The Social Child

Laying the foundations of relationships and language

Toni Buchan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135904036
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Educación general

What helps babies and young children develop proficient social skills? How do children's early relationships and social interactions influence their future emotional resilience and wellbeing?The Social Child thoughtfully discusses the key principles of children's social development alongside descriptions of everyday practice. It aims to provide the

‘It's a bit tricky with my back facing the wrong way!’

Waking up to our four-year-old, Connor, at the side of the bed needing help before six o’clock in the morning can be a challenge. He is dressed in an orange T-shirt, green combat trousers and red Converse boots, trying to attach a Spiderman tie around his neck. It is the conundrum of his ‘back facing the wrong way’ that wakes me fully as I am intrigued as to what he means — until I realise that he is referring to tying his tie. With a moment's longing for his earliest years, I am overawed to think of what he still does not know. This sends a wave of maternal comfort through me.

Later the same day, I reflect on the significance of our early morning scene. That orange T-shirt is the one he chooses to wear on his adventures with his granddad. The combat trousers are his ‘work trousers’, the ones he wears to help daddy chop wood, and the shoes are the ‘weekend shoes’ allowed as an alternative to his black school shoes. With no emerging sense of fashion, he has clothed himself in his dearest experiences. The Spiderman tie was his favourite Christmas present last year.

As his mother, the knowledge that he has these memories to inspire his dress sense is endearing, but the fact that he has such emotional attachments to his everyday life is far more precious.

As a practitioner, I can pick out the developmental significance of many aspects of our morning's conversation. Bruner describes how a child's social environment impacts on who they become. He says, ‘Man is not a naked ape but a culture-clothed human being, hopelessly ineffective without the prosthesis provided by culture’.¹

Connor has already grasped some of the really tricky concepts. He has dressed in his own choice of clothes for a non-uniform day at school. He had been excited by the idea that by paying a pound to the teacher, she would let him wear his own clothes for a day. In return, she would send his money to buy a mosquito net for a child in a faraway place. He could repeat this verbatim to anyone interested; but does he have an understanding of what charity is? Is it uniform, non-uniform, money, malaria, Africa, famine? In fact, what are the special powers of Spiderman?

Without the vocabulary to describe his tie predicament, you could be forgiven for thinking his language ability lags behind his insatiable thirst for new cognitive understanding and experiences. But this would be a disservice to his social development. Even without the right word to hand, his desire to fulfil his purpose, and his implicit confidence in trying to make me understand his meaning using other words, clearly demonstrates a willingness to try. This drive to be social is hardwired, as is the flash of curiosity I felt, as his mother, to open my eyes to his request so early in the day.

What it is to be social

As humans, we are all predisposed to be social. By the term ‘social’, I mean we are driven to interact with the environment around us, in both a physical and a psychological way. We seek to sense its features, explore its possibilities and usefulness to us, and to gather information about it. This drive is never more pure than in a newborn baby, where the potential is unlimited by prior experience, undiluted by preconceptions or misconceptions and the balance of nature versus nurture is never again as even. Maria Robinson describes how ‘Babies are primed to take an interest in their world so that they can begin the journey of finding out about themselves and the world about them’.²

A debate continues about which of the born with, or ‘nature’ characteristics, and which of the ‘nurture’ factors, impact on our personalities. This ongoing debate could be considered to be the backbone for many social development theories over the decades. Perhaps the ideas Piaget had about children not being empty vessels to be flled with knowledge was not completely without relevance. Again, his theory of children as ‘lone scientists’ is not hard to marry to the curiosity and active momentum we see children use to explore the world.

Other theorists rely more on the interactive process of the infant experiencing their new world, and the child developing the social skills that will endure throughout its life. From the psychodynamic theories of Freud, the psychosocial theories of Erikson, the psychoanalytic ideas of Winnicott and Bion, and the social and language development theories of Vygotsky, there remains a common denominator. The human child needs to engage with its environment socially to establish the rules of its surroundings and culture. By developing communication and, later, language skills, the innate consequences increase the potential of what new knowledge becomes available to the child.

Why are we social?

Stephen Fry, a well-known literary enthusiast, explored the evolutionary rationale and biological mechanics of why and how humans evolved using speech as a primary mode of communication.³ In the television programme, Professor Tomasello defined the origin of language as the point at which humans needed to collaborate and organise their cooperative efforts to gather food. Fry elaborated how, alongside this need to coordinate ourselves to achieve this primary purpose, there were other, unforeseen yet significant, benefits to communicating with speech. We became able to transmit our pasts, our stories and our own narratives to those in our worlds and across the generations.

