the end of every single day, like they might in other types of work. When we adopt the habit of listening and allowing our child to impact upon us, parenting does become rewarding. When you invest in helping to keep your child feeling connected and engaged with you and with any activity they do or that you do together, you are investing in their future default mood.
Most of us have normal, resting moods that we live in for most of the time, our ‘usual’ moods. This may surprise you a little, but the time you spend in the natural to and fro of relating with your child is an investment that will pay off in terms of the development of their usual mood. Although we may be born with a tendency to have a certain temperament, so much of how we habitually feel does develop in relationships with others, especially our parents. The more relaxed your child is, probably because they get enough attuned attention, the more their default mood is likely to be relaxed rather than anxious or angry. Like many adults, you may have had to work hard in later life to learn how to relax because, as a baby, you got used to being anxious, or lonely or otherwise unsoothed and unmet and those feelings became an habitual mood for you. I want to stress that of course it is okay for your child to feel the whole spectrum of emotions, and they will, but they need to be kept company in all their moods, from tears to smiles and fears and anger.
When people come to therapy for the first time, they often find it a powerful experience simply because being listened to has the power to soothe. Possibly some of us would not even need therapy had we been adequately listened to. Being available to observe, listen and engage with your child in a way that makes them feel safe, loved and valuable is an investment in their default mood.
Sleep is a huge deal – not for babies and children; they’ll sleep when they sleep, but for parents. It is an emotive subject. Parents get angry and defensive about their sleep strategies, especially if they think they have found a method that works for them and then someone like me comes along and says, ‘It is not kind or wise to leave your baby or toddler to cry alone in the night. It’s not relating to them. It’s like treating them like an “it” rather than a person.’ I am not saying this because I want to shame you – I really don’t – but nor do I want babies, toddlers and children to be alone at night when they feel that they need you. It is no more pleasant for a child to cry themselves to sleep or feel lonely than it is for an adult. I’m not comfortable with the idea of manipulation, or ‘training’, as a way of relating to anyone, but especially not to children, who are forming their personalities and attachment styles in relationship with their primary caregivers. Sleep training is when you leave a baby or a toddler to cry either until they are asleep, or until they have cried for a certain amount of time and then you go into them after a few minutes but each night you gradually make those few minutes longer and longer. There are studies that say this type of conditioning reduces the number of minutes it takes for a baby to go to sleep. There are even studies that say conditioning a child not to cry out for you does them no harm, but there is later research that contradicts these studies, that points out the flaws in the earlier studies and finds that sleep training harms a baby’s brain development.
The main take-away from sleep-training research is that sleep training does not eliminate a baby or a child’s need for you; it eliminates their crying out for you, as it conditions them to give up trying.
The parental sleep obsession is easy to understand because having interrupted sleep can leave you exhausted. But I believe our preoccupation in wanting to push our children into getting to sleep, and by themselves too, as fast and as early as possible has the potential to harm our relationship with them and therefore has the possibility to interfere with their capacity for happiness later in life. This is because babies and children do not learn to soothe themselves and regulate their emotions by being left alone but by being soothed by a carer, time and time again. As they grow up they eventually learn to internalize that soothing. In other words, we learn to self-soothe by being soothed by others. And to begin with, this soothing is a twenty-four-hour job, which can be something of a jolt for new parents.
If your child associates sleep with comfort, security and company, they’ll feel good about going to bed and sleeping. We get into trouble with sleep when we try to push our children away from us when we want them to sleep. Then, bedtime becomes associated with loneliness and rejection.
