About the Author
Louise Bates Ames is a lecturer at the Yale Child Study Center and assistant professor emeritus at Yale University. She is co-founder of the Gesell Institute of Child Development and collaborator or co-author of three dozen or so books, including The First Five Years of Life, Infant and Child in the Culture of Today, Child Rorschach Responses, and the series Your One-Year-Old through Your Ten- to Fourteen-Year-Old. She has one child, three grandchildren, and four great-grandchildren.
Frances L. Ilg wrote numerous books, including The Child from Five to Ten, Youth: The Years from Ten to Sixteen, and Child Behavior, before her death in 1981. She was also a co-founder of the Gesell Institute of Child Development at Yale.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
chapter one
YOUR INFANT
BECOMES A TODDLER
Your boy or girl is officially a One-year-old until the time of that second birthday, when he or she becomes officially a Two-year-old.
At the time of his important first birthday your infant is a treasure and a joy to all concerned. Your typical Twelve-month-old tends to be an extremely lovable little person—friendly, sociable, amenable. Given a reasonably favorable personality, normally good health, and a modestly supportive environment, most One-year-olds seem to adapt rather easily to whatever it is the adult caretaker has in mind. And it is usually easy for the adult to adapt to what the baby has in mind.
Your Two-year-old also should be fun. By the time he is Two he will have much to say. He will tend to like other people and to appreciate their attention. He will cuddle and kiss. He will, on request, proudly show you his eyes, his nose, his mouth, his arms, his foot. He is excited about what he knows and what he can do. He loves to have you play with him, and he usually does his best to please you.
He can feed himself, even though messily, and he tends to cooperate when you dress and change him. In short, most of the time he is a real pleasure to those around him.
All this being true, with One so delightful and Two so terrific, we might anticipate that in the months between your child’s first and second birthday, with locomotion and a certain amount of language among his new abilities, life would become ever easier.
Is this the case? Do children move smoothly through these special months, merely getting bigger and more capable as they approach Two? Not at all.
Certainly, as a child moves from Twelve to Fifteen, Eighteen, and Twenty-one months of age his vocabulary grows, his ability to handle objects increases, and he becomes more mobile. Getting around is no longer restricted to creeping on all fours or cruising beside stable objects. Now your toddler can walk around the house, run, and get up and down the stairs with ease.
It is indeed true that many children during this second year of life seem to advance light-years in their basic abilities. But they do not necessarily become easier to live with. As human behavior develops, often the negative parts of a personality show themselves before the positive. You will find that most little boys and girls tend to say “no” before they say “yes,” throw things before they become interested in picking them up, run away from you before they are able to respond to “Come here, dear.”
In fact, much of any child’s effort, in the second year of life, seems to be devoted to building up his or her own independent way of doing things, and that way is much of the time the exact opposite of what you, the parent, have in mind.
So passing the Twelve-month mark and graduating from infancy do not by any means imply that your child is about to settle down. On the contrary, he seems eager to exercise his new powers. He becomes demanding. He strains at the leash. While being dressed, he may now have to be held bodily. In his chair he stretches forward demandingly toward things he can’t reach. He wants to hold and carry something in each hand, or he may himself want to be carried even after his increasing weight makes him something of an armful. And he is beginning to insist on doing things for himself.
We may think of life for the One-year-old as a building wave which crests around the age of Eighteen months. Even by Fifteen months this wave of increasing egocentricity, demandingness, and opposition is well on the rise. Just getting the child of this age through his or her daily routines is no picnic.
At Eighteen months of age, which we shall especially emphasize in this volume, this hypothetical wave will crest. Then, on its way toward the calm which usually comes at about Two, the child will go through the Twenty-one-month-old stage. Whether this age zone will be smooth or stormy depends largely on the individual child. If well advanced in behavior, he or she may be approaching the calm and smoothness of Two. If the child is less advanced, Twenty-one months can be as stormy and difficult as Eighteen months.
Overall, though, parents will find their One-year-old’s increasing abilities in all departments a source of pleasure and pride, even though the negative side of his personality will be tough to deal with. Whatever your child’s temperament, the twelve months which follow his first birthday will be full of surprises. It will be a time when you will need all the ingenuity, all the resilience you can muster. We hope the information we give you in this book may help make this often tumultuous year of living go more smoothly than it otherwise might.
chapter two
WHAT YOU SEE IN
EARLY INFANCY CAN
HELP YOU UNDERSTAND
LATER BEHAVIOR
It is probably fortunate that babies are infants before they are anything else since infants teach us many lessons which, if well learned right at the start, will stand any parent in good stead through the long years of childhood.
Of the two main lessons which your infant will teach you, the first is that nothing you do will substantially speed up his development. Various abilities will appear when they are programmed by nature to appear. Just as you cannot speed up your child’s teething, you cannot, even by serious efforts, substantially speed up the time when various behaviors will make themselves evident.
