Hadow (1933)

Notes on the text
Preliminary pages Membership, Analysis, Preface, Introduction
Chapter 1 History of the development of infant education
Chapter 2 Physical development of children up to 7
Chapter 3 Mental development of children up to 7
Chapter 4 Age limits and organisation of the infant stage
Chapter 5 Medical supervision, education and training of under 5s
Chapter 6 Training and teaching of children in infant and nursery schools
Chapter 7 Staffing of infant and nursery schools, training of teachers
Chapter 8 Premises and equipment of infant and nursery schools
Chapter 9 Summary of principal conclusions and recommendations
Appendix I List of witnesses
Appendix II Anatomical and physiological characteristics of 2-7 year olds (Harris)
Appendix III Emotional development of children up to seven plus (Burt and Isaacs)
Appendix IV Notes on typical nursery schools and classes
Appendix V Manchester's student nurse scheme for 'helpers'
Appendix VI Practice in Europe and US
Index

London: HM Stationery Office

Appendix III
[pages 244 - 251]

THE EMOTIONAL DEVELOPMENT OF CHILDREN UP TO THE AGE OF SEVEN PLUS

Note
The following paragraphs dealing with the emotional development of young children at successive stages up to the age of seven are taken from a Memorandum prepared for the Committee by Professor Cyril Burt, DSc, Professor of Psychology, University College, London, and Mrs Susan Isaacs, DSc, Head of the Department of Child Development, The Institute of Education, University of London, and Research Assistant in the Psychological Laboratory, University College, London. The remaining part of the Memorandum, which is not printed here, is the basis of Chapter 3 of the present Report.

1. Of all the general features that mark the behaviour of the child during the first two or three years of life the most obvious and the most significant is the great strength of feelings and impulses as compared with the weakness of understanding and the power of control. Only gradually does the ordered world of physical objects and social realities come before the child's comprehension. For long he remains a creature of imperious wishes and intense emotions.

2. Experimental research has recently thrown much light on the nature and growth of the young child's instincts and emotions. Watson's work on fear and rage in infants, for example, seems at first sight to establish a suggestive fact, namely, that these feelings can be automatically called out by relatively simple and definite stimuli; fear, by the sudden loosening or lowering of the child's physical support or by a sudden loud noise; rage, by the forcible inhibition of the infant's movements. Subsequent work, however, has somewhat modified this view, and made it appear too simple. Valentine's studies have shown that the infant's responses are never quite so mechanical as Watson's descriptions have implied. After the very earliest days, it is always the total situation to which the child responds, rather than the single simple stimulus. The presence or absence of the mother, for instance, may entirely determine whether or not the child will respond to a particular stimulus with symptoms of fear or dismay. A more recent investigator has studied sleeping habits of children aged two to four; and has similarly demonstrated that during the day time the length of sleep and the readiness with which children fall asleep is largely affected by their personal response to the particular adult in charge. There is little doubt that the same also holds good, though perhaps not quite so strongly, of the younger child.

Nevertheless, Watson's observations of the special kinds of stimuli most liable to produce fear in the young infant, and his demonstration that one of the most certain ways of provoking rage is to inhibit the child's movements, whether by rough handling or by tight garments, still remain unquestioned, and are highly significant for education.

One instructive study has lately been made by Washburn of the smiling and laughing of infants during the first year. It has been shown that there are definite phases in the development of both responses. From the eighth to twentieth week, the infant will respond with a smile to another's smiling; but from the twentieth to fortieth week, negative responses predominate, probably because the child is then becoming more aware of strangers as such. After the fortieth week the smile can again readily be called out. Laughing appears later than smiling. It is more stereotyped in its pattern, and seems more closely connected with the primitive emotions and the expression of feeling generally; smiling, on the other hand, has the character of a communicative, adaptive response, and thus marks the beginning of a social reaction.

