- The relationship, the family and the institution
- The child’s attachment to the mother and the relationship between the educator and the child
- The quality of the institutions, the educational work and the contact with the child
- The child’s separation from the mother and attachment disorders
- The continued importance for attachment skills and the couple relationship
Is free play equally free for all children?
Does the free play create a grouping of quiet children and those who crawl in the curtains?
And what does this mean for relationship skills later in life and in the relationship?
According to PhD fellow Ole Henrik Hansen, free play is not always healthy (part 1 of the article) and its consequences can continue at school, in the study … and into adulthood, at work and later in the relationship (parts 2 and 3 of the article), I think and experience in my couples therapy practice.
Relationship skills
Reformpedagogical
The showdown is between a reform pedagogy that celebrates free play and children’s natural development, and then a minority consisting of individual researchers, educators and certain politicians who have had enough of free play and who are supporters of organized pedagogy. For many, the starting point is the philosopher Rousseau’s thoughts on free upbringing, which contrasts with the philosopher Kant’s thoughts on upbringing and disciplining.
Some believe that the free play where children are left to themselves in the institution can lead to the children’s brains not being optimally stimulated, as they otherwise are in the primary attachment to the mother/other significant adults, and that this can lead to them shutting down emotionally ( become attachment disordered). Which can be seen in the free grouping between children in free play, where a pecking order can arise with some who become quiet/shut down/become overadapted and others become outwardly reactive/impulse driven/dominant.
The quality of the educational work
Ole Henrik Hansen’s research does away with free upbringing and questions the quality of our intuitions and pedagogy. That the quality is largely dependent on the contact and relationship between the educators and the children. He goes so far as to say that it can create attachment disorders and behavioral problems if the quality of the contact between the educators and the children is not good enough. That it can create conditions reminiscent of maternal deprivation (loss of maternal contact/care and attachment problems) – especially in connection with entering the nursery. He also asked questions about who the pedagogues’ and institutions’ customers really are and how the various stakeholders should be balanced and taken care of. So, are the children or the parents the customers? Who and how much should they be accommodated and please? Do the interests of the parents, the children and the educators coincide at all? His criticism is that there are too few activities and only a few and superficial relationships between children and educators and that it is harmful.
More of the same
Well, everyone in the labor market is under pressure, including the educators. And in many workplaces there is a lot of administration and meetings. But the question is, how much time is spent on the secondary and how much time is spent on the customer (the primary)? Are the intuitions effective? Is it a matter of resources? Are better standards part of the solution or do we and the children simply get more of the same if we raise standards – that is, apart from external care – basically nothing?
Read more about Ole Henrik Hansen and his research here:
http://www.b.dk/nationalt/forsker-retter-frontalangreb-paa-dansk-vuggestuepaedagogik
Pedagogy and the brain
Development in pedagogy
Up until the 1960s, it was primarily external care that was the educational focus. Food and sleep. Calmness, cleanliness and regularity. In the 1960s, with Bowlby came a showdown with this. Here, the external framework became secondary and the attachment primary – the contact, the relationship, the communication… There was really nothing new in that, as already from Spitz’s work and research in the 1940s it was shown that ruptures and failures in relation to the primary attachment, could create attachment traumas.
The development of the brain
The latest research in neuropsychology also confirms conditions such as that the newborn child’s brain is not developed, and that through stimulation by e.g. breastfeeding, other physical contact and talking with the mother are developed in many essential and primary areas right up until the age of three. The research also shows that we actually have mirror neurons (1996, Giacomo Rizzolatti and Vittorio Gallese, University of Parma, Italy) and that these are extremely important for mirroring each other and our feelings, affective tuning, relationship skills and learning. That the mirror neurons are like a muscle that must be used and trained – use it or you loose it!
The relationship between the mother and the child, as well as its attachment to other significant adults, such as the educators, thus has an extremely great importance for the development of pre-social competences, incl. impulse control, self-regulation, communication, interaction, togetherness and attachment. A focal point is the emotional dialogue, which can take the form of both words and sounds, which is a carrier wave for the child’s psychological development.
To show how important the emotional dialogue with the young child is, the following example/experiment can be mentioned: First, a mother chatters with her happy baby. Then the mother turns her face away. When she looks at the child again, she has a completely neutral and expressionless face. The child reacts immediately. After a few seconds, the baby cries!
Consequences for the couple relationship and couples therapy
Since earlier and earlier we send our children into intuitions that they are there longer and longer at the same time as the professionals become more and more important for our children’s development, the risk of rupture and separation with the primary and natural attachment (the mother, the father and the family) as well as attachment problems. At the same time, we gain less experience in attachment in the family.
When we stay in the family, we not only get a direct experience of this, but our mirror neurons indirectly help us to gain and form internal competences, experiences and images of a family and being in a (couple) relationship as well as to feel and understand our loved ones. Without these inner competences, images, experiences, our frame of reference, which we will later use when we ourselves enter into a relationship and a family, is weakened. We are practically in a situation where we have to both reinvent ‘the deep dish’ without having seen it and try to wake up our untrained mirror neurons. And on top of that, many have some degree of attachment disorder as well as problems with affective tuning and communication. This means that the parties find it difficult to dialogue and to solve problems. To regulate themselves, their needs and feelings as well as the relationship (self-regulation). That it becomes difficult to move in and out of daily contact without it being experienced as failure, violations, rejections. That it ends with a loser and a winner, a violator and a violator, as well as power struggles and battles for recognition and love.
It has now been this way for a good three generations. This means that most people and their children are, for a large part of the time, raised and brought up in institutions. And not only that, the educators themselves and just like that! What will this mean for our children, relationships, families and workplaces?
If we do not learn early on to create, develop, maintain, settle and interrupt contact and relationships, it can later become difficult to do this, for example at study, at work, with friends and in relationships. These challenges are amplified if we, too, have not developed our mirror neurons and the emotional dialogue. In any case, it can become more difficult to understand each other, talk about feelings, communicate and solve problems.
In my couples therapy practice, I often see that it is two very different people who form a couple – as opposites that meet. It is very reminiscent of the phenomena Ole Henrik Hansen describes about free play and the quiet and the wild children. One partner is typically more reserved/silent and the other more defining/speaking. It can be difficult to see and balance in the relationship without outside eyes and help – for example from a couples therapist who is not themselves caught up in the games and emotions. One partner is not better or worse than the other. They both typically need competence development and support to see and be seen, to be in and to move in and out of contact and to regulate themselves in the relationship.
Read more about couple therapy here:
http://www.parterapi-parterapeut.dk/
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Kasper Larsen
Family and couple therapist
© Kasper Larsen, 2012. All rights reserved.