The second major lesson is that every infant and every child is an individual, different in major respects from every other. Parents can help children fully express their positive characteristics and can usually discourage them from some of their less positive traits. But as a parent you cannot determine what your child will be like.
A third important lesson which any infant can teach you is that you do not have to teach him how to perform many of the basic tasks of living. Your child will eventually sit alone with only modest encouragement from you. He will crawl and later creep without your showing him how. Though you may in your enthusiasm encourage such baby games as pat-a-cake, the actual basic motion that underlies this game (patting the hands together in a horizontal movement of the arms) comes into the infant repertoire quite naturally and without demonstration from you.
The vitally important, and exciting, matter of individual differences will be discussed at some length in Chapter Nine. Here we would like to emphasize the important fact that in most cases, even with rather vigorous and well-intentioned efforts, parents cannot substantially speed up any of the usual infant behaviors.
Numerous research studies at the former Yale Clinic of Child Development by Dr. Arnold Gesell and his staff have established this fact conclusively. Using identical infant twins as subjects, research was carried out to find out whether or not behavior could be sped up. Kinds of behavior checked on were stair climbing, block building, language, and other basic behaviors.
At just about the time when a new behavior might be expected to appear but neither twin had as yet exhibited this behavior, one twin was trained rather rigorously in the performance. The other twin was not presented with the situation (stairs, blocks, or whatever) until the first twin had been trained for several weeks.
In a typical instance, when both twins were Forty-six weeks old and neither had as yet climbed or attempted to climb stairs, one twin (T for Trained) was given six weeks’ encouragement and practice on the stairs. By the end of this period she was climbing proficiently. The other twin (C for Control) was kept in a living situation where there were no stairs for the six weeks of T’s training and was then introduced to the stairs when she was Fifty-two weeks old.
Within a day she was climbing as effectively and even with the same hand-knee pattern as her twin, even though she had not earlier seen stairs and had not seen her twin climbing them.
Studies like this have convinced us that at approximately the time when a new behavior would be appearing, added age is quite as effective as diligent training in causing that behavior to make itself evident.
So, if you really cannot speed up behavior appreciably, and if you really do not need to teach your child such basic behaviors as crawling and creeping and block building, what can you do? What should you do? Certainly it is the nature of the parent to want to help his child’s development, and most young parents are strongly motivated in this direction.
Our best suggestion, when it comes to infancy, is to spend a lot of time with your baby; be enthusiastic and interested. For most parents this is usually not too difficult. Play with him or her in ways which come naturally to you. You do not need much learning equipment or fancy toys.
Babies like to be noticed. They like to have you hold them, and rock them, and talk to them, and sing to them. They like the things which a loving parent does quite naturally.
Your baby will crawl and later creep even if you don’t do much about it, but your enthusiastic approval of his successes will encourage him to repeat those activities which give both you and him a great deal of pleasure.
Though you do not need to teach your baby to read or count or spell or do arithmetic problems, as some psychologists suggest, you are teaching him all the time by just being with him and playing with him. You are teaching him that he is a valuable and loved individual, that grown-ups are supportive and helpful, that the world is good.
It may help you most, in appreciating what to do, to realize that a baby’s mind is not separate from the rest of him. He does not have to be vocalizing to tell you that his mind is at work. As he lies on his back and watches his waving hands, he is learning about the world. As he creeps toward and reaches a ball and brings it to his mouth, he is learning about the world. Very, very early he learns how to get the nourishment he needs, how to get the attention he desires.
But babies, probably even more than Eighteen-month-olds, need time to themselves. It is possible to smother a young baby with attention, particularly if the whole family sits around and constantly admires his accomplishments. He needs time to himself as well as time with you. He will tell you, very clearly, when he does need you.
Your time with your infant should be, so far as you can make it, a time of relaxing pleasure and enjoyment. He will learn all he needs to from the things which you as a parent do with him and for him quite naturally. You really do not need to read a book to find out how to live with, and love, your baby.
All these lessons can be of tremendous help later on. It is relatively easy when your child is still an infant to accept the fact that you cannot, and need not, speed up his development. Your baby doesn’t creep yet? So be it. He lacks words to express his needs? You feel confident that words will come in time.
Most parents are not really tempted to rush the development of their infants. When the child is older and the temptation to hurry things along is greater, it’s a good idea to remember the patience and acceptance you felt when your child was an infant.
The same acceptance is important when thinking about the second lesson of infancy—that one cannot substantially change a child’s basic personality. It is crucial that you try to accept your child for who he is, not who you would like him to be.
And lastly, when it comes to teaching there are many things which one does need to teach a child as he grows up. But remember that basic age changes do come and go on their own. Dr. Gesell once commented, “Environmental factors modulate and inflect but they do not determine the progressions of development.”
