The two movements that a child goes through during the infancy and toddler stages is the dual process of growing in attachment to the parents and taking early steps of separation.
I watched these two kids staying in the proximity of their mother and moving away on their own across the road for exploring the environment. This sight of expressing the attachment and separation processes brought some thoughts about what normally happens with children in the pre-school years.
When a child falls down in the courtyard and feels the pain, it is to the mother or father the child would return to feel consoled. Soon thereafter when the child finds few other children in the neighbourhood playing, child would enthusiastically join that group. It is an effort for the mother to get the child back home, when it is the time for bath. The child is comfortable to be in that playful environment and seems to feel safe when staying distant from his or her parents.
This physiological bonding of intimacy and distance in the pre-school years is a revealing phenomenon to study and learn from.
A child of two, who was incessantly crying when his mother came in to the room for a conversation, I realised that the child was distressed over the absence of his mother. It is such a child who did not have enough of the affirming experience of bonding, who would feel threatened even when the mother is away from child's parents for a short while. This separation anxiety that some pre-school children experience at two or three years, although could be normal, would call for observation of other markers of anxiety in children. I have come across in preschoolers some practices such as not eating well, refusing to go to bed at night, not wanting to welcome guests at home, crying even for a trivial reason, expressing unreasonable angry behaviour, etc as some markers of separation-anxiety.
When parents recognise this, they can help the children by giving them attention without children having to get it by crying or insisting.
I have come to believe that it is the parental behaviour, which would help pre-school children to feel secure in the attachment process which does not cause stress to children during a transient separation.
When a child at three or four can go to school with delight and gladness, and not indicate any sign of stress of being separated from the parents, it is a sign of affirming attachment process and the separation stress gets subsumed by the earlier bonding experience.
I believe that when a home is centred around children, that home is a place that offers warm relationship for children to feel secure in all circumstances. The adolescent children with such an experience in the pre-school years, are less likely to drift in their conduct and character !
A home is a place for children!
A Child's Corner in a home is a statement of that primacy of attention for children!
M.C.Mathew(text and photo)
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