The view that a small child is a defenseless, weak and helpless creature is very widespread. Most often, it seems to anxious grandmothers that anything can happen to a child, that the child is weak and fragile, completely dependent on parental care, but this is not entirely true: quite adult people can envy many of the child’s abilities. The child’s arsenal of influence is much poorer than that of an adult, but the child has more energy, imagination and perseverance.
The baby is not helpless. This is an active, self-interested creature, capable enough to control parents, armed with all the necessary arsenal for this. This is a trained combat unit, a small energetic predator, using any mistakes of adults, easily jumping on the neck of parents and seizing power over them.
A mother for a baby is not a mother, but a part of the environment that he feeds on, which he consumes for his own needs.
A small child needs a lot of things. As the Soviet psychologist Daniil Borisovich Elkonin said, the first word of any child is the word “Give!”, And it doesn’t matter what sounds it is framed in. Things like eating, sleeping, being warm and dry, being in the arms of the mother are the natural needs of the baby, and if the parents do not give him this, the baby learns to control his parents in order to get from them what he needs from them.
This is how social emotions begin to develop.
A separate, very interesting question is about the psychological well-being of young children, for whom the question of the meaningfulness of life is not in principle. There is an assumption, however, that the psychological well-being of a young child is in fact connected with the meaningfulness of his life in the most intimate and direct way. The fact is that a small child does not live as a separate being, he develops as an element of the ecosystem, where the mother and the family as a whole are engaged in his development, create for him a focus on the future, thus fulfilling the function of giving meaning to his life. If a child is only fed, but not developed, if he is not created growth prospects, the child stops his development, essentially turns into a “vegetable”.
Unfortunately, such experiments were carried out by life itself: in the early years of Soviet power, there were a large number of abandoned children who were collected in baby houses, but who could only be provided with food and basic care. Six months later, the children lost all interest in life and people and reacted with displeasure to attempts to pick them up and play with them. They only wanted to sleep and eat, without these external hindrances.
What you need to know about baby crying In short, the main settings are as follows:
- What is the most important thing for a mother? Don’t worry, get enough sleep and be calm.
- Is it necessary to be attentive to the crying of a baby? — Yes, definitely.
- Should parents be afraid that the baby is crying? — No, it’s not scary.
- Can I believe the cry of a baby? Yes, babies don’t cry in vain.
- Is it necessary to wean a baby from night crying? Yes, gradually.
- What else needs to be taken care of? — Not to teach the baby to cry.
Read more about this in the article Baby Crying: Is It Always Necessary to Twitch?