When we’re young, we have a lot of needs. We depend upon our caregivers to meet those needs. And the sense of those needs can increase or decrease depending on our own temperament, our health needs, and previous life experiences. Lots of painful experiences of not receiving the attention and care and pain relief and comfort and cuddling and warmth that we need actually makes us needier for those things and more vulnerable and sensitive when we don’t get them.
I want to tell a little story from my dissertation, which involved offering alternatives to toddlers around problematic wants. Not the steak knives, how about the cool spoons? I went into 20 different homes. I ended up with a videotape of my interactions with their toddler, 20 mothers, 10 little boys, 10 little girls, and I followed them around for a while, just free observation. And then we did a ginger snap cookie making episode, which is full of opportunities for there to be a conflict between the wants of the parent and the wants of the toddler. I filmed it all and then I coded it really carefully, staying up late at night, getting up early in the morning, and I finally got a PhD.
There were several little episodes that stayed with me in really haunting ways. If you’re vulnerable here, you might want to take a step back from the stories I’m going to tell. They were really striking in that there was no overt abuse. Nothing physical happened. Definitely nothing sexualized. And yet I know what happened in these little episodes that lasted maybe 20 seconds really landed, especially if an episode like that happened again and again.
You might reflect on how your parents and your caregivers responded to your own wants. My mother was an extremely loving, decent, motivated, large-hearted person, and she grew up in a culture in the Great Depression in America in which it was just standard that children don’t know what they want. And even if they do know what they want, who cares what they want, compared to the wants of adults? She wasn’t mean about that. That’s just how she grew up.
The Toddler Who Raised His Arms
Story number one is a little boy and a mom. I’m following them around. And the little boy, 15 months old, barely can walk, raises his arms and starts making the sounds, if you’ve been around toddlers: rising tone, arms rising, pick me up. And the mom seemed like a pleasant person. She just stood there staring at him. She didn’t say something like, oh sweetie, I can’t pick you up right now, or oh sweetie, my back is killing me, I can’t pick you up, I’m so sorry, or kneel down on the floor and get next to him and let him crawl into her lap and cuddle there. Maybe picking him up just wasn’t an option for her. Nothing. She just went inert. She just looked at him.
Much research has shown that this is one of the most unnerving things that can happen. There’s a lot of research on what’s called the still face experiment, in which you take toddlers, you put them in a high chair, you park a parent in front of them, and you ask the parent to just maintain a poker face, no matter what the child does. Nothing mean, nothing loud, no yelling. Just nothing. Five, 10 seconds go by, the toddler starts getting animated, tries to get a rise out of the parent. 20, 30 seconds go, the toddler’s getting increasingly upset. 40, 50 seconds have gone by, the toddler is completely broken down and distraught, and they’ve got to stop the experiment.
Even if the other person disagrees with what we say or doesn’t want to give us what we want, at least they’ve received the communication. But when the other person is acting as if they don’t even hear you, or even if they hear you, it just passes through because it does not matter, that’s profoundly devastating to an adult and very, very, very devastating to little kids.
So she just stayed there. And he got louder and louder, and increasingly upset. Finally, he was so upset that, if I recall, she walked out of the room, and he followed after her. So that’s an episode. Probably 30 seconds in the life of that child. And yet if it happened once, especially with a stranger in the room with a camera recording it all, you’ve got to figure it was happening a lot in the life of that kid. What’s the impact of that?
The Toddler Who Wanted the Spoon
Another story. This one was while making ginger snap cookies. This is a kid who was just very delightful, sitting in his high chair. Mom is focused. She wanted to make these cookies. She was dutiful and task-oriented, probably a little compulsive in her behavior, but just the kind of person you want to hire for your company. Very dutiful and conscientious. She was going to make these cookies, which they were supposed to make together. The boy is exuberantly waving his arm around with the wooden spoon in it. And she needs the spoon. So she glances in his direction and plucks the spoon from his hand, because she’s now going to stir the bowl of ginger snap batter. And he looks at her for a moment like: Huh? starts pointing at the spoon. He wants the spoon, no big deal.