The development of social responses

The relationship between a child, his mother, and other people caring for the child alters around the end of the baby’s first year of life. Not only does the child then begin to speak, but he or she is able to stand-most children are able to walk alone at about fourteen months. In their second and third years, children develop an increasing capacity to understand the interactions and emotions of other family members. The child learns how to comfort, as well as how to annoy, others. Children of two years old show distress if one parent gets angry with the other, and may hug one or the other if that person is visibly upset. A child of the same age is also able to tease a brother or sister, or a parent.

From about the age of one onwards, play starts to occupy much of the child’s life. At first, a child will mainly play alone, but increasingly demands someone else to play with. Through play, children further improve their bodily co-ordination and start to expand their knowledge of the adult world. They try out new skills, and they imitate the behaviour of grown-ups.

In an early study, Mildred Parten set out some categories of the development of play which are still generally accepted today (Parten, 1932). Young children first of all engage in solitary independent play. Even when in the company of other children, they play alone, making no reference to what the others are doing, but does not try to intervene in their activities. Subsequently (at age three or thereabouts), children engage more and more in associative play, in which they relate their own behaviour to that of others. Each child still acts as he or she wishes, but takes notice of and responds to what the others do. Later, at around age four, children take up co-operative play-activities which demand that each child collaborates with the other (as in playing at ‘mummies and daddies’).

Over the period from age one to four or five, the child is also learning discipline and self-regulation. One thing this means is learning to control bodily needs and deal with them appropriately. Children become toilet-trained (a difficult and extended process), and learn how to eat their food in a polite way. They also learn to ‘behave themselves’ in the various contexts of their activity, particularly when interacting with adults.

By about five, the child has become a fairly autonomous being. He or she is no longer just a baby. But almost independent in the elementary routines of life at home – and ready to venture further into the outside world. For the first time, the developing individual as able to spend long hours away the parents without too much worry.

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