Lessons from Neurotypical Early Development

Parallel Assessment, Parallel Development

Post #2 in category. We recommend reading posts in numerical order.

Neurotypical infants are born with drives and foundational tools for survival and development. Hardwired predispositions and rudimentary mechanisms for basic sensory and perceptual processes, for basic motivations and feeling states, early foundations for learning about their world, for predicting what will happen next, for anticipating the consequences of their actions, for learning to decode the intentions and actions of others. For learning what will be the next thing to do, and for learning how to do it.

Early infant predispositions and behaviors are primarily biological, mechanical, involuntary and unconscious.

As their eye and hand coordination improves, the infant increasingly reaches for nearby objects. As the infant sees, moves, explores, tests and tests again to find out what happens, they gradually discover the consequences of their actions. They learn that a given movement produces a predictable result. As they investigate and learn about their world, they are building competencies.

An infant who repeatedly reaches but misses, tries but fails, will experience frustration, disappointment and even distress. If failures keep accumulating, their interest fades, and the child eventually gives up. Repeated failures generalize. Infants and young children whose needs, interests and efforts are continually unsuccessful may develop a passivity, an avoidance of novelty or complexity, a learned helplessness, and become isolated. The child learns that their intentions and efforts do not change outcomes.

Nature Needs Nurture

Because automatic trial-and-error learning is not effective for every child, the skilled mediator teaches the child how to become a more successful learner and experimenter. A nurturing adult who is a skillful mediator offers just enough encouragement and support to inspire the child’s curiosity and to help improve the child’s attempts and increase their successes.

Infants and young children with diminished skills and weakened interest learn through enjoyable, shared mediated activities to be curious, more self-motivated and actively engaged. As mediators engage with the child, they help bring the child’s own actions, conceptions, and feelings into the child’s conscious awareness so that more successful thinking, feelings, and actions can come under the child’s own control. Bringing their thinking and feeling into their awareness increases the child’s mental organization, their need to know, their choice-making and their intentional and purposeful actions. 

Cognition, feelings and social support help integrate the child’s experiences, preparing those experiences to become more successful, more personal, meaningful and practical. And this integration of skills and understanding triggers their imagination, motivation and agency.

The young infant’s bodily sensations and movements start out as global and undifferentiated. Even pain is not well localized at first. Their early perceptual, cognitive and affective responses to experience are largely global and undifferentiated. The relevant elements of their experience have to be organized before they become understandable, and before the child can engage in complex and abstract learning.

Cognition, Feelings, Intersubjectivity and Learning

Increasingly effective cognitive structures help direct and support their perceptions, feelings and actions. The child stores and represents their experiences as memories and feeling states. Information is stored in connected groups: things that are similar or are different, that happen within the same context, at the same time or place, or that generate similar feeling states. Persons, objects, events, feelings and ideas that are related to one another become connected in the mind. Associated sensations, emotive feelings and consequences are remembered as unified wholes when something similar, or something associated, happens again, or comes to mind.

Children learn by connecting information and experiences, by integrating aspects of each developmental domain with all other related developmental domains. Information collected and organized in the mind makes new experiences more coherent, more understandable, more useful. The remembered and organized information and feelings are used to reconstruct new memories, new thoughts, new feelings and new intentional behavior.

Infants gradually discover and organize procedures and rules about the physical world, about their thoughts and actions, and about social relationships. Intersubjectivity emerges when cognitive, emotional, and social states are freely shared between a child and an empathic, attuned adult during interpersonal interactions. Intersubjectivity for infants and young children underpins human connection and communication, which eventually leads to higher learning and progress.

Curiosity, stimulus-seeking, intrinsic motivation, intention, initiative and actions are blocked by confusion, by repeated failure and by criticism. Children need empathy, encouragement and understanding for their learning and development to advance.

The child’s emotional need for safety, security and trust has to be met before genuine communication and interpersonal learning can take place. These processes do not advance in isolated and independent domains, one domain at a time. During every learning and problem-solving experience, a child’s sensorimotor, perceptual, emotional, motivational, reasoning, communication, and evaluation of success are all linked together.

The child learns to make correct and relevant associations, recognize similarities and create categories, and connect related memories and concepts. They learn to consider, “Is this like the last time, or different, and in which ways?”

As their experiences accumulate and comparisons are made, understanding becomes more complex, more abstract, more generalizable beyond the immediate and concrete. Their predictions and problem-solving become more effective and efficient. Interpersonal relationships deepen. Emotional regulation stabilizes. Their reasoning and interpersonal connection advance together.

The child learns to organize the world according to what changes and what stays the same, to what belongs together and what does not, and in what order. They are better at determining what is relevant and necessary and what is not. With dedicated nurture and mediation, the young child learns to make better predictions and is freer to make better choices. The child and the adult mediator extend their range together.

Nested Systems

There is a multidimensional interrelatedness between developmental domains. Progress and development are intricately linked, continually changing and expanding processes.