At birth and throughout the first two or three years the child's emotional life centres chiefly in the nutritive impulses of his body. His first affection for his mother, and his first feelings of loss or thwarting, are experienced in connection with the way she nurses and feeds him. It is through the same fundamental relations that he gleans his first knowledge of her as a person. He learns to know his mother through his mother's breast. Later, when she begins to train his excretory functions in accordance with social standards, his emotions of love or of fear and anger become closely coupled with these experiences as well. (1)

To treat the training either of the feeding responses or of the excretory habits as a problem of purely physiological and local mechanism is a serious educational mistake. By his behaviour in regard to these functions the child manages to express either his trust and love or his anger and defiance; and such feelings are readily stimulated by the way in which he is handled during these recurring situations, quite as much as by his general relation towards the adults who have charge of him.

From the point of view of mental hygiene, therefore, it is of great importance that a sound technique in managing the infant while serving his physiological needs and training his excretory habits, should be acquired by those who attend to his needs. Regularity in the times for feeding and in the opportunities for voiding are essential; equally important are a gentle mode of holding him and a calm and confident manner. Quiet, positive encouragement, showing the child what to do and how to do it, is far more effective than scolding or punishment, or emphasis on what he should not do. Successes should be emphasised; failures should be minimised; and above all, any feeling of shame or hostility should be avoided.

It is equally essential for mental health in later childhood that the process of weaning should be properly accomplished. There is reason to believe that a normal period of breast feeding is as important for mental as for bodily health, that too early a weaning is to be avoided, and that the change over from breast to bottle or spoon should be graduated according to the special emotional requirements of each individual child.

The normal time for weaning falls in the third quarter of the first year. Just before this period there is a significant change in the instinctive responses of the child. Together with the first appearance of the teeth, there appears a marked inclination towards biting. This change may bring with it a general alteration in the child's whole emotional attitude; in particular there often is a marked increase in the destructive impulses. With the ordinary well-cared-for infant such impulses find a harmless satisfaction in biting food, bone rings, and the like, and, later on, in destructive and constructive play with bricks or sand. Thus exercised, they cause but little trouble. If, however, during the early months the child suffers some undue thwarting in regard to the routine of feeding, then the biting impulses may be greatly heightened and become a vehicle of rage and defiance. Later difficulties over excessive destructiveness in the nursery school period may often be traced to unsatisfactory conditions during the weaning period. These are but a few of the observable facts which illustrate the great psychological importance of a proper handling of emotional situations such as arise out of the nutritive processes during the first year of life.

The second year sees a considerable increase in the variety and vividness of emotion. Difficulties may now arise even in children who, throughout their first year, have been comparatively placid. A recent investigation into anger in children has shown that the frequency of outbursts of anger, no matter what their cause, rises to a definite peak during the second twelve months. During this period, a number - perhaps the majority - of children go through a phase of obstinate self-assertion, stubbornly resisting almost every demand which adults make upon them. It would seem as if now, for the first time, the child discovers himself as an independent person, and so needs to affirm himself defiantly and wilfully against his environment. Only in this way can he begin to learn in which directions he is allowed to be independent and self-determining, and in which directions it is more satisfying in the long run to acquiesce. A brief spell of perversity is normal; but the tendency may persist unduly in those who are severely punished or who feel thwarted by the absence of any opportunity for self-determination and self-help.

During this second year the common phobias of childhood, including night terrors, may make their first appearance. In a few they may give ground for anxiety; but as a rule, with calm and sensible treatment, they die gradually away.

Difficulties in regard to feeding now take the form of idiosyncrasies of taste, of reluctance to chew or swallow solid food, or of a general moodiness with regard to food. If there is no ill-timed attempt to ride roughshod over the child's preferences, no excessive fuss on the part of the adults when he is disinclined to eat, the trouble may vanish spontaneously by the end of the second year.

Another characteristic of this period is thumb sucking; but again it soon loses its attraction when the child's skill and interest in the external world find scope for development.

All through these first two years what is most distinctive in the child's emotional attitude is his intense attachment to his parents. Other children interest him, but are often treated as merely rivals. Indeed, rivalry with playmates over the sharing of toys or over the attention of grown-ups may be very acute. But in the main it is mostly to adults that the child looks for his emotional satisfactions.

