Dr. Gutstein continues to discuss the typical development of infants in order to lay a foundation for understanding what is happening to our ASD kids.
During the first year, infants begin to take on a more active role in their relationship with others including initiating experience-sharing. They begin to explore, experiment and start to seek out challenge as their growth-seeking drive takes over. Through the child’s growth seeking actions, they become their own agents. They seek out the challenges, they seek out the disorganization, and hopefully they see themselves as the agents of their reorganization.
This process of mental growth becomes something rewarding to the child and something they pursue. By one year old we see them becoming very motivated to pursue this mental growth process even though they’re going to experience that temporary disorganization, that does not deter them one bit.
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Full Transcript
Now in the first year, guiding relationships becomes crucial, but in the first year guiding is continuing to develop the infant’s personal agency and helping them to become self regulated even though they’re still very dependent on their parents. Their learning to regulate their attention, even their emotions to not be so reactive and of course their motor regulation, their motor planning. Also the guiding relationship is focused on developing the infants what we call interpersonal agency. Their ability to influence others in their world and that includes taking on more responsibility for their joint engagements. To take more active roles in some of those infant games. And a third important area is to develop this budding sense of an infant of self of themselves in a differentiated say from others . I can do things, I have some capabilities. I can influence my world. Also what guiding does, what parent guides do is they support their infants in their desire to explore , experiment and practice and to engage with challenges, to moderate challenges.
So what parent guides are doing is they’re also creating these positive experiences but they’re also spending an enormous amount of time responding to the infant’s own growth seeking and trying to shape that and guide that in a positive direction. So together, in that guiding relationship , infants and parents provide for one another , you can’t really separate who’s doing what , with a variety of ways for the opportunity of development. And you’re going to see experience sharing, co-participating , joint activities, social referencing, practicing for mastery, exploring and experimenting and finally observing. You don’t want to diminish that, infants spend a lot of time in observation . So infants on their own and I want to emphasize this , this is something you don’t teach them, none of these things are things that parents teach them . Infants initiate what we call experience sharing. So you will see here again this is my grandson , who on his own chooses to engage with his world in a engintic way but periodically wants to check in and share that experience with his grandfather on his own in a very joyful way. In a way saying hey look at me look what I’m doing . It’s not because I taught him or I’m prompting him. It’s part of that built in drive of being a human being right?
Now , Infants are also very enthusiastic starting around 6-7 months to become active in these early infant games . So I will show a little segment with a little infant named Emma , where you can see in her earlier months playing peek a boo which is a typical infant game. She was just a passive recipient of it. Her father was doing all the active work of getting the game going and maintaining it , her job is there, she is just laying there and responding. But by 7 months now she has a much more active role in the same game. She actually has a more active role than her father. She’s become a very powerful agent and she has to take responsibility. So she gets the pleasure of being active but she also has to take the responsibility for her active role which requires some work on her part. So what happens if infants are very enthusiastic about accepting those invitations to be active and they’re not interested anymore in being passive recipients in any kind of game and having things done to them. They want to be co-participants and that’s why we use the term co-participation in those activities .
Alright another thing remember we talked about social referencing in my other slide and starting in the second half of the year infants start to move around, they start to separate from their parents and explore their world and as part of that process they’re going to encounter things that are going to leave them unsure of whether they should engage with it, whether it’s dangerous, whether they should move on or come back to the parent. They are not always going to be sure of that . They encounter the experience of what we call uncertainty. So something isn’t dangerous immediately or threatening but they’re not sure it’s safe or they’re not sure they should do anything with it. And that’s a very important milestone and what we see is that infants on their own , without being taught, when they encounter that feeling of uncertainty, They look back and engage with the parent and they don’t necessarily communicate, they just look at their parents’ facial expressions. And they use those expressions to make decisions about whether they should engage or whether they should withdraw. We call that term social referencing. And again no one teaches them and it isn’t so much as a skill it’s their built in growth seeking program.
