Options For The Care Of Children



Options For The Care Of Children

Introduction

The days of visualizing the human infant as a lifeless, largely unconscious creature-to whom the world happens without her taking much notice-are largely over. While there is debate about precisely how babies go about perceiving, remembering, and formulating narratives about their lived experience, we no longer doubt that they are quite busy at it. Clearly, they record, respond, and adapt to their environment (Bowlby, 1969; Crittenden, 1990; Main, and Kaplan, 1985; Schore, 2001; Siegel, 1998; Stern, 1985).

Do the early experiences of babies in being parented, in creating connections, and in experiencing disconnections form the basis for how those babies grow up to parent their own children? If so, precisely how? Do babies simply grow to do exactly what was done to them?

Or do babies and young children develop narratives: internally-processed story lines that help the infant explain to himself why things worked out as they did, that help her adapt to present circumstances, that cue him about how to act in similar circumstances, in the future? If so, two things would appear likely: 1.) such narratives would have great inertia, proving difficult to unseat-particularly using educational means, and rational discourse; and 2.) such narratives would likely find expression in the child's own parenting behavior, later in life, and would be defended with great vigor (Fish, 1993; Fraiberg, 1980; Lieberman and Pawl, 1988; Ricks, 1985; Zeanah, Anders, Seifer and Stern, 1989).

Profound clinical and methodological questions arise, then, about the efficacy of any intervention that fails to take into account precisely why a parent behaves as he or she does. It would appear that the likelihood of provoking change in aberrant parenting-abuse, neglect, psychological aloofness, for example-might be significantly increased if we could find pathways to accessing the parent's own infant narratives.

What we may have stumbled across is the infant narrative of the parent-or, perhaps, one of many such narratives that, it turns out, were developed when the parent was very small. It helped, back then, to give the child some way to understand her world, and to predict what was gong to happen next. It was a survival strategy, a way of gaining some imaginary control over a life that may have offered the child little actual power. The child used the intellectual and observational resources available to him at the time (meager though they may have been) to construct a story about his world. As he grew older, he may have continued to behave and to develop expectations and to relate to others as if the narrative were still true, even though it may no longer have been correctly descriptive of actual experience. Discomfort over any mismatches between her early narrative and her present life may have caused a growing child or adult to try to squeeze actual experience into interpreted narrative since, curiously, it is there that she finds comfort; it was there that she once found survival.

Plan for Parent-Child Relationships

The plan is to build ...