Child development; Infant psychology; Motor ability in children
To go back to those swift four days in which the baby came into
realization of her power of using hands and eyes together,--they had
been preceded by a marked advance in the use of eyes alone (or jointly
with the sense of motion in being carried about) to get the relations
of things about her more clearly arranged in her mind. The day before
the baby held up her rattle to look at, she had declined to go to sleep
in her mother’s arms, and kept lifting her head to look at me, till
I crossed the room and put myself out of sight. Presently she lifted
her head again, turned round, and searched persistently the quarter
of the room toward which she had seen me disappear. She had gained
much in sense of direction and in association of ideas when she could
look along the line in which I had been seen to move moments before,
expecting to see me somewhere there.
Later, the same day, she sat in my lap, watching with an intent and
puzzled face the back and side of her grandmother’s head. Grandma
turned from her knitting and chirruped to her, and the little one’s jaw
dropped and her eyebrows went up with an expression of blank surprise.
Presently I began to swing her on my foot, and at every pause in the
swinging she would sit gazing at the puzzling head till grandma turned,
and nodded or chirruped to her; then she would turn away satisfied and
want more swinging.
Here we seem to get a glimpse of the process I have spoken of, by which
the baby gradually associates together the front and rear and side
aspects of a person or thing, till at last they coalesce together in
his mind as all one object. At first amazed to see the coil of silver
hair and the curve of cheek turn suddenly into grandma’s front face,
the baby watched for the repetition of the miracle till it came to seem
natural, and the two aspects were firmly knit together in her mind.
She began, too, to watch people’s motions carefully for long spaces of
time--all through the process of setting the table, for instance--with
a serious little face, and an attention so absorbed that it was
hardly possible to divert her if one tried (which one ought not to
do, for power of attention is a precious attainment, and people have
no business to meddle with its growth for their own amusement). When
her mother’s dark-eyed sister had a little reception in consequence
of having married the minister, baby was in the thick of it, watching
first the preparations, and then the comings and goings of people, with
the closest attention and the deepest enjoyment, cheerfully willing to
have her meals postponed, her nap broken, anything, if the fun would
only go on.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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