A couple of principles I see play out in my environments that connect my experience with my learning are verbal play and large motor play.
We learn, in early childhood development circles, the importance of babble–emergent non-structured sound production, to a child’s language and musical development. Children need to have the space to try out their equipment in a free-range way in order to discover the pathways to conscious control. The brain is hearing and recognizing patterns of speech and musical sound, and children are always trying to mimic the sounds that they are hearing. The sounds they make are their “emergent wisdom,” and at first a connection to the sources of these sounds might be unrecognizable. Slowly, with lots of repetition, lots of trying, lots of beautiful mistakes (that parents often find endearing and write down–one of my favorites, as a parent, was “apupup” for “octopus.” We laughed and laughed about that one for a long time, and I still laugh inside when I remember it), they form sounds that we recognize and can reflect back to them, further encouraging them to continue in their studies. A beautiful feedback loop.
As the brain is always seeking a variety of sounds to recognize as language or expressive sounds, you can imagine that the more of these types of sounds are in a child’s environment, the more sounds will be recognized and categorized by the brain as available for use in expressing, and will emerge as the salad of expressive sounds the child will use. I have many trilingual families in my environments, and the style favored among these families is for the one parent to speak their native tongue to the child, another parent or caregiver to speak their native tongue to the child, and for the two caregivers to speak English to one another. As a musician, the range of expressive sounds that emerges from children in these environments is so lovely to me–strange, and beautiful with variety, timbre, syntax, articulation, and all the other things that sounds make. All children’s babble is beautiful–I don’t want to single these kids out–but since everything in the room is visible, it’s notable.
Kinesthetic “babble” is also important to a child’s emergent wisdom, and equally wonderful to watch unfold. Children tend to have access to their head coordination first, and then their torso, and finally the impulses make their way out to the limbs. Play is the work of the child (look it up), and through unrestricted play, kids get to do “all the movements” before they are required to harness their movements in various ways. Not enough can be said about the value of providing kids with a rich variety of models of creative and varied and multi-level movement to allow them to access all of the pathways available to them.
In a musical environment, having a wide variety of expressive modalities–dance, vocalization, instrument play, and various conductive modalities, provides a child with a rich tapestry of models and invitations to engagement, as they explore their movement capabilities. And again, it is joyful to watch kids experiment, and the things they do “outside the box” often lead to novel discoveries. Shaking a drum, or using a shaker as a drumstick, lead to creation of novel sounds with unprescribed movements. When a caregiver entrains to their child’s movement, the child becomes the conductor. This is just how it should be, especially if we value the idea of our children being the innovators of the future.
Children in our culture have a wonderful window of exploration, when all of their impulses are met with love and admiration and reflected with joy and recognition. During the time that parents are able to be still and enjoy these unstructured moments, and celebrate their child’s emergent wisdom, development in these areas ebbs and flows like a joyful ocean. Not to sound alarmist, but to sound an alarm, from my privilege as a person who moves through various environments with children, this window of exploration is getting narrower, in our culture, as we move children into environments of obligation and expectation and rules of participation earlier and earlier. As an early childhood environmentalist, I’m seeing it happen, and I am advocating for the environment.
At some point, there comes a time when a child’s vocalizations and movements become recognizable enough that adults around them will begin to manage these expressions, for various reasons. Here are some examples:
“Use your inside voice,” for volume outside of a prescribed range;
“We don’t use that word in public,” for language outside of a prescribed range;
“Don’t hit!,” for kinesthetic impulses outside of a prescribed range;
“Share!,” for engagement outside of a prescribed range.
All of these prescriptions come from adults, and are ways that we prescribe specific rules of engagement. They make sense to the adults who prescribe them, but there is nothing universal in their nature. Different families have different expectations of conformity to these prescriptions, as well as different cultures–ethnic and socioeconomic and trade-related and spiritual-related, and academic, and various positionally-aligned cultures within the larger community. Some are more free-range in certain areas, while being more prescriptive in other areas. Living in a multicultural society is great, and it also has its areas of conflict, as different expectations in the same room can lead to cognitive dissonance and confusion about preferred outcomes.