In most of Western culture, there seems to be some sort of race to get children to be alone at night. It might be because we prioritize our fast-paced lives and what we perceive to be society’s expectations of us over the necessity of following our instincts to attend to a coercive cry. Society’s expectations of parents and babies can be at odds with biology. What we need to remember is that children separate from their parents naturally. When they know you’re there and available, then they feel free to separate because they can take it for granted that you’ll be there when they want to reconnect. We do not encourage their independence by pulling away from them; by doing that we are interfering with the separation process and protracting it, as well as interfering with the process of our children forming a secure attachment style. All mammals sleep with their young and the majority of humans are no different. In southern Europe, Asia, Africa and Central and South America, sharing a sleeping space with parents is the norm for babies until they are fully weaned and often beyond that, as in Japan. We are in the minority in the West to think it is acceptable to have babies sleeping separately from their parents.
Night-time is half a baby’s life. If they get into a habit of feeling unheard and unmet and lonely at night, there is a danger that this becomes a sort of default mood for them. If a baby is crying and is being comforted by a mother, father or another familiar figure, this is tolerable stress; if a baby is left alone to cry, it is toxic stress. An excess of the hormone cortisol will be present in toxic stress and this adversely affects how the baby’s brain wires up. If you are so tired that you have slept through your child’s coercive crying on a few occasions, this is unlikely to have any long-lasting adverse effect on them; it is only when there is a nightly habit of ignoring the cries of a baby who is alone that there may be a rupture you will need to repair. This is done by accepting your child’s feelings, not trying to condition or scold them out of them but being alongside them and feeling with them so they know they are not alone. This is what we need to do whatever age our children are.
Sleep is one of those areas, like many areas in childrearing, where the more time you invest early on, the less time you’ll spend later trying to get it right. I think the best way of investing is with empathy, lying down with your child or otherwise staying with them until they’re asleep. In this way, they learn to associate sleep with feeling loved, being kept company and safe.
You may have altered sleep patterns while you invest this time in keeping them company in the night, and this is normal. It usually helps if, when the baby awakes, they can smell or touch their parent, so it can help if you sleep with your baby. This also saves you from having to get up to soothe your child.
None of us sleeps through the night. A typical sleep cycle for an adult is about ninety minutes; for an infant, it is one hour. We may think we do sleep through, but in fact what we are doing is waking up, or very nearly waking up, and going straight back to sleep again. If a baby senses you close and can touch you, they are less likely to be aroused to full wakefulness.
Please don’t berate yourself if you have tried sleep training. You may have had no way of knowing that your silent child could still be stressed before you heard that the stress hormones remain high even though they have given up crying. It may well be that a lot of children can survive sleep training unscathed – individual children have different needs and different sensitivities – but personally I would never take that risk. Please don’t throw this book away in a temper. I don’t want you to feel ashamed if you have resorted to trying to condition your child to sleep by ignoring or delaying your response to their cries. There is so much societal pressure to force children to be alone and silent at night, it’s no wonder we capitulate to it. I will be coming to alternatives. Sleep training is conditioning, it is not relating; it is treating your baby as an ‘it’ rather than as an individual person, it is trying to manipulate your child into having a silent night rather than allowing them to separate from you at their own pace according to their own needs.
Not many of us have pre-verbal memories, so we cannot recollect what it felt like to be left alone to go to sleep when we felt needy and lonely – and so we may not see the harm in perpetuating it. I believe, as well as developing a habit of feeling despair, what sleep training may also perpetuate is a shutting down of that feeling of despair, which also shuts down the capacity for being able to empathize with others in their distress. There’s a possibility that sleep training, as well as conditioning a baby not to cry out in the night, could also contribute to feelings of shame around needing another person.
At first, a baby will cry every day, and it may seem like every hour of every day and night; a toddler will cry every day; and then, almost imperceptibly, they will cry less and less. As you comfort them, they learn how to cope with their feelings. If you ignore their cries, they will learn not to share their feelings with you – which will not help them cope with them. Having feelings accepted and soothed is the foundation for good mental health.
I know – this is all very well. Here I am, lobbing facts and opinions at you without mercy and apparently not noticing how exhausted you are. Sorry. But there are good alternatives to sleep training. There is co-sleeping, where you do not separate at night so the baby does not feel abandoned and alone. But not everyone is able or wants to sleep alongside a baby. An alternative is what neuroscientist Professor Darcia Narvaez calls sleep nudging.
