The Feeling Child

Laying the foundations of confidence and resilience

Maria Robinson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781136330872
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

What impact does children's emotional development and well-being have on their capacity to learn? How do you provide learning experiences that meet the developmental needs of every child in your care?

The Feeling Child thoughtfully discusses the key principles of children's emotional and behavioural development alongside descriptions of everyday practice. It clearly explains how a child's early experiences influence their particular behaviours towards different people and different situations.

Throughout the book, Maria Robinson considers the key characteristics of effective learning and shows how play is one of the key mechanisms that children use in their discovery of themselves and the world around them. These characteristics are then applied to integral aspects of early years practice to help practitioners to:

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• support children to come to new understandings in safe yet challenging ways

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• understand the ways in which children may approach or withdraw from learning opportunities

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• reflect on their own teaching methods to encourage children's engagement, motivation and creativity through effective observation and planning

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• engage with parents and carers to help support children's learning at home whilst maintaining the values of the family.

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• celebrate the uniqueness of each child and provide learning experiences that are appropriate for individuals with particular learning needs, be they physical, emotional or cognitive to ensure that every child has an equal opportunity to succeed.

Emphasising the importance of understanding the theory that underpins children's emotional development, this accessible text shows practitioners how they can use this knowledge to provide learning opportunities that nourish children's thinking and creative skills.

Chapter 1 Setting the scene

DOI: 10.4324/9780203122051-1

Recently, while listening to the radio, my attention was caught by an item about stress. Stress had apparently become the number one reason for absence from work and the topic was generating a great deal of discussion. However, continuing to listen, I realised that although people were apparently talking about ‘stress’, what they appeared to be actually describing were their feelings in response to various adverse life circumstances. It seemed as if their experiences of anger, sadness or fear were being lumped together under this ‘stress umbrella’ rather than the identification of the specific responses to their experiences. This is not to undermine in any way the reality of stress itself which, in its purest form, is anything which causes a disturbance in how we feel, think and behave.

Thinking about this further, I realised that there is another way in which we appear to lump together a range of possible feelings — the common usage of the term ‘depression’. People can be heard to say that they are ‘a bit depressed’, when in fact what they might be feeling is worried and/or sad, fearful or anxious. Again, this does not in any way undermine the reality of depressive illness, which is all-consuming and frightening in the levels of hopelessness and despair that such a condition can produce. Nevertheless, it is interesting to reflect on why we appear to want to give a medical flavour to our feelings. It is as if calling our sadness, depression or our feelings of helplessness and powerlessness ‘stress’ somehow validates them, perhaps making them more acceptable to others and thereby we may feel more able to seek help and/or behave in particular ways.

This led me on to wonder if we have forgotten that as human beings we come into the world already equipped with a range of emotions (albeit initially in very simple forms) which tend to be universally acknowledged and recognised,¹ and which, as noted in the introduction, colour-wash all our thoughts and behaviour. These common emotions are happiness, sadness, fear, anger, disgust and surprise, and we express them in our faces (including the most subtle movements of eyebrows, mouth curve and nostril widening or narrowing), our eyes and also through body language. However, the latter can be more problematical as the same movement can mean different things in different cultures! Nevertheless there appear to be some aspects of body language which retain a similar meaning, such as cowering in submission; a signal shared across the animal as well as human kingdom. The common language of emotions, therefore, especially facial expression and eye gaze, provides a bridge of communication between all humans, allowing us to feel a sense of connection with one another. This means that while no-one can feel exactly what you are feeling in any given situation, the shared understanding and what our outward behaviour may signify as to our inner state means that we can empathise with one another. Empathy and/or sympathetic understanding is crucial for cooperative behaviour and wards against cruelty and neglect, which leads us into the ‘why’ of feelings.

Why feel?

Why do we have the emotions described above and all those others which are often the result of a more complex interweaving of those basic strands? For example, jealousy is essentially a mix of fear of abandonment, sadness at potential loss and perhaps, more obvious, anger dependent on the particular context in which the feeling may be aroused. For example, seeing your loved one look favourably on someone else! Envy and resentment too often have their roots in fundamental ideas of not being ‘good enough’, which in turn masks sadness and/or anger at not feeling noticed and appreciated. It is a cliché, of course, but emotions are what makes us human and, as important, make us able to function. It may seem counter-intuitive, but they actually help us to think logically; without emotions we seem to have problems in making decisions and planning. Studies of people who have had parts of the brain damaged which are involved in the processing of emotions have been found to be severely curtailed in their ability to simply live from day to day. Logic is not all! This is because we feel something in response to everything we encounter and at its most basic level, circumstances/events can feel pleasant or unpleasant. Being human also means that we tend to want to repeat the pleasant experiences and avoid the unpleasant ones. This is an evolutionary safeguard on many levels (something tastes nice, eat it again; it tastes horrible, avoid it!); but this sensible action can also turn against us if what we find pleasurable actually harms us, such as too much alcohol, misuse of other drugs or risky behaviour. Of course, as we will discover, such behaviours are often a means of finding something, anything to help us feel better when daily life seems unbearable in some way. The brain, which is the arbiter of all our experiences, does not discriminate between what is good for us and what is not; it simply, as we shall see later in this chapter, processes information and provides the bedrock for our responses and behaviour.