Cognitive, Motor and Social Development

The child’s cognitive and motor development are linked with the child’s social development. An infant smiles when he sees other persons. Their smile is a motor movement, a social behavior, and an expression of their positive emotion. Nature and nurture, sensory perception, cognitive judgment, and interpersonal interactions work together.

Seven-month-old infants have stranger anxiety. This social and emotional fear reaction relies on their ability to discriminate between familiar and unfamiliar persons. Around 12 months, the child’s increasing locomotion offers many more opportunities for new interests, more exploration, new understandings, for increasing social contact and prospects for communication.

Combining curiosity and motivation with increased movement and mobility provides more opportunities for learning experiences and problem-solving. With increasing movement, exploration and opportunities, their attention, memory, planning and coordination improve. Improved communication, increasing self-confidence, more flexibility of thought and imagination combine to promote development across all interrelated developmental domains.

Growth within and between integrated developmental domains increases the child’s curiosity, motivation and ability to learn.

And with increasing abilities and competencies comes better judgment, ever more opportunities, more choices, more spontaneous activity and participation. As the child’s skills, understanding and curiosity increase, the child takes more initiative and strives for more exploration and self-reliance.

As the child experiences greater achievement and success, they feel freer to try different activities, are better able to accept change, to see other people’s perspectives, to empathize with other people’s feelings and needs, and are more willing to take on personal responsibilities. They want to pull their own weight, to contribute, to give back.

As the child becomes more successful, more participatory and helpful, they receive more social approval and feel more valued and appreciated. They are forming a more trusting, more optimistic and positive identity, a deeper, more authentic sense of belonging, of purpose, of self.

Flexibility

Flexibility is a key aspect of each developmental domain. A child’s growing skills and understandings in a domain are far more important and useful if their skills and understandings can be adapted and used in new and different contexts.

To become genuinely functional, a child needs to learn to make changes as contexts change, as relationships, goals and meanings change. The child needs to learn to be more willing to revise an idea, a feeling, a pattern, a rule that was learned in the past, that has become familiar, easy, comfortable and nearly automatic.

But flexibility and openness for change can be difficult for children whose experiences have been isolating, confusing, frustrating or frightening. Why risk changing your mind, your strategy, your assumptions, your feelings, your habits, your behaviors when life is so unpredictable, difficult or punishing?

The child will try a different approach, a new route, a new and more difficult idea or process when they feel safe enough to change, to try something new or difficult. A child will only risk being wrong, risk trying a new approach that might not work, when they are in a safe, supportive, non-judgmental interpersonal relationship. When adult nurturers and mediators help the child establish feelings of trust, security, and mutual respect, playful interest, communication, and sharing first, the child’s confidence, motivation, flexibility, and success will follow.

The Adult Mediator also Grows

Nobody is automatically an accomplished mediator of a young child, let alone a child whose development does not proceed in the ordinary way, on an ordinary schedule. Trust-building is not learned from a book. It is learned slowly during your genuine and extended relationship with a growing child. If the adult mediator is open and pays careful attention, the child will teach their mediator how to communicate and to mediate with them.

Development does not happen in one direction. As the adult learns to better understand and to communicate with a child, the child learns how to connect and how to learn. As the child’s feelings, thinking, and actions progress, as the child’s own capacity to learn and to change strengthens, there are reciprocal changes in the adult. As the adult becomes a better teacher, the child becomes a better learner. As the child becomes a better learner, the adult becomes a better teacher. This is how two people come to respect each other and help each other so that each can eventually learn to change themselves.

Parallel Assessment and GPS

Parallel Assessment can be thought of as a Global Positioning System (GPS). Parallel Assessment helps determine where we both want to go, the child and their adult mediator. We find out roughly where we are at the start, and where we are along the way. Parallel Assessment presents a range of alternative routes. The map gets revised as we travel, as we experience and learn things along the way. During the journey, Parallel Assessment suggests alternative routes which will improve the journey.

The Parallel Assessment (GPS, GPPSP system) is designed to help devoted adult mediators to set achievable goals, to identify priorities and prerequisites, to form specific strategies for motivation, for activities and experiences for this particular child, and for this particular mediator, at this specific time and place. Parallel Assessment continually evaluates progress for this child and this mediator so that goals, priorities, prerequisites and strategies (GPPSP) can be updated and improved in real time.

The map is individual. Every child arrives with their own rhythms, their own hidden strengths and difficulties. A child may have great difficulties following spoken instructions but may have an uncanny ability to read another person’s qualities and inner nature.

Parallel Assessment does not limit the GPS map to random obstacles and detours along the journey. All relevant aspects involving this child’s developmental domains and this mediator’s connection to the child and their ability to inspire, are continually updated. Parallel assessment is a map, a compass and a connection device that gives parents, caregivers, teachers, therapists and this unique child a shared vocabulary and a shared mindset, so all can progress together.

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