Another thing we see is that infants become very involved in what we call social observation as well as non social observation. But because they now have control of their attention more they can actually spend more time and focus on things that have more interest to them and for typically developing infants they privilege the social world. Their attentional system is tuned so that they really look at other children, other people but especially other children closer to them and when you watch an infant starting at 7-8 months to observe , you really see a serious almost scientific observation in their face. And they can spend enormous amounts of time. When I am with my grandson for instance he spends, and we go to a playground , he spends half of his time, if not more of his time, effort in observing what’s going on around him, The other children in that setting. That observation kicks in on its own . We don’t tell them to observe, we don’t have to point out things although we do to facilitate that but we don’t have to start it up. As part of growth seeking, they are very motivated to watch and observe without us teaching them to do that. Our job is to facilitate it. We can enhance it , we can provide opportunities, make it easier for them to do that but we don’t have to get it started.
The response to novelty becomes really exciting at this age and you can see the children just love the idea of something they haven’t seen before, even if it’s the parent acting in a way they’ve never acted before , it’s the height of their world. So here’s a good example of a mom acting silly and the infant just loving it. ( Audio of mom acting while playing basketball ) I love it , you can see this, this strong desire , oh this is something I haven’t seen before , oh this is something that I’ve never seen mommy do. This is new , I just love it, they’re just hungry for that. It’s so reinforcing for them , it’s so powerful and as I said by the end of the first year growth seeking includes challenge seeking. My grandson decided on his own he wanted to try to walk our dog which is really much to hard for him but I wanted to give him a experience of doing that and again the goal here is not for him to learn how to walk a dog , he’s a little bit young for that but to have the sense of mastering a challenge. Something that was very difficult for him, holding onto that leash and being able to at least move several feet and feel that sense of agency. I would have never imagined for that to be something to do with him. So sometimes we’re inviting, more often we’re facilitating. We’re enhancing, we’re making something possible that they are starting out themselves to want to do and we have to maintain a nice balance of challenge but not so much challenge right so that child will always fail but not to remove the potential of failure.
But even when a child fails, as a guide what we are going to do is provide what I am going to call a safe landing. We don’t want failure to lead to injury or to demolishing sense of self but to the idea that either we adjust the task to make it a bit less difficult or we in a very normal way encourage them to try again and we often don’t have to that , they will often do that and as a result of that they will build what we call resilience. They sense that they can pursue something or persist at something even when it’s frustrating and as well as cementing their sense of the importance of their guiding relationship in terms of facilitating their growth.
Now there’s one more point I want to get. We are going to go to ASD and that point is that no matter how we guide, that mental growth is always going to be disorganized. And developmental scientists know that when we grow, that when we learn to see the world in new ways, which is what our growth is about and see ourselves in new ways and see ourselves with others there is going to be a period of disruption. There is going to be a period of having organized our understanding of the world in one way we come across something that challenges that. That’s what challenge is, a mental challenge and there’s going to be a temporary period where we realize that our old way of seeing the world just doesn’t fit anymore but we don’t yet have a new way of doing it or seeing ourselves or seeing others. And so inevitably a period of what we call disorganization and I mean internal sense of my way of organizing, making meaning of the world has been somewhat disrupted. Not everything, not everything I believe but some piece of how I see the world doesn’t make sense anymore and for infants to be able to grow mentally, they have to be able to sustain their effort , their engagement during that period with our help to reach a place of reorganization. When we get to the point we say ah ok now I got it, here’s how it fits , here’s this new way, not that different, here’s a new way .
Now this happens pretty naturally with typically developing infants so you might not even notice it . But what’s interesting is it’s not that we do this to infants. We’re not the agents of this. Infants as I say through their own growth seeking actions become the primary agents they disorganized themselves. They seek out these challenges, they seek out this disorganization and they become hopefully see themselves as the agents of their reorganization. Even though we help them, we want them to experience themselves as capable of doing this over, over and over again so that the process of mental growth becomes rewarding to them . Something that they pursue, something that they’re encouraged that they can do that becomes part of their agency and that’s what we do see happening by one year old. We see them becoming very much motivated to pursue this mental growth process even though they’re going to experience that temporary disorganization that does not deter them one bit from doing it. So remember this, Mental growth is inherently disorganized. There is no way around it.
Sir,
Can we get full transcript of your podcasts?
Thank you for your interest in Podcast 3. We don’t have transcripts of our podcasts but it is a great idea. Thank you for suggesting it. Dr. Sheely