At some point, while I was immersed in crash courses on parenting in the initial midst of having three babies born back-to-back, I remember sage advice from a class I once took at a parenting resource center in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. The class was always about parenting in general but the particular focus that day was on developmental stages.
The center, known as Families First, was just about to relocate from a shabby former school to a brand new, enormous, custom-designed facility in the woods off Route 1. I was experimenting with attending their weekly class held at 9:30 Wednesday mornings.
The shabbiness was a bit odd—seating furniture was very assorted and run-down, and the place had the feel of a movie set for a film about a high school where a mass murderer attacks and slowly hunts down the students one by one, messy chalkboard, flickering fluorescent lights and dingy windows included.
In such a setting, it was a little bit difficult to let my daughter go to the classroom next door, where social workers provided free child care and snacks. My kids have occasionally been reluctant to part with me, but more likely I’m the one disinclined to let them go. One of the early defining traits of my eldest child is her willingness to go wandering off. Taking family walks through the woods, as a toddler, she would march ahead of us until we couldn’t see her anymore, and she seemed to find this entertaining. This trait has only matured and is reaching a kind of full bloom.
Since the norm at Families First was for the children to separate from the parents so the parents could have any hope of thinking straight, I complied and my daughter, at two, coped well enough. I kept my little nursing babe with me, already pregnant with my third as well. Such a condition would often lend itself to a great deal of sweaty discomfort, as my body was a kind of nerve center not just for itself but also for two (or even three) others most of the time. My brain wasn’t sure how to focus on something like a class, where a reasonable instructor who spoke full sentences made attempts to appeal to my higher intelligence. But her words are still with me, somehow.
The class was about how kids develop differently, with varying needs to meet, from birth to two, two to five, five to eight or so, and onward. The instructor, a social worker as well, scribbled on the chalkboard to show us these varying age ranges and help make her point clearer.
At birth, she said, infants need to establish trust. The parents listening were told this was a baby’s main “developmental task.” If trust is not established, she said, the child will continue to grow up and will be seeking out this basic need, not always for the better or in obvious ways. This is why you take care of a crying child’s needs and try to figure out what will make the baby feel peaceful. The baby needs to know you’re there and can trust someone.
After that, in toddlerhood, the social worker told us, children are looking to establish independence. This is why power struggles between parents and little two-year-olds are so common. Children are looking to assert themselves and find the boundaries of the authority their parents hold. They need room to do this, and also clear and loving limits. Their “developmental task” is to feel that sense of self and capacity and separateness.
By school-age, about five years old, we were told, children are ready to start understanding the difference between right and wrong.
That doesn’t mean they can’t be told, “Don’t hit your friend in the eye with the stick,” when they’re three. Setting the limit is important and they should be taught why respecting other people matters at that age. But their capacity to absorb it is limited. Mostly they are looking to find their edges and boundaries in toddlerhood. They don’t necessarily understand why they shouldn’t hit their friends or grab toys or stick forks in outlets or yank the cat’s tail or dump all the milk out onto the floor. As toddlers, they hear a parent’s corrections and understand that he or she is upset or is setting, or failing to set, a limit. By the time they’re five or so, they are considered developmentally ready to begin to comprehend what those corrections mean and how to make moral choices.
A toddler who doesn’t make mistakes and test limits can’t necessarily accomplish the developmental task of learning independence. If a toddler mimics an adult and pretends to do the right thing all the time there are probably going to be issues later. Something similar can probably be said for a toddler who never has limits set but is always treated as though everything he does is just fine and he is just being his free and wild and creative self.
The notion that moral education can begin at around the age of five really grabbed hold of me. With such young children I felt like I was facing an eternity of three years before my oldest child would be anywhere near ready to learn that stuff. I would be dealing with trust- and independence-seekers forever. The task of setting constant limits faced me like a giant rock wall to scale and I had to carry groceries and children in slings the whole while, with no rest or reprieve.
One more thing, the social worker told us: when children seem unhappy it is often because they are looking to achieve mastery, and this can happen at any given age. Power struggles will result from one of two things: either there is a real need to meet or the child wants clarified authority. When there is a need to meet sometimes it can indicate readiness for some new mastery or skill. Kids are sponges, they need mastery and constant exposure to new knowledge. Make sure they are always getting a chance to master something.
Now that my children have somehow all arrived at the age where learning right or wrong has become the very feature and centerpiece of our lives, I wonder what drug I was on that I was so eagerly anticipating it and so quick to wish away the physical exhaustion of diaper-changing and nursing constantly. I knew mothers who said parenting teens was much harder and more challenging than parenting babies and toddlers, but I didn’t really believe them (this is a mother’s developmental task: learning to listen and believe and learn and appreciate). Rather, I always figured it would get easier as they aged. And certainly, as far as the physical demand of parenting, that has proven to be true, but because the physical demands are so intense that they tend to cloud out notions of what the other demands sometimes are in the early years, one can easily overlook the idea that other challenges will come into play, just as forcefully.
Somehow the groundwork I laid in approaching meeting the needs and accommodating the developmental tasks early on are being mirrored now, while I juggle what’s right or wrong in parenting my children, and how that ends up reflecting on them and teaching them moral choices.
My daughter still wants to be able to go off on her own. I test the waters with her. I tell her the first time I took the city bus by myself, I was nine years old, and a bit scared and reluctant. “You’re nine,” I told her at the time. “Would you take the bus by yourself?” She looked at me sideways and shook her head. I breathed a silent sigh of relief that she wouldn’t challenge me on that one anytime soon.
Another example: this school year, I’ve been trying to figure out how to bring some kids home from school immediately when it lets out, while also returning to the school an hour later for kids who stay behind for a given supplemental activity. Whether to drag everyone with me or not was a prime question I had to address, when they had already gotten home and settled into homework or a computer game with their shoes and coats off. “Can I stay home by myself?” my daughter asked. I wouldn’t have suggested it out of the blue, but kids ask and show that their interest in independence didn’t end at five.
It happened again today, when we were getting ready to go to school. My daughter, grumpy as ever over a dispute with her brother regarding a borrowed book they both want to read simultaneously, but not actually together, requested the chance to walk to school alone slightly ahead of us. I told her that was fine. Mostly for my own reasons. I didn’t want to walk with such a grumpy person. But in addition to that, she was simply ready, and had done it a few times before. Usually she wants to walk together, when she’s in a better mood. Walking alone would probably help her clear her mind before arriving at school.
So she left and I didn’t see any trace of her when we followed a little while afterwards. It was probably too late to catch up to her.
As we hiked up the sidewalk on the steepest part of our walk, my seven-year-old son remarked on how sore and tired his legs always feel when we head out to school. I looked down on him disbelievingly, wondering how such a new person could feel so regularly tired.
He demonstrated a bit of a funny, hunkered-down, lunge-walk for a moment, reminiscent of Monty Python’s silly walks. “When I walk like this,” he said, “it really makes my legs hurt.”
“Really,” I said. “Hmm… I wonder what’s making your legs hurt.”
“Probably puberty,” he said.