Emerging from these realms of verbal and kinesthetic play comes a more complex realm of engagement: the realm of role. Role describes a position within, an area of engagement relative to. As a child becomes self-aware, they become aware of the many selves embodying roles that surround them. The first roles that emerge are those of nurtured self (child, ideally) and nurturing self (caregiver, ideally). This is the basic give-and-take of human relationship. The roles of nurtured and nurturer are fairly universal, and will usually be the first models of role to emerge. We see children in our environments embodying the nurtured role, often, when a child wants to “get up” or “uppie.” Or when a child just wants to sit on caregiver’s lap and just observe. We also see children embodying the nurturer role, and even the prescriptive role, when they do something for us that they’ve seen us do for them, or when they tell us, “don’t do that.” They are simply acting out the roles they’ve been shown.
In terms of caregiver engagement, it might be best to treat our child’s experimentation and play in these roles as a joyful exploration, that we encourage and laugh about and document for posterity. The fewer expectations that we have that require of them to meet us in highly-refined ways, the more we can see the range of ways they are trying to meet us, and enjoy their beauty and strangeness, and we might learn (or remember) new ways of engaging. Think of it as theatre improv.
I’m sure we’ve all seen a child that asserts that they are a fire captain, or a digger operator, or a princess, or a superhero. These are all roles that children are “trying on for size.” “What does it feel like to be the fire captain? How does the world respond to the fire captain? What does the world look like through the fire captain’s eyes?” Many children “capture” a role like this, and embody it for some time. Children understand that adults have roles that they hold onto for a long time, too. Why would we be concerned when our child practices long attentional arcs, in the form of captured role play, considering we’re always asking them to pay attention? It is play, after all, and play is the work of children, and they are hard at work, and sometimes they know themselves quite well early on, if we let them.
Sometimes we see a child that is a role player and a big mover together. To me, this is a beautiful sight to see. Often a child like this will move through roles rapidly, which can be confusing for adults around them who are not used to seeing people change roles rapidly. We recognize a role, and then there might be a sudden shift, which pulls the rug out from under our conception. Some people find this experience of having the rug pulled out disconcerting, while others find it exhilarating.
I am one of those who find it fabulous, and fun. Think of someone like Robin Williams, or Jim Carrey, who can shift tone and body language rapidly. We understand these shifts of tone in context, because we understand the role that the person is embodying: the actor. The actor is a fine role to embody, as it allows one to move through many roles at will. If you’re someone who is stuck in a role you don’t want to be stuck in, imagine the liberation of morphing into a different role at will. Temples have been built throughout the ages for actors to be actors in. Some people study for a long time to be actors–some people start their study early, just like some people start studying to be a fire captain early. We should embrace and support the actors among us, especially if we recognize their role in our society, and recognize how much of our money and attention we give to support those who embody that role. Pay attention, indeed.
Here’s one of the challenges that actors face, though, as they move through their embodied roles: they show us to ourselves. That’s actually their job, and it’s a job that actors didn’t make up, it’s a role that they embody by being just who they are. Recently a child came into my environment with a ukulele (I play the ukulele during class). He strode right in with long strides, and looked me straight in the eyes, intently, and strummed and strummed his ukulele, as he strutted around. I was enthralled! But here’s what I also understand (and have seen happen, all too often): when we are shown ourselves, we don’t always like the self we see, or we feel we are being mocked. We have hair-trigger responses inside us, (even well-educated adults) that can light up our feelings when certain things happen in a room. When that child looked me straight in the eyes, intently–that’s a signal in some scenarios, a signal of dominance and challenge. Some of us are wired to respond to this challenge to our dominance, even when it comes from a child–it’s just an impulse, and if one’s impulses aren’t trained, one can be carried away by them.
I could have taken this child’s challenge to my ukulele dominance to heart, and felt that they were mocking me, or belittling me, and I might have experienced a tingly feeling somewhere in my body that I wasn’t ready to feel. But, loving children as I do, I actually love being belittled–it’s actually my job, so I laugh when it happens. What many adults don’t understand is that the intention of a child (especially a child of 2 or 3 or 4) is never to belittle, but only to reflect, and mirror (that’s how they learn everything they learn). Love should always be the only response to the mirror a child gives us.
But some adults, being highly protective of their roles, for whatever reasons, can react in unloving ways when little actors like this reflect something back to them that they don’t want to see, and it can be heartbreaking, and my heart is broken all the time watching it happen. An adult might say “that child needs to learn to control their impulses!”
But the truth is that the adult’s impulses have not been trained to always respond to a child with love (they might have had a tingly feeling they weren’t ready to feel at the moment), no matter what role they are moving through in the moment. I call that finger-pointing moment “hocus pocus,” a little moment where an adult has a feeling they don’t want to feel, and they point the finger at the child and say, “Look over there at those untrained impulses.”
