The First Two Years of a Child's Life - Essay Example

Running Head: Why are the first two years of a child's life seen as important in the Development of positive relationships Infants Social Relationships By ___________________ Introduction A baby experiences positive relationship in the form of bonds of affection, trust and dependency it receives from a primary caregiver. A baby's attachment to its surroundings upholds an influence not only on his social development but also upon baby's present and future moral and cognitive growth and development. (Peterson, 2002, p5.54) This development has a positive influence on the upbringing of an infant, which in the long run becomes a part of his personality. It is through the influence of initial two years, that the baby live as a confident and bold personality through the rest of his life. The social interaction he experiences for his initial years helps him learn to trust and rely upon his surrounding, he learns how to get into social relationships, and this learning helps in the formation of the grounds which helps in building up his personality traits. The first few months of life are important to an infant as his personality depends upon the influence of relationships. These influences are responsible for constructing a positive sense of 'attachment' in an infant. Early in the first quarter, however, the infant is unable to distinguish among individuals, and so the earliest expectations operate as generalised expectations of people. Though a parent may become attached to an infant almost as soon as the baby is born, it takes several months for the infant to feel and become securely attached, thereby identifying the parent or primary caretaker. As the infants are sociable from the moment of birth, they prefer human companionship to contact with inanimate objects, it seems that they love their parents instantly. However, until they reach 3-5 months of age, baby's sociability and attraction to people is largely indiscriminate. (Peterson, 2001, p5.22) This is evident from the scenario when a person holds a baby of 2-3 months old. It is very unusual if a baby do not cry while being in a person's custody he is unaware of. Very young infants happily accept comfort from almost anyone who holds, feeds or soothes them. The first social sign of attachment is the time they begin to smile, i.e., 6-8 weeks. By about this age infants also begin to show negative reactions to being separated from people they do not know. Bowlby (1969) described four phases in the development of infant-parent attachments, which depicts the start of a positive relationship: the newborn phase of indiscriminate social responsiveness (months 1 to 2), the phase of discriminating sociability (2 to 7 months), "maintenance of proximity to a discriminated figure by means of locomotion as well as signals" (month 7 through the second year), and finally the phase of goal-corrected partnership (year 3 on). (Bornstein et al, 2002, p. 16) During the first 2 months of life, human infants have some difficulty organising states of arousal and behaviour (Berg & Berg, 1979). The infant in this phase is going through various physical and mental changes, which are unpredictable; neonates appear to shift with remarkable facility from the heightened arousal manifest in the distress state to the low arousal of sleep. Only around 8-10 weeks of age, the baby's various neural components of specific states become intercoordinated psychologically. Simultaneously, state transitions become more predictable and less labile and, from this point on, longer periods of continuous time are spent in various discrete states (Lamb & Sherrod, 1981, p. 156) By the second quarter-year of life (3 or 4 months of age), the first sign of sociability begin to emerge, as the infant starts differentiating among individuals in a systematic manner. The baby starts showing special regard for a few key people. Smiling is limited to familiar faces than to strange ones. (Peterson, 2001, p5.22) This indicates the infant is responding consciously towards a positive attitude, and wants to acquire full love and attention from loved ones. He starts expecting from the people he is familiar to. The most salient individual in the infant's life is, the person with whom the most stimulating and frequent interactions take place i.e., the primary caretaker. According to Peterson (2001) "During childhood and adolescence, intimate bonds to parents and familiar caregivers continue to exert a major influence upon the offspring's psychological development". (2001, p5.22) Lamb and Sherrod gives an example for social attachment of an infant in the following way: Two parents, may respond to the infant's smiles with equivalent consistency except that one adult vocalises and smiles, whereas the other smiles at and touches the infant. The behaviour of the two is equally predictable. Even when individuals are equally likely to respond to the baby, however, their responses may differ in some consistent fashion. In these circumstances, the infant would be equivalently certain of the individuals' predictability, and so in one sense the expectations of the two adults would be very similar. On the other hand, the infant would also develop different expectations regarding the types of interaction that each represented. These social expectations too play an important role in social development of a positive