On Observing Infants in Prams and Buggies

                    

Let Your Observations Support  The Theme Of This Blog.

I would like to see readers of this blog observe the behavior of infants in both forward and mother facing prams and buggies and get some sort of measure from such observation as to their relative contentment. This should convince those taking the effort that forward facing strollers or prams indeed are cold comfort to the psyche of those so 'ensconced'.
What age of infant does the substance of this blog relate.  It relates to the infant having eye contact, touch, auditory stimulus and smell at close hand right from birth which means positioning them so these can happen. Increasing strength and physical activity enable the developing infant to move to away from such reassuring stimuli as they chose fit –as their assurance and confidence grows –but these attributes aren’t inherent and need to be nurtured.  

One wonders how much the grip or startle reflex, which are inherent and not nurtured and  which tend to go normally around 2 – 4 months  in humans,  is not just primate survival i.e. actually staying safely with ‘mum’ as we see them cling on,  but a virtual  feed-back mechanism reinforcing in its brain that it is safe or else its time to find someone else to cling onto.  Let interest, curiosity, even boredom  in the infant govern the direction of and be the prime mover for its head turning away from the parent – a choice truly impossible in a forward facing pram or buggy.

Triangular thinking as seen by Greenspan and  Shanker  in ‘The First Idea’ embraces triadic interaction ‘among feeling states’,  wherein a Judgement value is placed on the interaction. They suggest this starts after 2 ½  years.

Something present much earlier,  I think could very reasonably be called ‘triangulation’ is easily discernable very soon after birth and relates to how the infant, when confronted with something unusual or someone new rapidly searches for its mother’s eye for approval from a smile, a word, a reassuring touch signalling this is ok, safe and I’m here to back you up. The infant then completes the triangle happily engaging this ‘other’.

 This can’t happen when it does not face the mother but think about what does happen to its brain frame – scariness, strangeness, maybe even danger and who can I turn to tell? With this happening chronically the infant cannot be at peace with itself and dare I say starts to generate an  ambivalence towards its mother from the start, an ambivalence that persists with annoyance, suspicion and even aggression into young adulthood.