Sleep nudging is not about shutting down your baby by ignoring their communication. It’s about nudging your child to sleep within their tolerance and not outside of it. It is important that your child feels secure throughout the process. Firstly, says Professor Navaez, do not attempt sleep nudging before your child is six months old. In their first year of life, the social and emotional processing parts of your baby’s brain – in other words, the foundation for their mental health – are wiring up in relationship with your loving interaction. So do not start this process before they are ready. And all babies are different as to when they may be ready.
As I mentioned earlier, babies aren’t born with the capacity to believe that an object still exists when they can’t see it; psychotherapists call this ‘object permanence’. So when they are left alone, they may feel abandoned. Our own sense of people continuing to exist even when we cannot see or hear them is so ingrained it’s easy to overlook that we had to learn it too.
Once a baby does have this sense of ‘object permanence’ – and, again, I’m not going to say when this is, as we all develop at different speeds and it is possible to have the knowledge of permanence cognitively but not feel it on a bodily level until later – it’s easier to begin to nudge for more separation at night.
The first step is to notice where and when your baby feels safe and secure as they fall asleep. This may be going to sleep while breastfeeding and being nursed back to sleep if they wake up. This ‘comfort baseline’, as Narvaez calls it, is where you need to start.
Next, what is the smallest step you can take to move away from the baseline? It may be to stop nursing while they are still drowsy but not yet asleep and cuddle them instead so they can still feel your body and your heartbeat. If your baby accepts this step, repeat it so it becomes the new comfort baseline before going on to the next step or nudge: a further separating step such as lying them down when they become drowsy and stroking their forehead, or whatever soothes your baby. The next step might be to move the baby out of the bed and into a cot right next to it. Then going on to move the cot further away, and eventually into another room. At any stage, if your baby becomes distressed, you return to their comfort baseline.
My story:
My first nudge was to stop nursing when my daughter was still drowsy and cuddle her. When that became her baseline, the next nudge was to pass her over to her father to cuddle her to sleep. With that arrangement, we could have one adult sleeping with her while the other got some sleep in another room.
When she was about two, she asked for her own room but was aghast when it came to night-time and we suggested she should sleep in it alone. ‘Oh, not to sleep in, only to play in,’ she said. We gave her another nudge by saying we would stay with her until she was asleep and, if she woke up, she could come into our bed, so long as she didn’t wake us up and there was no talking. She accepted this arrangement and sometimes we woke up with our daughter in the bed with us and sometimes we didn’t.
By the time she was three she only ever slept in her own room, and when she was four she was happy and secure enough to start to put herself to bed, which she did of her own volition, with no nudging. Although this was on her terms: she got to choose whether she put herself to bed or asked one of us to be with her as she got ready. She didn’t resist going to bed because it had always been a place of comfort, not of loneliness.
The important thing is, you make each of these nudges within your child’s baseline of comfort. We all develop at different speeds and have different needs for closeness and for our own space, so when the time is right will depend on your baby. What felt fine with your first child might not be the case with the next. What you want is for your child to associate their bed with relief from tiredness, with comfort, cosiness and sleep rather than separation, loneliness and desperation. If bed is about good things, they will not be reluctant to go there. This will help them get enough sleep throughout their childhood, which, as you know, is important for their development.
Doing the sleep-nudge process (rather than sleep training), using encouragement rather than punishment will take longer, but I believe it’s worth it. The result will be more long-lasting and makes separating to go to bed easier for children as they develop, and it contributes to a good relationship between you and your child. Being encouraged to do anything is fine for a relationship, but being tricked, ignored or manipulated into a behaviour is not going to enhance your lifelong bond. I do understand how difficult it is to take the long-term view when you are exhausted but, again, I believe it is worth it.
