Great Kids (2 of 2 free samples)

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COPYRIGHT
Great Kids by Stanley I. Greenspan M.D.. Copyright2007 by Stanley I. Greenspan, M.D.
All Rights Reserved. Sharing not permitted.

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1: ENGAGEMENT
RELATING TO OTHERS

I visited a new mother, a friend of the family, in the hospital recently. When I entered her room, she was holding her infant in the crook of one arm and using her free hand to pack a small suitcase for the trip home. The baby was awake and alert, looking out from the safety of her mother's arm, smelling her, and feeling her warmth. As my friend packed, she crooned a bit to her new daughter. This connection, only hours old, was off to a good start. Mom was relaxed and enjoying her contact with her new daughter; the baby was warm, secure, nestled into loving arms. A relationship was beginning.

The lessons of engagement begin with the intimacy of a baby's bonds with her parents. As this little girl grows older, she will form strong bonds with all her immediate family by learning to trust, to communicate, and to work and play together. In her relations with others, she will learn about frustration and anger, about disappointment and sadness. As she grows, she will move away from the immediacy of her family circle into a world of peers and, later, into larger groups. Learning how to engage and take pleasure in other people--from elementary school friends to high school buddies to teachers, boyfriends, a husband, and eventually her own children--begins from the moment she first looks into her mother's eyes and takes pleasure in her mother's closeness.

The ability to engage with another person is the bedrock skill for the development of a great kid. From it grows her ability to form trusting relationships. Through relationships, a child learns to construct not only a sense of self but also of the reality of the world in which she lives.

Throughout her life, a child must be able to "read" and relate to a range of people. As she grows up, this ability to connect will allow her to make friends and form a variety of relationships with significant loved ones, with casual acquaintances, and with colleagues and clients. In times of stress, she will turn to those close to her to help her feel better and to find solutions to problems. Through connection with others, children and adults share the pleasures, joys, angers, and sorrows of their lives.


HOW ENGAGEMENT BEGINS

As we can see in the scene I witnessed at the hospital, connection begins immediately. The capacity to elicit connection develops quickly, as well. By the time she is four months old, my friend's baby will be wooing her mother with winning smiles--and getting smiles in return. The pleasure of this reciprocity builds her trust in relationships and her sense of her own ability to connect with other people. By the time she's eight months old, she will be flirting with caregivers, and even with strangers; she will actively be playing peek-a-boo, laughing, and reaching out.

RELATING THROUGH JOY

During the first few months of life, babies learn to translate the world of their sensations into emotions. They begin to understand that a world exists outside themselves, represented at first by Daddy's face, Mommy's smell, the comfort of a soft blanket, the shock of a banging door or a loud voice. Recognizing these patterns and learning the difference between "me" and "outside me" is an essential step toward connecting with a reality outside themselves.

At the very beginning, that reality is grounded in a continuous set of sensations: temperature, touch, taste, hearing, smell, and the sight of familiar faces. The baby I saw in the hospital was already using all her senses, and those senses were focused on the presence of her mother--as they were on her father, too, when he held her in his arms. As parents nuzzle and croon, feed and bathe, cuddle and soothe their baby, their engagement with their infant brings her intense pleasure. This interaction gives the baby her first emotional experience. Through those feelings, she will quickly learn essential lessons about the outer world and about how human beings function in it.

D. W. Winnicott, the great British psychoanalyst, offers a delightfully vivid account of this early engagement:

There is the reactive smile that means little or nothing but
there is also the smile that eventually turns up that means that
the infant feels loving, and feels loving at that moment
towards the mother. Later, the infant splashes her in the bath or
pulls her hair or bites the lobes of her ear or gives her a hug, and
all that sort of thing. . . . On account of this, the infant is able
to make a new development and integration.

It's easy to take the human ability to connect for granted. After all, we all have parents, many of us have siblings, and we all operate in a world filled with other human beings. But this ability to connect varies a great deal. Some children need to sneak away to play alone in their own rooms when they're upset. Others escape into video games, computers, or the television--essentially isolated activities. Others seek to establish connection by fighting, behaving provocatively, or irritating others to force attention.

Parents take great joy in the period of their baby's life when she begins to respond with coos of pleasure and bursts of laughter to interactive games. Mommy might put a rattle on top of her head to make the infant laugh, and then repeat the game. This funny exchange reinforces the baby's understanding that Mommy is a person separate from her. It also teaches the baby that by responding to silly games with laughter and smiles, she can keep the connection going.

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