The next time you see an adult doing this, stop and reflect on what is happening (since you’re witnessing it, and witnesses are important allies in times like this). Consider whether there is a kind way to advocate for the child, and turn the finger back around, and allow the child to get back to their work of training their impulses, that has been so rudely interrupted. Because asking a child to control their impulses (especially a child of 2 or 3 or 4) is asking them to do something that many adults have trouble doing. We should give them a break, not break them.
Little actors like this are only moving through the roles that they see around them, and believe me, they see a lot of roles being played. There are a lot of roles in a big city like ours–highly sought-after and studied-for roles, roles that we hold onto only tenuously, or roles that we grip ’til our knuckles are white. If every role-player in our big city was trained to only respond with love to a child, wouldn’t the love reflected back to us by children like this be wonderful? But children like this see us playing roles that we don’t even know we are playing.
If you’re a parent, there will come a day that you realize you swear because your child will swear. Your child just helped you wake up. Hopefully you laughed about it and documented it and put it in your album of mementos, to laugh about later. But the environment around a child can be unkind when certain reflections our children reflect back to us make our insides tingle in ways we don’t like, and we take it out on them, instead of owning it and waking up to ourselves. We point the finger. “That child needs to control their impulses!” Who’s the one playing that role? They might be someone like me, who saw a little ukulele player, and recognized myself, but then my untrained impulses might have taken the challenge in their eyes to heart, and felt threatened, and not have had words for what was going on. And I might have tried to restrain that child’s impulses for reminding me of my own untrained impulses. That would have been a shame, to restrain that child’s beautiful human impulses to respond to the world in they ways that they do (and as a parent, I was ashamed when I found myself restraining my child’s impulses instead of my own). We put our kids in environments all the time where people with untrained impulses are restraining our children’s impulses (I’ve done it too, and been ashamed when I recognized it. Luckily, that kind of shame burns up when we recognize what’s going on. It’s kind of cool).
So having been there, and done the thing I now know I don’t want to do, here’s the little shift I’ve made in my role of parent and children’s environmentalist, with little method actors all around me, who are always on (like Robin Williams, or Jim Carrey, or Kate Winslet, or Angelina Jolie–look up “actors who stay in character”–it’s a thing, and it’s a thing of beauty when a child adopts the concept so early): My role has changed. My role is now of caretaker–not of my child’s beautiful human impulses, which I am there to nurture, but of their environment, the world around them that they move through. Knowing that these actors reflect back roles they see played around them, I try to put them into loving environments where the only response to any role they’re playing in the moment is love. Being that they are moving through roles so rapidly, there’s a good chance, that if they’re not seeing people around them playing challenging or aggressive roles (which is what someone trying to manage their impulses looks like to them), they will eventually forget those challenging or aggressive roles, and continue to reflect the loving roles that they see embodied around them. If I trust that what’s inside them is love trying to connect itself to the world, then I can take pride in my child’s devotion to their craft.
It seems like a no-brainer to say, “Surround your child with love,” but if we don’t understand the environments we are moving them through, we might not recognize the dangers–the micro-aggressions, the subtle or even harsh challenges, the managed or restrained impulses. But our kids are moving through the environments they move through, and they see everything. And sometimes, we are even moving them in front of us, before we’ve recognized the environment they’re moving into. I see it all the time, because all the time is right there to see.
And being a caretaker, and advocate, I’ve learned to advocate for the child, not for the adult’s untrained impulses, even if the adult in question is playing a role of authority, even if it makes my hands tremble (thanks for that one, Mrs. Roosevelt). Having found myself in loving environments, I’ve found that, generally, people in the room understand who I am advocating for, and they are there to support me. When that hasn’t been the case, it’s made me consider the environment, and my advocacy. Having been a children’s environmentalist for a long time, I’ve had a looooong time to consider what I’m saying. And I think it will stand up to scrutiny. I invite you to point out any inconsistency. I don’t occupy a role of authority (which kind of makes it easier to understand authority, frankly. It’s right there).
And I invite you to join the children’s environmental movement. The children’s liberation movement. The liberation of children’s movement through the environments they move through. It’s right there, in the heart. And remember the Lorax, who spoke for the trees? He was a children’s environmentalist, too. If you’ve forgotten, maybe take some time out and reread it. It’s a classic for a reason.
But who will listen?