There is another important aspect to the idea that we are born with feelings, and that is that our feelings are not created in a vacuum but are awakened by the circumstances in which we find ourselves; this awakening begins even before we are born as we develop in our mother's womb.² This suggests, in a very real sense, that each of us essentially creates our own particular reality dependent on the type of experiences we have and how we respond to them. Behaviour is therefore a result of our unique perception of ourselves and others and this perception is based on what we feel in response to our circumstances; with a dash of genetics thrown in.

Sing a song of childhood

My soul is like a hidden orchestra; I do not know which instruments grind and play away inside of me, strings and harps, timbales and drums, I can only recognize myself as a symphony.³

(Pessoa)

This wonderful quote is used by Damasio⁴ and it encapsulates beautifully that the person we are, as child or adult, is a result of all the developmental factors combined within us: physical, cognitive, social and emotional. Just as a piece of music, sung or played, is the result of the combination of only eight notes, so our development is a combination of all these factors. This is why, although in this series these developmental factors are presented as separate issues, all the authors lay great stress on their ultimate integration. The importance of seeing development in a holistic way is vital as all too often the integrated nature of development has been overtaken by the particular perspective on development which may be fashionable at any one time. For example, the ‘behaviourist’ school which seemed to reduce human behaviour to a system of stimulus and response. While this perspective does have validity in that we do respond to stimuli in particular ways that can be repeated in a variety of contexts with similar aspects, it does not explain the how and why of such reactions and the reason why they can become repetitive. The growing realisation that this approach was not sufficient to understand human behaviour was followed by an emphasis on cognitive development, with emotions taking a distant back seat. In fact, the idea that emotions were important and not simply an inconvenient side issue has come to the fore only in the past two decades, when brain research has begun to reveal the power of those emotional circuits in our brains. An emphasis on a particular ideology or devotion to one particular theoretical perspective has meant that the issues surrounding a child's capacity to learn and adapt their behaviour in different situations can be viewed simply as a particular ‘problem’ rather than a reflection of what forces may be at work that influence the child's ultimate reaction to their circumstances.

Nevertheless, it is heartening that in the neuroscientific world at least (if not yet in the wider media), the reality of the influence of emotions/feelings on the overall developmental well-being of the child is increasingly recognised.⁵ This shift is described as being based on research on three main categories: first, how our brains develop and, most importantly, what aspect of development appears to be most crucial in the early years; second, how we make and maintain relationships, in particular the role of attachment (crucial for human functioning); and third, how we learn to regulate or ‘control’ our own behaviour. Research in all these areas has highlighted the importance of the early years and crucially the response to the emotional behaviour shown by infants and very young children by their caretakers. Schore quotes extensively from huge amounts of research in all these areas and how they combine together to produce a child's feelings of self-worth and self-perception, and thereby lead on to how well the child can respond to their experiences; which, of course, includes their aptitude to learn.⁶

The issues that Schore mentions: neuroscience, attachment and self regulation, are like the three parts to a melody; individual and indivisible.

Understanding the brain

While Schore emphasizes the role of the brain, we must not forget that the brain is the ‘processor’ or arbiter of all the information we get from our bodily feelings which arise from our experiences. This includes bodily sensations, vision, hearing, touch and movement. Movement is our first ‘communication’, as in the womb we stretch, kick, suck, swallow, blink and feel all around our growing body, the sensation of the warm, watery world in which we develop. We also hear sound through our mother's tummy and especially the tone and pitch of her voice.

We hear other voices too, but hers is the one we are aware of the most,⁷ so this section of the chapter will take a brief look at the role of the senses, as well as an outline of the workings of the brain.