3. Observers who have approached the study of the young child from many different angles are all agreed upon one outstanding point: namely, that the emotional intensity of the young child's life reaches its zenith about the end of the third year. At this age, every emotion the child undergoes is felt with a vividness and a strength that is never again experienced either in later childhood or in adult life; from this stage onwards experience and the integration of impulses tend more and more to control and moderate the child's emotional excitement. This early vividness and intensity are seen with every type of feeling. The child's rage at being thwarted, his fears, his phobias, his night terrors, his love and devotion towards mother or nurse, his sense of loss if they leave him, his jealousy and feelings of jealousy towards other children, all are violently felt and vigorously displayed. In its quick changes and warm and shifting colours, his emotional life is kaleidoscopic. From laughter to tears, from affection to hostility and back again, is but a momentary step. What the child cannot do as yet is to organise his conflicting impulses into restrained, stable, consistent behaviour.

In the home, all these feelings with their varied content are shown with a demonstrativeness that is undiluted. In the nursery school they never appear so fully or so vividly: there the presence of a greater number of persons leads to a wider diffusion of feeling; and further, the child's emotions are naturally less keen and acute towards other adults than towards his own mother or nurse. Nevertheless, even in the nursery school the tiny child of three is very ready to show rivalry with other children, and evinces a perpetual desire to cling to grown-ups for shelter or attention. By the middle of his fourth year, however, his close attachment to adults and his jealous suspicion of other youngsters grow less and less marked: a more positive and active interest in playfellows appears and become progressively established.

The control of emotional impulses is due mainly to the formation of what the psychologist terms sentiments. Groups of emotions become associated and organised about central ideas. These ideas are, to begin with, ideas of persons - almost invariably those whom the child meets daily in his own home circle; later they may be ideas of concrete but inanimate things, such as the child's own property or playthings; later still, and for the most part after the period with which we are here concerned, they may relate to more abstract conceptions and form the centre of an enthusiasm for certain games, for particular school subjects, for particular modes of conduct, for ideals of virtue and the like.

In popular conversation, we speak of these sentiments as the 'love for' this or that object; and we say how important an influence is exercised on conduct by this child's love for his mother or another, by that child's love for her pretty clothes. Affection for a doll, respect for a teacher, family pride, attachment to the old home, loyalty to a school, a passion for reading, a liking for ball games, self-love or self-respect - these are all sentiments; and the germs of them may be successively sown during the years that elapse from birth to six or seven, or later. Some sentiments, as we shall see in a moment, may be sentiments not of love but of hate; most early sentiments are mixtures of both. Unfortunately, common language has no convenient general term: the technical use of the word 'sentiment' strikes the non-psychological as a little forced. Perhaps the best simple word would be 'interests'. It is, then. the development of rich and permanent interests that is the chief agent in stabilising the child's emotions and rendering his conduct more coherent.

Of these interests or sentiments the earliest, as a rule, is the child's sentiment for his mother (or for the nurse who takes his mother's place). Its formation starts in the first few weeks of babyhood. At the outset his interest in his mother is primarily an interest in the source of food and of comfort; but soon he begins to 'love' her in the more ordinary sense of the word. This means not merely that he will experience a passing emotion of affection whenever she is present to his eyes; it implies that he gradually builds up a permanent disposition to feel a whole cycle of various emotions according to the changing circumstances. When his mother is happy, he feels happy too; if she suffers, he feels sorrow; if he fancies she is in danger, he begins to feel fear; if someone ill-treats her, he grows angry; if she neglects him for her husband or for a younger child, he grows jealous. Thus a complete system of feelings - joy, sorrow, fear, anger, affection, and the like - becomes attached to the thought of his mother. Such an organised sentiment tends to regulate his passing impulses and feelings in a more consistent fashion.

