Child development; Infant psychology; Motor ability in children
I have spoken several times of the ease with which even we grown people
lose our sense of personal identity; and changes in brain circulation
make such confusions especially likely at first waking from sleep. With
babies, whose feeling of identity is but insecurely established, this
must be much more common; moreover, a baby’s conditions of breathing
are less regular than ours, and it is probable that as he comes out of
sleep, and the circulation and respiration of the waking hours slowly
reestablish themselves, he has all sorts of queer, lost feelings. I was
pretty sure, from our baby’s behavior I in the next two years, that she
struggled back to the firm shores of waking consciousness through dark
waters of confusion, and needed a friendly hand to cling to. This, I
suspect, is the secret of the wild crying in the night, which doctors
call “night terror”: it is not terror, I think, but vague distress,
increased by the darkness--loss of self, of direction, of all one’s
usual bodily feeling.
In these sensitive states attending sleep it is likely that some of
the emotional conditions for life are formed, and the ties between
mother and child knit firmest. My observation is that the one the baby
loves most is the one that sleeps close by, that bends over him as he
struggles confusedly back to waking, and steers him tenderly through
the valley of the shadow of sleep; and next, the one that plays most
patiently and observantly with him--not the one that feeds him.
In her absorption in her growing bodily activity, the baby had taken no
marked steps in intellectual development, though in skill of handling,
and in ability to understand what went on about her and put two and two
together, she made steady progress. Early in the eighth month, some
definite instances of this appeared. She showed a discreet preference
at bedtime for anybody rather than her mother, and clung vigorously
round my neck or her grandfather’s when that messenger of fate came for
her. She dropped things to watch them fall, with a persistent zeal and
interest such as she had not shown in earlier experiments of the sort.
She knew what it meant if one of us put a hat on, and pleaded with
outstretched hands and springing motion to go too. Once she found that
in moving a long stick she was moving some twigs at its farther end,
and kept up the experiment with curiosity.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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