Children's socialisation into their own culture is the process by which they learn what it means to be an adult human being within their society.⁴ It is a complex gathering of understandings as to how our world operates. Bronfenbrenner's social model puts the child in the centre and layers the various influences on the child's socialisation into its culture like an onion.⁵ This happens not in stages over time, or with one stage dependent on another being consolidated. These developments can happen concurrently and may not happen in a particular order and should be considered as a ‘work in progress’ process. What it does provide is an insight into the many influences that can potentially impact on our child's cognitive, emotional and psychological processes and can also offer some understanding about what being ‘social’ means. Schafer highlights that it is via a child's interaction with the world and the relationships it has with the people in it that determines what the child learns to be significant, what it learns to be worth attending to, how it acquires language and labels, and in the process, develops ways of viewing itself in relation to the world. As Margaret Mead observed: ‘Children learn to see themselves and what they do in relation to the people around them’.⁶

Being sociable

Learning to be social and socially cooperative with others is a vital childhood task. Being sociable, however, is a personality choice for an individual. I know I feel at my most sociable when I am physically well, in company with similarly minded people with whom I share a distinct level of trust and whose company I enjoy, even if I do not directly share their beliefs and values. I like to feel confident to either conform or defend my own stance without social pressure, and, importantly, express my own views. In this situation I feel emotionally secure with them and am sure of their kindest intentions towards me. Crucially, I am able to choose to be sociable or not as I have agency. Davies stated how: ‘To be social is an evolutionary fact, to be sociable is the free will bit’.⁷

So do we give young children the same control, or agency, over their choices? The last child's birthday party our family were invited to was on a beautiful late autumn afternoon at the child's home. There were plenty of familiar friends for the children and adults alike, some lovely weather and a range of food sensitively selected to please all the attending children, including a themed birthday cake for the birthday child. The children were happily playing outside, using the garden to its fullest, climbing on the climbing frame, making dens, bouncing on the trampoline and using skipping ropes and balls. There was little conflict, lots of laughter, lots of chatter together as they made plans for their dens. Many of the parents even commented on how ‘easy’ a birthday party it was. It was then that the heavens opened, so indoors we all went for party games. Even before the end of ‘Pass the parcel’, a game well known by all the children, six of them were upset and crying. The change of child-led activity to being adult led had hijacked the children's sense of security and knowing about what being at this party meant. The parents had taken control and they had inadvertently undermined the children's agency to choose how to behave at the party.

Do our youngest children choose to be sociable with others of the same age, gender, religion or playgroup? Or are those choices determined by the adults who group together for support, social interaction and succour during our time raising and caring for young children?

It could be argued that young children cannot practically or socially make those kinds of choices. Many socialisation theories focus on the relationships within which a social interaction happens. If it is the adult's preference that determines the people that the children come into contact with outside the family, as well as determining the rules of how to behave appropriately when they get there, this might suggest a culture that offers children little acknowledgement of their individuality and their preferences in their earliest years. Is there a cultural predisposition to undervalue the worth of childhood, their right to receive respect from others and have agency over their choices? There are presumptions made about children, and what is best for them, throughout their childhood, but at what point do we, or should we, give them some agency over their choices? It is not our two year olds that have labelled the toddler's struggle for independence and to be understood, the ‘terrible twos’. Who are they terrible for? Could it be that to lose our control over their choices, or have to reconcile our emotions to a place where we are not needed quite so much as when they are first born, make it terrible for us? These, and issues like them, will be explored throughout the contexts of the chapters ahead.

Choosing to be sociable

The underlying drive for the type of social interaction all humans seek is to have our own biological and perceived needs met. In the newborn child, the basic need is nurture for both their physical and psychological comfort whilst they are at their most physically vulnerable. From the rooting reflex (the ability to find the mother's breast as its immediate source of food just after delivery) to taking an active part in securing physical comfort, the child is driven to seek satisfaction. This is usually personified by noise making and crying for reassurance, which hopefully leads to physical closeness. Bion identified the psychological importance of swaddling a baby to provide it with a physical demonstration of security during its earliest interaction with its new environment.

In the pre-linguistic child, many parents and practitioners may hold a deficit or ‘they don't do much’ view of young children. This is underestimating the positive aspect of the child's development. What children are doing is developing responses to the emotional and sensory sensations they experience. They are experimenting with new emotions in response to experiences and limits, both imposed and perceived. They are consolidating an early knowledge of action and reaction. Gopnik and Meltzof's ‘cause and effect’ theory concerned a baby's physical action and the result it got by kicking a mobile with its foot. The mobile repeatedly swung back, again and again. The child learned that this action would cause this response. For example, for a child with a temporary pattern of biting others, a common and completely understandable progression of behaviour for the youngest of children, who have not long moved past mouthing everything, the adult now needs a consistent and repeated response to change that behaviour. It is this same scientific ‘behaviour cause and response effect’ approach now applied to a social context. Thus the child gathers social cues and appropriateness of behaviour within their culture.

Relationships

The establishment of relationships is a life-long issue; the development of the social skills to make and sustain relationships are the foundations for every child's life experience. Relationships provide the context in which all of a child's psychological functions and learned emotional responses develop. It is the cultural appropriateness of the emotional response to events that determine the social behaviour linked to it in a given culture. As an example, Schafer⁸ cites a tribe of indigenous Eskimos who consciously do not accept or value aggression as a characteristic for their community. They indulge the very youngest of children and tolerate their emotional outbursts, what we might call ‘tantrums’. From about two years old, all expressions of anger and rage are ignored, without exception, by the whole community. What this achieves is a next generation of children who learn the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction to the series
• Introduction to The Social Child
• 1 Setting the scene
• 2 Play, imitation and exploration
• 3 Active learning; learning to be sociable
• 4 Creating sociable language
• 5 Seeing children talk
• 6 Engaging with families
• 7 Embracing differences
• 8 The links of language
• 9 Ready for school, prepared for life?
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Author index
• Subject index