YOUR DEVELOPMENTtouch his sidekick Robin, but can’t touch the sea-sponge cartoon char-
acter SpongeBob.
Combine all these insights into aspects of infanthood – attentional
focus, self-consciousness, self-control and imagination – and you start
to get an idea of what it must be like to be a baby or young child. Every
inch of the world is alive, dancing, screaming out for your attention.
And meanwhile you’re thoroughly immersed in each present moment,
unrestrained, unhampered by any nagging connections with the past or
worries about the future; uninhibited by the impossible, by what’s real
and what’s not.
Developmental stages
Classic developmental psychologists like Jean Piaget used to think of
children as passing through a series of discrete stages of mental maturity
and that the errors they made on various tasks could reveal what stage
they were at. It’s certainly true that various developmental milestones
emerge in a predictable order – crawling comes first, then walking;
single-word utterances before sentences, and so on. Similarly, there are
Other early abilities have more
obvious survival value. The
classic “visual cliff ” experiments
conducted by Eleanor Gibson and
Richard Walk in 1960 showed that
most babies seem to be able to
perceive depth as soon as they
are old enough to crawl. The
researchers placed babies aged
between six and fourteen months
on a glass table, part of which was
patterned, giving the appearance
of being solid, while the other part
was see-through, appearing to be
a sheer drop to the floor. With few
exceptions, even the youngest
babies refused to crawl onto
the “drop” even if their mothers
encouraged them to do so.Babies have a great capacity for
mimicry.