One of my first tasks as I dive into my education as a father is to get up to speed with what my wife has been learning in the last two years. While we read many of the baby books together, the latest stack has more to do with the toddler infant stage and the book she suggested I start with is “The Aware Baby” by Aletha J. Solter which covers from conception to roughly two and a half years old.
I’m just getting into the book this evening and thought it would be a good idea to get the premise of the work she presents in the introduction into a post as an anchor as I read thru the book (we ordered a copy on Amazon and, strangely, ours has the pages bound upside down with respect to the cover and they are bound right to left, essentially backwards!)
To be succint, the author believes that we need to change our child-rearing methods where we focus not only on linguistic and cognitive skills but also emotional health and self-esteem with the goal of rasing productive, non-violent children who are more interdepentdant as opposed to independant and not afraid of expressing their emotions.
She defines “Aware Parenting” thusly:
…a way of being with babies based on trust, empathy, and respect. It describes how to form a deep emotional connection with your baby, and how to help your baby stay connected to her true self and grow up as a human being. Aware Parenting is comprised of three basic aspects: attachment-style parenting, non-punitive discipline, and acceptance of emotional release.
She makes fourn assumptions about human nature that underlie the ideas presented:
- Babies know what they need.
- If babies needs are met and if they are not hurt, they will be intelligent, compassionate, and non-violent.
- Babies are extremely vulnerable, and early trauma and under-filled needs can have long-lasting, negative effects.
- Babies have the ability to recover from many of the effects of stress and trauma.
My Thoughts
This book was originally written in 1984, and I must say, based on observations in the last ~5 years of my life as I have paid more attention to new parents, the ideas she presents are not widely held. Granted, I have lived in Spain for the last 8 years and I suppose that these ideas maybe just haven’t made it here yet!
I would tend to agree with the author when she says that we need to spend time focussing on aspects of emotional health. Someone recently pointed out to me how we spend so much time caring for our bodies, or take medication and rest when we become physically ill but mental and emotional issues are neither “worked out” as much as our bodies or approached in the same manner as physical maladies.
With respect to interdependance versus independance I cannot but help agree. Having read “The Seven Habits of Effective People” by Steven Covey, he places interdependance above independance and dicsusses how we need to evolve to this higher level. Indeed ancient literature such as the Bhagavad Gita outline the same ideas; imagine, awareness of these concepts have been around for over 2500 years!
Lastly, touching on her four assumptions, I gather she will be providing evidence to support these at some point. I can only really comment on the first point by saying that my son has shown in many cases that he knows what he needs. A perfect example comes from shortly before his first birthday when he woke up, rolled over and signed to my wife that he had “owie” in hit mouth and wanted medicine. He had signed requests like this before – having really started to sign consistently at about ten months – however never so direcly and in a signed sentence. Although we had done so earlier, from that point on we worked really hard to communicate with him as it was clear that, knowing how to use his tools to communicate, he would tell us what he needed.
Off to read chapter one!
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
This is so exciting! I can’t wait to have some great discussions.
I agree with you on that the ideas of this book are not widely held, at least here in Spain (even that all Aletha’s books have been translated to Spanish and are easy to get). I think it has to do with some things she mentions later: the fear we parents have of creating an spoiled baby and that its not well accepted to express strong emotions in our society.
Re emotional health, I recently realized how important it is to the world the mental health of each of us, then realized how important is our role as parents to the whole world. Its so simple jet I had never seen it this way: emotional healthy babies would create healthy interactions, families, governments and a ultimately a healthy world.
And about knowing what they need, I really believe that it is true, and that our big work is to try to maintain it that way, trying to interfere as little as possible, instead of trying to mold them to our ways.
Well then, it seems we agree on a lot of things!