It wasn’t until I finally got my mother-in-law totally out of my life that I learned what retaining control of one’s life could do to better the physical body. She was no longer allowed to even call our house and my husband couldn’t call her from our house! Imagine my courage! (Pre-mobile phones too!).

The catalyst for such a dramatic decision was coming home to hear my sons telling me “Grandma says you’re a bitch”! (They had heard their father say over the phone “Don’t call my wife a bitch”). With her out of my life my bodily system completely changed and went back to normal; suddenly it was doing all the right and predictable things again. My periods went back to being regular! I was, quite frankly, astonished.

My sons hopefully don’t recall but I’m sure I became a better mother to them at that point. They were allowed to visit their grandmother with their dad so they weren’t cut off from her. I even gave up my own Thanksgiving one year to allow them to go to her home with their father.

I’ve now met too many people in life that I later decided (too late?) were very controlling, demanding and manipulating of my time. Being inexperienced with such people none of my usual polite (overly polite?) English manners seemed to keep them at bay. A complete break was needed. In at least three of those instances an argument caused the breakups. The others I just ignored for a while and the relationship fizzled.

So I am obviously severely deficient in many skills! First of all recognizing controlling people and second of all in how to back off from them!

Remember, most of these contacts were in my early days as an immigrant and I was very dependent in those days, firstly on my husband’s family and secondly the people I met. I was desperate for friendship and incredibly lonely. I had two jobs before I had my children and I now realise that due to my husband’s emotional makeup (caused by his family’s control issues?) I wasn’t free to ever accept invitations from anyone in my work place – even my wonderful bosses!

I came from a family that gave us freedom but also expected us to be responsible as their children. We all complied with the unwritten ‘rules’. It was a respectful environment to grow up in.

The control my husband influenced over me was passed down from his mother to him. The only way he had escaped from his parents’ control was by taking to sea on sailing boats and becoming an adventurer, if you will, far removed from his parents’ and society’s expectations. In fact he chose not to remain in contact with his family for at least a year in that period of his life.

However, the ‘control’ his mother had over him resumed as soon as he came within her circle again – by then we were married. He didn’t know how emotionally damaging she was to her children’s psyche and thus to her grandchildren’s lives. Her four wonderful grandchildren are very fine people, her behaviour caused her to miss out on their very affectionate natures and seeing them grow up.

As the years have gone by I’ve become more observant of everyone I’ve met. Anyone who has read the books by Alice Miller, which I recommend to anyone who is trying to improve the quality of their lives and lifestyle, will know that we are the only ones who can make a change.

Like anyone, I fall back into certain habits, but I’ve really strived to know instantly if a person is going to damage my psyche. Those of us who are too close to the individuals who cause us damage, too controlled by them – often even after they’ve died! – are in a challenging place in our lives. The ‘controllers’ can be parents, spouses, siblings (who carry the same damaging reactions), colleagues (as I’ve more recently realised) or even ‘friends’.

The first sign that you are facing a controlling personality is often negativity. A general negativity towards one’s life, one’s spouse and children and other family members; sometimes the negativity is aimed at political or corporate entities - they are all signs. Contolling people usually hone in on the weakest pawns in their lives, manipulate them in a powerful way and they in turn start manipulating everyone else in their circle on behalf of ‘the controlling one’.

It can be repeated generation to generation unless children step away from such power. Stepping away from family circles for one’s own health is virtually impossible to do. Sometimes moving miles away, by accident or by design, can help.

I moved miles away from my family by accident. I never dreamed it would last 39 years and it’s not an idea I would promote for a close knit family. But then again I was purposefully able to step away from someone who lived only 10 miles away, for my own health.

The extent to which being under the power, demands and control of such a person can be deleterious to our health may not have yet been studied.

My suspicion is that many cases of cancer could be linked to having such a controlling person in one’s life. I also think that it’s the background to many current developmental delays, including autism. I know of a family where two out of three children had more than one bout with cancer. Their father was extremely controlling of every family member’s actions and opinions. Even his recent death was dramatic (staged?) and at a traditional time of year for family gatherings. How can they forget (escape?) him now?

Ask yourself how truly happy and warm families in such circumstances are – if you think about it you will instinctively know that you don’t feel very happy, warm or totally trusting around them – it will surprise you! You are frequently trying to convince yourself that ‘these people’ are really good!

We can make our own decisions when it comes to our health and the health of our own families.