relationship. (Lamb & Sherrod, 1981, p. 156) To the delight of parents, unambiguous, extended, and somewhat regular periods of sleep, drowsiness, and alertness become more common in the third month. The most common intervention attempted by adults is to pick up and hold the crying infant, and there is evidence that the tactile stimulations involved in being held comprise the most effective way of terminating the infant's distress. In this way the infant learns to trust his loved ones. According to research, the infants who are not caressed or hold while crying turn out to be individuals who lack the factor of 'trust' in their personalities. (1981, p. 156) Picking up the infant is effective in conditions where he is continuously crying, this puts the infant in a state of quiet alertness, where he tries to figure out the person to whom he is being hold. The infant opens its eyes and visually inspects its surroundings. An observer would say that it was concentrating, for the baby's other movements are stilled and the visual regard is searching. States of alert wakefulness are otherwise rare and fleeting in early infancy, so the potency of the adult's intervention is noteworthy. The relationship between holding and alertness insures that when the baby is in a state of alertness the state in which it is most capable of inspecting and learning about its environment it is most likely to encounter and learn about social stimuli, because it is the caretaker who is most likely to be sensed, perceived, and inspected during the periods of quiet alertness produced by interventions. (1981, p. 156) The multimodal stimulation that characterises the caretaker recurs repeatedly in a predictable constellation. The baby visually regards the caretaker while simultaneously hearing his or her voice, experiencing his or her soothing touch, and smelling his or her unique odour. These repeated co-occurrences permit the infant to construct or to begin constructing a multimodal, nonverbal concept of the caretaker and in this way he learns to build a constructive character around him. Distress involves high arousal and unpleasant affect, and the multimodal intervention that follows usually facilitates a transition to a state of more controlled arousal and receptiveness. The salience of the events (distress, caretaker intervention, relief, and alertness) enhances the likelihood that the associations will indeed be learned rather quickly. The distress-relief sequence thus contains all the components necessary for the infant to: (1) learn that distress predictably elicits an intervention that brings relief; (2) recognise the person responsible for facilitating the transition from displeasure to pleasure; (3) develop an integrated, multimodal concept of the caretaker; (4) associate the person's features with the pleasurable outcome he or she produces. (1981, p. 156) By 6 or 7 months of age, the infant bears little resemblance to the neonate. Seven month old clearly understand and respect the rule of reciprocity in their interactions. Their confidence in others reinforced, 7-month-olds enjoy their newly acquired ability to creep around and to take responsibility for getting close to their parents at will, instead of waiting for others to come in response to their cries. Between 6 and 12 months of age, infants are increasingly likely to initiate interaction using directed social behaviours, whereas mothers more frequently initiate games, terminate or redirect their infants' activities, and issue verbal requests. (Bornstein, 2002, p. 376) Infants enjoy positive relations with their mothers when they provide one another with a range of nonverbal supports to communication and language learning. Gesture is one such form of mutually shared support. By the time the infants are nine months of age, parents already engage in much nonverbal attitude towards infants while labelling something and also nonverbally indicating direction of regard, such as pointing (2002, p. 85). Unfortunately, development often makes it difficult to tell whether fundamental change has occurred in an underlying construct, or whether there is simply some superficial change in the way in which an unchanging construct is expressed. Again, the distinction is best illustrated by example. Fear may look the same in the faces of 6-month-olds and 18-month-olds, and thus we may use a scoring technique to assess fear at these two ages in order to determine whether there is temporal stability in levels of fearfulness. By contrast, 9-month-olds may express affection for their parents by clinging, crying, and asking to be held; one year later, signals like talking and smiling may have become more common ways to express attachment. These developmental changes do not necessarily mean that attachments have changed in strength; they may simply indicate that different means have been found to mediate emotional relationships. (2002, p. 16) Goldberg (1977) and Lamb and Easterbrooks (1981) list a number of infant characteristics that affect parental affection; these include infants' responsiveness, readability, and predictability. Responsiveness refers to the extent and quality of infant reactivity to stimulation, and readability to the definitiveness of infant behavioral signals. An 'easily read' infant is one who produces unambiguous cues that allow caregivers to recognise the infant's states quickly, interpret the infant's