Sometimes, however, the emotions aroused by one and the same person may come into conflict. While his mother nursed and protected him, the emotions she aroused were mainly pleasurable. So soon as he has learnt to walk and to show some degree of independence, his mother may find it necessary to thwart or restrain his actions, and this may arouse a feeling of anger or of fear: the germ of hate thus appears. The word 'hate' may seem a strong one to use in this connection; but it is scarcely too strong if we consider, not the overt manifestations, but the half-unconscious tendencies to which such feelings give rise. Usually these more unpleasant emotions get repressed, and so remain more or less unconscious. And in this way the sentiment comes to resemble what the psychoanalyst has taught us to call a 'complex'. Hence, in the organisation of the child's feelings there may be dangers as well as benefits. It is often within his own home that he first learns to hate as well as to love. But whatever form they take, his early emotional attitudes towards the members of his family will largely determine his later emotional attitudes to other persons whom he meets in after-life. It is, therefore, supremely important that the way in which the child's own parents treat him should be sane, scientific and consistent. The process can be traced step by step. The habitual response of the child to his parents will affect his reactions towards the adults whom he meets in the nursery school, and their treatment in turn will influence him afresh for the rest of his days. His feelings towards his own brothers and sisters will affect his feelings towards his playmates when he meets them outside his own home; and once more his new experiences in school will correct or confirm the habits started already.

Of all these sentiments the most important, the master passion, is the child's own sentiment for himself. From the attitude and utterances of other people, from the way they react to his everyday behaviour, he gradually builds up a notion of himself as a distinct and interesting personality of a particular sort. This notion may develop into a kind of ideal which he may endeavour to live up to or live down to. The emotions attached to it may be selfish emotions or purer and more enlightened emotions. Accordingly, the way the child is praised or punished, allowed to gain confidence and a sense of self-reliant independence, or crushed into timidity and diffidence, or, it may be, allowed to regard himself as the domineering centre around which the whole household revolves - these early forms of treatment and the very names or nicknames he is given may produce a lasting and ineradicable effect upon his moral character. Accordingly, where the parents' attitude is unwise, or where the relations between the two parents are themselves strained, unhappy, or excessively emotional, there the more orderly environment of the nursery school, with calm dispassionate treatment, may save the child from the permanent ill-effects of an unwholesome environment at home. (2)

There is both room and need for first-hand investigations into these processes. A few have already been attempted. Professor Katherine Bridges has made a detailed study of the way in which a young child's emotional attitude towards other children alters, (3) and is influenced by successive changes in its development and surroundings. At three or earlier the first response of the child to other children is commonly one of suspicion and dislike. This gradually gives way to a kind of experimental hostility, in which the child shows his interest by behaviour more or less aggressive. Where there are opportunities for cooperative play, this aggressive stage is succeeded in its turn by an active pleasure in doing things together with the other youngsters. At first the opportunities will not be fully seized and the play will not be genuinely cooperative play. The children play happily in the presence of each other; yet, before the age of four and a half, they still tend, on the whole, to play individually. Each follows his own pursuits; and, if he tries to get others to join in, it is usually in an attempt to make them follow his particular notions. Spontaneous groups formed among children at this period are nearly always small; generally they consist of two or three, hardly ever of more than four. Whenever half a dozen or so are present, they quickly break up into small and separate groups. Limited and occasional as it is, however, such playing together provides the ground out of which the social impulses gradually begin to spring up. The children gain an actual experience of 'togetherness'; and the foundation is thus laid for true social reciprocity in later group life.

In these spontaneous groupings one significant feature is the way in which rivalry flashes out between the smaller groups, whether in make-believe or in earnest, much as it formerly flashed out between individuals, though now in milder form. The child's initial hostility to all other children but himself is dealt with first in this fashion; it is as it were pushed further outwards, away from his immediate friends in his own special group, and on to other groups in his neighbourhood. In these early years, however, such groupings are always unstable and temporary: at any moment, through the outbreak of quarrels or petty disputes, they are liable to break down. The leadership of an adult who understands how to direct children's activities will sustain a genuine group feeling far more durably and far more stably than the children left to themselves.

The hostility that so constantly obtains among the tinier children springs from various sources. A squabble may arise over the possession or the use of some toy or apparatus, over the leadership of the group, the choice of the game or the fashion in which it is to be played, and most significant of all, out of a sharp competition for the friendship and attention of other children. Sometimes it will spring from no cause in the outer environment, but rather from the momentary peevishness or unhappiness of one child who for some internal reason is moody or ill-humoured. Much of this early antagonism and aggression tends to fade away as the children in a particular group gain the experience of playing together, building up a common history, and learning to trust each other. As each child achieves an increasing skill, he becomes better able to cooperate with his fellows.