Many of the things we expect our children to achieve, they will, with the minimum guidance or from following our example. Nudging them to the edge of their comfort zone but not beyond it is often a way forward if they do need some help. Remember that, if we do something that they can do for themselves, we may be disempowering them.
When the child is in charge of how they separate, they are less likely to become insecure and clingy than when the parents leave them before they are ready. This goes for separation at night, being left alone at nursery, going to a party on their own and any other situation where they are without you. You can ‘nudge’ to encourage a child to accept these situations – that is, go to the edge of their comfort baseline – but if you are in too much of a hurry for a child to become independent, it will end up in extra work because it can damage your relationship and you will need to repair it. You may see making them manage without you as encouraging independence, but they are more likely to feel it as being pushed away and experience it as some sort of punishment. My message here is to trust your child to separate at their pace and to follow their pace, rather than imposing yours.
In their own good time, your child will sleep all night and on their own, they will sit up, crawl, walk, get themselves dressed, eat solids, cook their own breakfast and pay their own rent. When we push them to do things before they are ready, we frustrate them and ourselves. Many things we painstakingly teach them or make them do they would have picked up on their own in their own time anyway. In our rush to move their development along we may even delay it.
For example, when we prop up a baby into a sitting position rather than wait for them to push themselves up, we deny them the opportunity to learn to do this for themselves. A baby does not need props that restrict their movement in order to sit; all they need is time and space to discover movement. Left to their own devices, they will roll and wriggle, learn how to crawl, to sit up, to stand and to walk for themselves. They will also be learning how to learn. We do not have to interfere with these processes.
In fact, a baby who is often propped up before they can naturally sit up, before the right muscles have developed, sometimes won’t learn to crawl properly but instead will learn a sort of lopsided shuffle from a sitting position which can interfere with naturally good posture later. I’m afraid this was the fate of my own daughter. Never mind: you cannot get everything right. I am conscious that when I talk about ‘best practice’ parenting, you may have already been through the stage I describe and you’ll feel bad because you did something different. But what matters is your relationship, not how soon you started to wean or that you propped your baby up too early. My daughter goes to Pilates now she is an adult and is correcting her posture. It would have been great if I’d had the information when I needed it, but I didn’t. I will keep saying this: it isn’t the mistake that matters as much as making amends for it, even if the amends is Pilates or any other type of therapy your child needs when they are older. Please don’t feel shame if your child needs any sort of help when they are adults because of something you got wrong when they were younger. Being defensive about our mistakes will make them worse, not make them disappear.
The sitting example may sound quite specific, but it’s to make a general point about how much to help: don’t disempower your child by doing something they could learn to do themselves, especially if you back off a bit. You may find the concept of nudging or encouragement helpful when deciding how much to help.
Freya, aged five months, two weeks and three days old, is lying on her front on a rug in the sitting room. Her father is on the sofa close by, reading. Freya makes a squawk; she is trying to grab a ping-pong ball that is on the floor just out of reach. Dad looks up and sees her problem. Should he fix it? She looks up at him and lets out a frustrated cry. ‘You really want that ball, don’t you?’ says Dad, as he kneels on the floor next to her. ‘Can you reach it?’ He smiles at her encouragingly, he looks at her, then he looks at the ball. Freya stops crying and begins to bring her knees up and manages to wriggle towards the ball by pulling herself up on her hands. She lies down again and stretches towards the ball. Her fingers touch it and it goes further away. Dad puts it back where it was and Freya tries again; this time she grabs it and squeals with delight and Dad laughs along with her. ‘You tried really hard then. Well done,’ he says.
Of course, it’s difficult to know, as a parent in a scenario like this, whether to rescue, to encourage or just to observe. By watching your baby or your child for cues, you will be able to get it right a lot of the time. If you rescue them when they could do something for themselves, you are disempowering them and robbing them of agency, but if you don’t help them when they are helpless, you are not being sensitive towards them. In the above example, Freya’s dad gets it just right. He does this naturally, without thinking about it, because it was done that way for him. If it was not done like this for you, it’s a good idea to consciously adopt this style.
