The Mom I Want to Be

Little ones use a combination of emotion, recall, and learning to understand the world around them.

 

If we stop and think about it, most of us are aware that emotions — pleasant or unpleasant — impact our learning. Developmental psychologist Michael Hoffman researched three different ways that this happens for children:

 

Emotion may cause, change, or interrupt the way a child processes information. Say a dog approaches a toddler. The child’s mood or emotional state before the dog arrives may predispose her to be interested in him, if she’s feeling secure and comfortable, or resistant, if she’s feeling tired or irritable.Emotion may organize mental recall. Pleasure in the dog encounter stimulates the recall of previous pleasurable encounters, which encourages the young explorer to reach out and touch the dog, or talk to it, instead of simply looking on passively.The emotional “charge” we attach to categories, events, and things is the product of how we felt about them in our past experiences with them. We bring that charge to each new experience, which, in turn, may modify the charge further.

 

For the young child, in particular, experiences are more easily understood and filed away if they are connected to the emotions — pleasurable or not — contained in the event. Thunderstorms are terrifying if you are alone, wet, or hungry. Thunderstorms are neat if you are snuggled on your dad’s lap, and he tells you what is happening and how safe you both are, and that the noise, lightning, and water will not “get you.” Either way, boy, will you remember thunderstorms! The same is true for remembering dogs, grandmothers, songs, pictures, books, butterflies and so forth.

 

The little thinker can take that experience, file it, and call it up to work on later. He may construct figures in his sand pile, get water, and pour it over the tableau as he roars his own thunderclap (most observers would wonder what is going on!). He is playing out an experience which he is thinking and feeling through. In this type of play, children practice and refine their inner worlds the way they practice rolling a ball, washing a doll, or pulling on a shirt. It takes time, a pleasant, calm environment, some playthings, and a little time to oneself. Most little ones resent interruptions as they work to sort this stuff out!

 

The more internal images children have at their disposal — of their own making, not from videos or TV — the better they will manage later in life. The way children accumulate those images over time is what makes toddlerhood so interesting. Recent memory research has built upon the pioneering work of Jean Piaget, the famous Swiss psychologist who established the idea that children learn best from comfortable, repeated, and predictable sequences. They feel pleasure at being able to predict and cause the outcomes of their actions.

 

This is why children delight in repetition — why the demand the same story or game or song over and over. However, once they are comfortable and satisfied with a learning experience, something unexpected happens: They start to demand the new or different.