Sublime

Étudier l’évolution des comportements de l’enfant revenait dès lors à étudier la science en marche du bébé à l’adulte – « l’embryologie de la raison

Every new mother begins as a child-mother. A child-mother is old enough to have babies and has good instincts in the right direction, but she needs the mothering of an older woman or women who essentially prompt, encourage, and support her in her mothering of her children.

The broad lines of the developmental answer to this question should be familiar by now. Babies are born knowing a great deal about language. They also have powerful learning procedures that allow them to add to that knowledge and, in particular, to learn all the details and peculiarities of the language of their own community. Finally, adults play

Experience, not information, is the key to emotional development. It is in unsupervised, child-led play where children best learn to tolerate bruises, handle their emotions, read other children’s emotions, take turns, resolve conflicts, and play fair. Children are intrinsically motivated to acquire these skills because they want to be included in t

The naughtiness of infants is experimental, a method of data collection.

Systematic studies indicate that two-year-olds begin to show genuine empathy toward other people for the first time. Even younger babies will become upset in response to the distress of others (we all know the disturbing way the baby will suddenly begin to howl when a marital argument starts). But only two-year-olds provide comfort. They don’t just

Harris quotes a Kpelle father in Liberia: ‘If I am cutting brush, I give him the machete for him to know how to cut brush. If work becomes hard, I’ll show him how to make it easier.’ The deliberate teaching of our young, rather than being a modern perversion of human nature, is part of our biological heritage.

But when someone else touches their face, they root frantically. A true reflex wouldn’t discriminate between these situations: both would produce the same response. The fact that newborns have different responses suggests that they have a primitive sense of self: they can distinguish between what they do and what someone else does.