Exercise: Let your child take the lead
Get into the habit of being with your child, not doing anything but keeping them company and following their lead. Think about observing and helping them rather than just rescuing. Help them problem-solve rather than doing it for them.
The very word implies that play is trivial – but it is vitally important. While playing, an infant learns to concentrate and gets in the habit of making discoveries, one of which is the joy of feeling absorbed by what they are doing. In addition, they learn how to connect ideas and feed their imagination. It’s also through play that children learn how to connect with their peers. Play is the foundation for creativity and for work; for exploration and discovery. All mammals play, because play is practice for life. Playing is your baby’s and your child’s work – and needs to be respected as such.
I was surprised when I first read the work of Maria Montessori that she said a child who is concentrating on an activity must not be interrupted. I wasn’t used to the idea that when a toddler is pushing a truck around the carpet and making a noise like an engine they are in fact working. They are absorbed, they are concentrating, they are using their imagination, they are constructing a narrative; their activity has a beginning, a middle and an end. And when allowed to repeat such processes many times, they lay down a solid foundation for completing tasks and concentrating.
A child’s work starts earlier than this stage, though. Your baby needs a safe place to play so they can touch all the objects within their reach. If they are being told ‘no’ all the time, their concentration will be broken. An undistracted baby can play for minutes at a time with a simple object like a piece of tissue paper. They can learn how to grab it, screw it up, drop it, reach for it again. A baby does not get bored with an activity, even if you do. While this is going on, your job is just to watch, to follow their gaze but not to direct it.
Children don’t need a lot of toys. As you probably know, the cliché of them preferring the box to the article inside it is so often true. A two-year-old child of my acquaintance was given a great pile of toys by her doting parents, friends and relations on her birthday. One of her aunts also threw in an empty plastic lemon-juice bottle shaped like a lemon. What was the child’s favourite toy? The lemon bottle, of course! Playing with this, she learned how to suck water into it and push water out of it and to direct the jet of water too. So, the fancy dolls’ house went largely unplayed with, and so did the Disney characters and the tiny kitchen and whatever other landfill had been bought for her. Children do not need more than a few simple toys: a couple of toy cars, a cardboard box, a square of material, a doll, a bear and a few bricks, and a child is set up. Some dressing-up clothes can fire imagination too. More is not better. If they only have a few toys – one drawer or chest of toys, and some craft materials such as paint and paper – then each thing can have its place to be returned to after play.
Children, just like adults, become overwhelmed and frozen when given too much choice. We might believe we’d prefer to have lots of options, but experiments by the psychologist Barry Schwartz show that we don’t. In one, he found people felt happier with a box containing a choice of six chocolates rather than a choice of thirty – and were more satisfied with the chocolate they chose. What happens when we have too much choice is we worry we’ll make the wrong one. The average child in the West has more than 150 toys and receives an extra 70 to add to this number every year. This is overwhelming for children. With too many toys, they’re more likely to flit from activity to activity rather than engage deeply in one. Buying more toys is often indulged in by parents because they hope it will mean that the child will want them less. But guess what? It doesn’t work.
Children need free play where they choose and direct their own activity to build their capacity for creativity. But sometimes a child wants you to play with them. And it is you they need, not the novelty of a new toy.
You might feel it’s time-consuming and it may not be your idea of fun to play ‘show party’ or whatever game they devise for you to join in. It can be frustrating when a child demands that you play, especially if you have a pile of stuff to get on with. However, I found investing my energy at the beginning of playtime paid off. When my daughter wanted me involved, she’d demand that I ‘Talk teddy’. Then she’d gradually take over and do the talking for teddy herself.
Play is a time to let the child take the lead, to decide on an activity and direct your role in that activity. You’re more likely to be able to tackle that pile of stuff if you help your child to start their play and gradually back off as they become more self-absorbed. It is easier for you and nicer for them if you play with them first.