The patterns I have experienced and personally seen in other families are passed down generation to generation. To see two or three generations damaged, either physically or emotionally, or both, is dramatic to observe. To experience it personally and then recognise it clearly is truly an eye opening experience - talk about ‘research’!

Controlling grandparents beget controlling parents (some with social deficits) beget developmental delays (definitely emotional deficits) in the youngest members of the family.

Let’s break the spell of control for control’s sake.

Those in control need to take a look inwards (or be alienated if they cannot be forced to be introspective for the sake of their families) and take some responsibility for the debilitating ailments their spouses, children and grandchildren are now experiencing.

If you think that a perennially passive parent also equals a calm parent, you are sadly mistaken. Many passive parents engineer themselves to be that way, often and most particularly if they are teachers or critical care nurses or in similar occupations, in order to stay in charge and appear ‘calm’ while they are in their stressful job.

However, if these same people continue their engineered persona when they are home with their children they are depriving them of a real person, a parent who is genuinely calm or who even exhibits the normal range of emotions. Such parents rarely show enthusiasm for their babies and toddlers when picking them up from daycare at the end of the day.

I have been in the company of many career people, often women since they are still the primary caregivers when at home with their children, and on only one occasion have I known a mother who, upon returning home from work, became what I call ‘a true mother’ to her children; she was a calm and responsible mother. Yet even her children exhibited characteristics which indicated to me a poor level of childcare whilst the parents were working - flat head syndrome in one and gray pallor in the other.

The children of most of those artificially calm parents frequently show signs of behaviour problems from a very early age (under 3 years) and some I know ended up being diagnosed on the autism spectrum.

I’d like more parents to step up to the plate and show a range of genuine emotions, including being calm, so that their babies and young children have someone to learn from.

A mother’s education has no bearing on her ability to mother. A good instinct for her baby’s and young child’s needs will go such a long way in ensuring positive and neurotypical development in all domains: physical, emotional and linguistic (by ‘linguistic’ I mean all forms of communication in the first three years).

We have to know our babies well and want to get to know them in order to be ‘a good enough mother’. Challenges abound for the working mother who leaves her baby in group care from infancy. Those who understand the two sides of the bargain of parenting have no trouble bringing up their babies and really work hard to develop their mothering and parenting skills and understanding their child.

However, in every instance where a child is ‘awkward’ when in group care there are missing pieces to that mother/baby pairing, mostly stemming from the mother’s poor skill set and poor ability or desire to constantly learn about her baby.

So when I say ‘disorganised’ when referring to a mother I don’t mean she’s untidy in her personal or professional life but I do mean that there are pieces of her baby’s developmental puzzle that she is incapable of observing, learning from and then making the requisite changes to her own contribution.

If you couple that disorganisation with a ‘disorganised’ caregiver for 10 hours a day it is unlikely that the child will be emotionally balanced, feel secure and have the language skills and cooperative behaviours I expect at 18 months, when in group care they usually make the transition to a toddler classroom.

An intelligent child that hasn’t been overpowered by his parents or caregiver can become extremely mentally well balanced and communicative, and can even come out of a disorganised state when he starts to recognise that although his mother is disorganised an adult in his group care room is worth connecting with in a positive way.

Of course the best developmental results come about if the caregiver is RIE trained (practicing the Magda Gerber/Emmi Pikler philosophy) and the mother is ‘organised’. Those toddlers are a delight to watch; they are happy, greet you with a smile, saying your name and are very ready to listen to a story. “Read! Read!” they scream with excitement – it’s a wonderful sight to behold!

RIE training is always the best route. However, it is perfectly possible for young and otherwise inexperienced yet very caring young women to read Magda’s books, discuss her philosophy with me and quite quickly absorb most of the skills needed to care for babies. What a difference they make in the group care classroom!

One young assistant wondered if the little ones would remember her after she left. I told her they might not remember her specifically as the years went by but they would always remember how kindly she treated them. I was a recent witness to her return as a visitor. One of ‘her’ babies, now in the toddler class, came into the infant room looked at her slightly puzzled but not scared. She said nothing but “Hi, Peter” with a lovely smile. He then remembered the voice and the face! And walked over to her and calmly backed into her welcoming lap.