Towards the close of this period, therefore, the amount of sustained friendly play and genuine cooperation amongst children, though still restricted, is much greater than was possible during the preceding years. As a result, by the end of his fifth year, the child has become more stable in his private emotional life; this in turn reacts on his dealings with others. His social relations with the rest of his group thus grow more and more settled and reliable. Further, these active friendships with other children serve to detach him from his exclusive dependence on adults, and so usher in the initial stages of that gradual change which culminates in the typical attitude of the older child of nine or ten. Characteristically enough, during the years that intervene children are much more concerned with, and much more affected by, the opinion and feelings of other children like themselves, than they are by the approval or disapproval of adults.

4. Between the child under five and the child of six or seven no difference is perhaps so striking as the difference in general emotional attitude. In its essence, the change is a continuation of what has been going forward ever since the period of most intense emotional conflict - the age of three or thereabouts. But the cumulative effect of the intervening processes produces a distinct reorientation of the child's mind, gradual but complete. The new standpoint is now slowly consolidated and fixed; and, as he passes from one stage to the other, the child's whole outlook expands and his insight grows deeper as well as broader.

The most conspicuous feature is his increasing detachment from his parent. More and more the child turns away from his father, mother, and, indeed, from adults generally, and looks rather for his chief emotional satisfactions to the outside world - most of all to other children. By slow degrees he ceases to regard other youngsters simply as rivals for the love and attention of grown-ups, and comes to treat them as allies. Feeling as he does his own insufficiency against the prestige and the authority of the adult, this sense of comradeship comes as a great support to him: it enables him to look on adults with a more open and discerning eye, and so behave towards them in a more temperate fashion and with greater self-control.

The new alliance with other children thus gradually builds up a new reserve. During the infant school period the child grows far less demonstrative. His parents or his teachers may even complain that they are losing his confidence. Actually the change implies a definite progress in emotional stability. The quickly shifting moods of love and hostility, of jealousy and friendship, so characteristic of the youngster up to the age of five, give way to attitudes more lasting in quality and quieter in tone. Three influences contribute to lessen the intensity of his feelings. First, his circle of acquaintances among both children and adults grows wider and wider. And with this goes an increase in the variety of contacts that he makes not only with persons but also with things and with ideas - an expansion which now becomes possible through the enlargement of his own skill and interests. Secondly, both in the spontaneous associations of free play and in the regularised competitions or organised games, his feelings of hostility and rivalry are now turned outwards - away from his own immediate playmates to other children or towards other groups. He thus becomes capable of active friendship, and can participate on equal terms in the pursuits of others. Thirdly, emerging out of the two previous influences, there is an increasing organisation in the child's social relations. His behaviour, both towards young and old, no longer rests on the impulse of the moment; it is based on a scheme of attitudes, which fit more and more closely to the special requirements of time, place, and person. Something like a moral code is beginning to grow up.

Recent studies of the moral development of young children have revealed an important change. In the earlier years children's moral judgements and their notions of just punishment are far more severe and absolute than later on. Before the age of five or six the whole pattern of their emotional and social life is founded on the relation of parent and child, of authority and obedience (or disobedience). Towards six or seven years, however, a morality of equals begins gradually to develop; and, little by little, the virtues of loyalty, friendship and tolerance gain meaning for the child. His moral values as a whole grow more tempered and balanced, and show a closer connection with his real experience. They will, of course, still be entirely concrete and immediate; as yet all abstract moral judgements are beyond the range of his comprehension.

Footnotes

(1) The close association between the emotional life and the alimentary processes has been demonstrated by such work as Cannon's on Bodily Changes and Pain, Hunger, Fear and Rage, as well as by direct observation of those situations which call out emotional responses in the infant and young child.

(2) See Flugel, Psycho-Analytic Study of the Family.

(3) KM Bridges, The Social and Emotional Development of the Pre-School Child.