On the other hand, if you tell your child you’re too busy to play with them, they are likely to continually interrupt you so you don’t have time to do your work. You’re also giving them the message that they’re boring or a nuisance, and this might make them feel lonely, angry or sad, even insecure about their relationship with you. Once a child has started playing and is content, they can continue their play without having to check on you or keep you engaged.
You have to put the time in anyway with children. Invest it positively at the beginning, then you’re less likely to have to invest it negatively later. This is true of playtime as well as many other times.
The other day I was watching a father and daughter on the beach. The girl looked to be around the age of six. When they first arrived, it was ‘Daddy, do this,’ ‘Come with me,’ ‘Come to the water,’ ‘Get the bucket,’ ‘Build this.’ Daddy did everything he was told. After a while, the girl became more and more absorbed and involved in playing with the wet sand where the tide had gone out. Daddy was close by but only observing, not participating – and he managed to read his newspaper as well. It was a lovely example of the girl gradually finding her inner ‘autopilot’ so Daddy could get a bit of leisure too.
After a while another girl came and stood and watched her for a bit, and she started to involve that child in her game. It was satisfying to watch. If Daddy had not started off playing with her and had gone to his newspaper straightaway, she may have been preoccupied with her relationship with him, may have become fretful and couldn’t have allowed herself to become so absorbed or make a new friend.
Most children also like some organized games like cricket or cards as part of family time together. You may associate such games with love and enjoy passing them on. But if you weren’t played with as a child, you may find that playing or even organizing these games feels like too much. Be aware if playing is bringing up some feelings from the past in you. You can either overcome these feelings by knowing they don’t belong in the present or make sure that other children or adults are around to help facilitate play and try to join in occasionally.
I remember, once, we were one of three families spending time together in the days between Christmas and New Year. The Monopoly board was brought out, much to the amusement of most of the adults and the enthusiasm of the children. But one of the dads got up and went to get his coat, declaring he was going to walk the four miles home and leave the car for his wife and son. I followed him into the hall. He told me he was an only child. He was always given board games for Christmas but no one ever bothered to play with him. So these games always brought up such sadness in him that he said, if he stayed, he was frightened he would spoil it for everyone. I haven’t really got a happy ending for this story, I’m afraid, but what struck me at the time was how much what is laid down in childhood can stick.
Children thrive when they have multi-aged playmates. Put a couple of very young toddlers together and they’ll be more likely to have parallel play than to play with each other. Age-mixed play teaches children how to play in a way that playing with kids of their own age does not. Younger children can learn more from older friends than they would by just mixing with their peers. Most of our learning comes from observing others; older children teach younger ones more sophisticated behaviour and are role models, and they can offer more emotional support to younger children too. And the older children learn how to teach, how to nurture and how to be leaders.
Looking back over their childhood, many adults feel their happiest times were when there were children of all ages who they could make up games with, run around with and had plenty of space to do it in. These times usually happened on holiday, with cousins, friends, on camping trips, at festivals, on days out or days near home at a park or in a garden. And they included having trusted adults there in the background to go to if necessary, providing meals and enough boundaries to make them feel safe. I worry that with too many structured after-school activities children may not be getting enough time in a mixed-aged group to organize their own play. Most children probably need more time outside with other children and less time inside being organized or in front of screens. Screens should be used with caution. They can become addictive, but denying them altogether is another sort of deprivation.
Exercise: Creating great play habits
- Don’t interrupt a concentrating child.
- When a younger child wants to play with you, start them off on the activity they choose. Then, when they get so absorbed they don’t need you, back off.
- With older children, don’t feel you must be the entertainments officer every time your child doesn’t know what to do. When a child is bored, have faith and tell them you have confidence in them that they will find something fun to do. Boredom may be a necessary component of creativity.
- Do, however, put some time aside for enjoying yourself with your children by sharing activities you enjoy – board games, card games, sports, singing or whatever you like.
- Children thrive with playmates of all ages.