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In the beginning...

I was originally asked to write a book about childcare. In essence the subject is quite simple and straightforward, and yet the working through of it in the day-to-day living experience is so multifaceted that a single book could never aspire to address all its complexities. One could imagine that a book on childcare should have a coherent organised flow to its content. Yet by its very nature, the process of childcare demands an eternal flexibility.

The overall concept of childcare is really about the care that is required during the early years of life in order to enable the physical, emotional, and spiritual growth of a new person, and how an adequate amount of this care can be provided.

Adequate provision is fundamental. Readers might find Bruno Bettleheim’s concept of the ‘good enough’ parent (a concept that is referred to by both D W Winnicott and by Bruno Bettleheim) to be helpful in the examination of what might be deemed to be ‘adequate’. Some parents may long to provide ‘perfect’ care. If this is the case, I would ask that the concept of perfection is considered carefully. The world into which a new person is being invited is a complex and challenging entity, which is ever-changing. A parent can never hope to mediate every aspect of this interface perfectly, and it will gradually become plain that the parent has ‘failed’ in certain respects. Such ‘failure’ can be a consequence of factors such as inadequate factual knowledge, inadequate emotional development of the parent, lack of awareness that the child is experiencing a problem in the interface, and so on.

Truly adequate parenting must by its very nature include the capacity on the part of the parent to accept his or her current limitations, and a willingness to interact openly about this whenever needed. A mother or father who can say to the child ‘I’m so sorry, I got that wrong. I didn’t know it was like that. It would/might have been better if I had… Perhaps we could try again’ is laying down a very important foundation. This foundation can help the child to develop an emotional tolerance of inconsistency, uncertainty and inadequacy, and to learn creative ways of clarifying difficult situations throughout his life. If a child can experience inadequacy in a safe situation – i.e. a situation in which the wish to reach a ‘better place’ is demonstrated – he goes on to be able to mediate interactions with others confidently. Such a person has no worry that uncertainty and disagreement might provoke feelings such as anxiety or fear for him.

I think that a helpful approach would be to describe a series of situations – some fictional, and some real-life – and reflect on this material in a way that elucidates some of the ‘unseen’ aspects of the interactive processes that are involved. This is the purpose of the cameos – on pages 31-55. In this way I hope to raise the awareness of the reader not only to the needs of the child that requires the care in the here and now, but also to the needs of the child of the past that dwells inside each ‘adult’ state. This is of crucial importance, as it is not possible to provide care which is genuine and adequate unless the carer has, as a child, received a sufficient supply of such care or has become conscious of the gaps in their own care and the consequences of such gaps. A parent’s or carer’s acceptance of this situation means that the help that any sufferer of inadequate parenting gives to a child is far less likely to be contaminated with the ‘adult’s’ need to attempt to conceal from himself any residual emotional pain from unresolved issues from his own childhood experience.

If a parent has had childhood experiences that have been significantly painful, and that pain has never been adequately addressed, then it is not unlikely that the parent will give a less than adequate response to certain of the new child’s range of needs.

Early nourishment

When a baby is born, having only known life within a person, his perception is that he continues to dwell in a state where he is not a separate being. Any challenge that indicates that this is not so will fill him with intense alarm, and his normal reaction will be to scream as he feels torn away from what he can only perceive as himself.

The baby needs a lot of close physical contact with a parent person while he discovers that he is not part of the mother any more. Developing a clear grasp of being in a separate body evolves over a period of many months, but the process of discovering emotional separateness takes far longer. The baby has been born with a separate body, and daily experience gradually allows him to discover and perceive this. However, the perception and understanding of his emotions prior to his eventually being able to experience himself as a separate person is a process that is spread over years.

Re-presenting of feeling states

The importance of helping a young child to identify and name the feeling states that he experiences is paramount. This process is the bedrock of his becoming able to develop reliable and confident access to his emotional life, learning how to incorporate it into his interactions.

Once a child can name each emotion that presents itself inside him, he can communicate about them. For example, ‘I’m angry.’ Evolving on from there, he can form an approach such as ‘Mummy, I’m angry with you.’ And later, ‘Mummy, I’m angry with you because you took my bricks away.’ At first, the big task of identifying and naming each emotional state is sufficient. Angry, sad, frightened, happy, worried… A child will encounter these states rising in a very physical way inside his body, and relies upon a trusted parent to help him with them. The naming of them is the first step. This is fundamental to all that follows in the development of his ability to use the knowledge of them in his interactions about events in his life that provoke such feeling states.

The ability to use knowledge of his feeling states in his communications enables the child to connect with and communicate about how events impact upon him.