Why is Social Interaction Particularly Important to Children During the First Two Years of Life
Why is Social Interaction Particularly Important to Children During the First Two Years of Life? Some psychologists argue that no year of life is as important as the first. If the baby doesn’t start out well, they warn, if the parents (especially the mother) do not tend to the baby’s every physical and emotional need in the ‘right’ way, the baby’s whole life may be influenced for the worse. ... If they start off on the wrong foot, with sickness, premature birth, or social deprivation, they don’t do as well as babies who start off healthy and loved. ... Birds of prey, for example, will catch and kill young monkeys, particularly if no older monkeys are offering any protection to the young. Most infant animals are reared for the first weeks and months by one or both of their parents. ... So why do parents and babies tend to stay together? ... This two way bond usually means that the newborn will try to stay close to its parent, and that the adult will feed and protect the infant. ... The first major investigation into this attachment bond was conducted by the influential British child psychologist Dr John Bowlby. ... During the 1940’s and 1950’s, John Bowlby studied how and why babies make attachments. ... Bowlby collected research findings about children’s emotional development, particularly children who had been separated from their mothers. He reasoned that one good way of discovering the importance of forming and keeping a successful attachment would be to study children who hadn’t been allowed to form one, or who had formed one and then had it broken. ... Bonding was thought to be set off by maternal hormones that are present during childbirth. ... So can parents who adopt older infants and children. ... The effects of early bonding are weak, and do not explain why a mother keeps on mothering (Campos et al. ... “Humans had better be prepared for twenty years. ... ” The young child, in the first years of its life, undergoes an especially intensive development process, whose most salient features include the close intertwining of motor, cognitive and socio-emotional learning processes with the quality of parent-child interaction and relationship. Development in this phase of life proceeds first and foremost in the context of the child-parent relationship. ... Such a "development scope" means for the child that during play it can gather everyday experiences which entail the integration of a large number of complex and different stimuli through different sensory channels: by jumping into a puddle and feeling the cold water on its hands; going to the crawling group and on the way perceiving the various smells and sounds, for example, of nature, of people, of the traffic etc.