There are some key points about our amazing and magical brains described by Robinson⁸; these are:

• The brain is possibly the most complex structure in the universe and our understanding of it is still in its infancy, in spite of the enormous strides in recent times in untangling some of its processes.
• The mind is embedded in the workings of the brain, but exactly how the processes of an organic structure evolve into the miracle of our understanding of a personal ‘self’ remains an ongoing mystery.
• It is generally agreed that the fastest period of brain growth is in the first four years or so of life, with the growth in the first year to 18 months perhaps being particularly dynamic.⁹
• The brain has time-related surges in development which roughly correspond with periods of significant shifts in skills and abilities.¹⁰ The early years contain a number of these surges, with another significant ‘wave’ occurring in adolescence.
• The brain itself is a product of millennia of evolution in humans, just as in other mammals, and so many of its basic structures and allied functions are similar to those of other species.
• Contrary to some earlier perspectives on brain development, ‘new neural connections in response to experience can be made across the lifespan’.¹¹ In other words, we can adapt and change ways of thinking and behaviour over time.
• The brain has areas of specialisation which appear to deal with different types of information such as vision, emotions, memory, learning, hearing, etc., but it is also an associative organ, bringing together and combining sensory and emotional information. This forms the ‘complete picture’ that we experience in our day-to-day lives.
• The human brain survives and builds on a continuous stream of information from both body and environment, but too much or too little information can cause stress in one form or another.
• At birth the brain is ‘the most undifferentiated of any “organ” in the body’.¹²
• The right hemisphere is more advanced than the left from about the 25th gestational week until around early into the second year of life.¹³ It is also the right side of the brain which appears to be intimately involved in processing the emotional and sensory information the baby encounters and the responsive outcome.
• While our genetic inheritance provides the information for the brain's structure, function and how it grows and matures, it is experience which ultimately influences the way in which the brain is uniquely ‘wired’ for each individual. As LeDoux puts it, ‘nature and nurture are partners in our emotional life’.¹⁴ This point links with the information above, i.e. that our understanding of the world is unique to each of us.
• Areas in the brain that mediate what are termed ‘executive functions’ — i.e. planning, organising, self-monitoring, problem solving and sequencing — mature much later than those areas of the brain that process our more fundamental functions and our emotions.
• The newborn baby's brain already has a ‘uniquely complex anatomy with all major systems present in various stages of immaturity’.¹⁵

The human brain is a combination of genetic information in the way it builds up from the beginning of life and the way in which the various parts are organised. As can be seen from the points above, it is our experiences which ‘fine tune’ the connections between the various areas of the brain. Basically, our brains are all the same, and at the same time are uniquely different. Like an orchestra tuning up for the full concert, the hundred billion brain cells we are born with and the basic connections that have already been made because of the infant's activity and experiences in the womb are ready and waiting for the experiences which will constitute the symphony that will be the unique child.

One of the oldest parts of the brain, and the earliest to develop in the womb, is the brain stem; this is involved with evolutionary safeguards against danger, i.e. the newborn baby will usually show a ‘startle’ reflex and begin to cry if feeling unsafe or placed alone on a cold surface. This response to a possible threat to survival is therefore entrenched in the human brain at its very oldest and deepest level. Another ancient part of the brain and one which, like the brain stem, we share with other creatures, is the interconnected structures which form part of what is termed the ‘limbic’ or ‘emotional’ brain, which drapes around the brain stem in a semblance of a rim (hence the name). This part of the brain over long periods of time becomes more intertwined with what can be termed the ‘thinking’ or ‘logical’ brain. However, we have to be aware that the strong connections between these parts of the brain are very much a two-way process, and as we know, our emotions can frequently override logic.

An important structure within this ‘emotional’ brain is called the ‘amygdala’; this tiny area has strong connections with memory, the production of bodily chemicals, the ‘logical’ part of the brain, the senses and also with the ancient brain stem. It has been shown to be particularly involved with fear and anxiety. Cozolino tells us that the amygdala has already reached a ‘high degree of maturity by the eighth month of gestation, allowing it to associate a fear response to a stimulus prior to birth’.¹⁶ Linking this information with its further development at birth and its rol...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction to the series
• Introduction to The Feeling Child
• 1 Setting the scene
• 2 Play, imitation and exploration; development's instrument
• 3 Learning to be secure, learning to learn and the nurturing practitioner
• 4 Self-awareness and the growth of empathy
• 5 Observing and reflecting on children's emotional well-being
• 6 Engaging with families
• 7 Embracing differences; the different worlds of boys and girls
• 8 Can we hear the voice of the child?
• 9 School readiness?
• Notes
• Author index
• Subject index