signals promptly, and thus respond contingently. Predictability refers to the degree to which the infant's behaviours can be anticipated reliably from contextual events or the infant's own preceding behaviours. The health and developmental maturity of infants also affect the parents' behaviour and the quality of infant-parent interaction. (Goldberg & DiVitto, 2002). Bowlby while exploring on the basis of several assumptions found out that the behavioural propensities of infants and parents are most profitably considered in the context of the environment in which our infants evolve. In that 'environment of evolutionary adaptness' the survival of infants depend on their ability to maintain proximity to protective adults in order to obtain nourishment, comfort, and security. Unlike the young of many other species, however, human infants are unable to move closer to or to follow adults for several months after birth, and they are even incapable of clinging to adults in order to stay in contact. Instead, human infants rely on signals of various sorts to entice adults to approach them. In order for these signals to be effective, adults must be predisposed to respond to them. The best example of such a signal is the infant cry, which very effectively attracts adults to approach, pick up, and soothe the infant (Barr et al., 2000). As they grow older, infants develop a variety of means of achieving proximity or contact, including independent locomotion, and gradually come to focus their bids on people with whom they are most familiar, thereby forming attachments to them. Children start socialising with peers by playing usually after attaining eighteen months age, by this time the children learn to play cooperatively, to make or break rules, and to cope with group acceptance or rejection. In this respect in order to assess children peer relationship sociometric technique (Hymel, 1983) is used. This technique evaluates the child's status within a social network (preschool children). Members of the group are interviewed individually by the aid of photograph to determine whom they do and don't like. (Peterson, 2001, p5.55) Positive sociometric nominations are the votes a child gets when peers are asked by non-verbal communication the ones they like and want to play with. Negative nominations are the choices of an individual in response to questions about dislike behaviour. Based on the average, children can be assigned to one of four distinct sociometric classifications: popular, neglected, controversial or rejected. If a child is neglected or rejected (preschool or day-care), the first two years are the best moulding states for his parents to change their child. Conclusion It would not be wrong to say that the first two years of child's life is influenced by the social understanding, and it is this understanding, which serves as the ground root for a child for the rest of his life. They learn from their surroundings, from their parents, peers and even from those who are strangers to them. Social referencing can have a powerful effect not only on reactions to inanimate stimuli such as strange toys or a visual cliff but also on social behaviour, such as reactions to strangers. (Bornstein et al, 2002, p. 413) Infants in the middle of the first year often react negatively to unfamiliar adults, that means by that time they are aware of building social relationships and does not likely respond to strangers. Peers provide models of behaviour to imitate. They offer direct coaching when they tell or show a friend how to do something and also teach important social lessons via their approval or disapproval of one another's actions. They offer rewards ranging from smiles to praise, to gifts and punishments ranging from tears to verbal ridicule. Above all, the child's membership in a social group of peers provides a source of companionship and lessons, which they imitate for the rest of their lives. It is for this reason that children whose brought up is under the guidance of joint family grow up in sharp and confident personalities, devoid of any psychological disorder. References & Bibliography Barr, R. G., Hopkins, B., & Green, J. A. (Eds.), (2000). Crying as a sign, a symptom, and a signal: Clinical, emotional, and developmental aspects of infant and toddler crying (Clinics in Developmental Medicine, No. 152). New York: Cambridge University Press. Berg & Berg, (1979) In Lamb E. Michael & Sherrod R. Lonnie, (1981) Infant Social Cognition: Empirical and Theoretical Considerations: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates: Hillsdale, NJ. Bornstein H. Marc, Teti M. Douglas & Lamb E. Michael, (2002) Development in Infancy: An Introduction: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates: Mahwah, NJ. Goldberg, S., & DiVitto, B. (2002). "Parenting children born preterm". In M. H. Bornstein (Ed.), Handbook of parenting: Vol 1. Children and parenting (2nd ed., pp. 329-354). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Hymel, S. (1983) Preschool children's peer relationships: Issues in sociometric assessment. Merill-Palmer Quarterly, 29, 237-60 Lamb E. Michael & Sherrod R. Lonnie, (1981) Infant Social Cognition: Empirical and Theoretical Considerations: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates: Hillsdale, NJ. Peterson C. Candida, (2001) The Early Years of Development In: Psychological Science: An Introduction. Read More