It is hard to explain how important such connections are in a baby’s early years. If they haven’t had this special connection with their mother and haven’t had it with their caregiver they are in dire straits, but in Peter’s case his mother was always very ‘organised’. She seriously accepted her role as Peter’s mother, never rushed to him at pickup saying (demanding?) “Where’s my smile?” or “Where’s my kiss?” or “Where’s my hug?” (the usual litany of requests from a ‘disorganised’ mother. Some even say to their baby on arrival: “You hurt me when you don’t give me a kiss”! How insensitive and disrespectful is it to say that to a 16 month old?).

‘Organised’ babies, toddlers and 3’s quite comfortably lean on a loving and warm (RIE?) caregiver. Other, less caring and less intuitive, staff members feel they have to tell me that “Tom is leaning on your back” while I’m feeding another baby.

What the staff member doesn’t know (because she’s ‘disorganised’!) is that Tom and I have a perfect understanding – he knows that I know he’s there. He doesn’t need anything more from me except to be a prop to aid his new-found ability to stand and take a few steps. If he needed me he would be much more assertive and make more noise – I would be forced to respond to him!

To answer your question: Tom’s mother is ‘organised’!

I repeat: “Disorganised mummy = disorganised baby”

By way of explanation ‘receptive language’ is what we label an infant’s response to the words we say to him. When a 3 month-old infant grins and gurgles at us he is usually responding to our own facial expressions, language and burblings – he is already ‘receiving’ the language we are offering him.

As he approaches the one-year mark (with the most advanced babies it will be around 8 or 9 months) and he is crawling about, he might hold up an object as if to show it to us. If we say “Oh, Sam, you found the elephant, can you show it to me?” (we might even be sitting a little way away from Sam and holding our hand out, palm up of course)…and then Sam crawls over and gives us the elephant – our whole ‘conversation’ was based on the child’s receptive language. This is how we begin to know just how much language and labeling your child, any child, has already received and is capable of ‘receiving’.

Similarly if a 15 month-old knows a regularly sung nursery rhyme like ‘Row, row, row your boat” and we ask if they want to sing ‘row, row’ and they respond ‘r’ we should be sufficiently familiar with their growing communication abilities and behaviour to know that the two of us are in agreement and we should then go on to start singing the song and doing the motions that go with it. We communicated, the child communicated and we reached a mutual agreement “time to sing”!

It does require that we as a parent or carer enjoy the initial simple repetition involved with regularly caring for infants. This repetition of language, and actions that are related, is one of the building blocks to speech - we should be scaffolding those experiences and language use every single day. If we aren’t happy with what might be deemed ‘menial’ repetition then I suggest we either shouldn’t be working in early childhood care or not have children!

Personally I love the daily accomplishments of the little ones I’ve cared for – every day there’s a new word from the most verbal (the ones with the best receptive language). All these accomplishments come because of – trust.

The others, according to my standards, seem to be ‘lagging behind’. Then I suspect that no one at home has been working on the child’s receptive language and probably no one at daycare either. Those babies do not trust their parents or their carers. Such parents are often more concerned about the materials or outdoor activities their child is exposed to, not understanding that receptive language and trust are two of the most critical foundations in the first 2 years – without it children are behavioural challenges to all but the very best caregivers!

Trust is so critical to early childhood that the lack of it is easy to identify in children who have no semblance of it in their daycare or home lives. Their behavioral instability is manifest every single day! With 13-month-old infants it’s usually screaming ‘for no apparent reason’. With those who are 2 and older it’s behavioural patterns that frustrate even the most experienced caregivers and teachers.

Without trust between parent and any of their child’s (often) multiple caregivers or from caregiver to caregiver, a young child doesn’t have trust in his world. Those without trust are usually quite removed from the adults around them. Such children aren’t totally free to participate in what’s going on in their day room. The adult caregivers, not knowing that they need to build trust or not even knowing how to build trust, simply go about their daily ‘work’ (for many it is simply ‘a job’) doing just the practical tasks for each infant and child.

But children are little humans and we, albeit poorly paid caregivers of the very young, must do all in our power to help them grow to be the best they can be in every way. We must supply an environment of trust in which they can build their physical and language skills to ready them to move up to their next age group. This is particularly true of centres where children do not remain with a primary caregiver for their first 3 years.

Which brings me to the final essential component in infant and toddler care…continuity of quality care. A virtually impossible thing to provide in the daycare setting - even in the best facilities staff move on.

I’m not sure how to ensure continuity of quality care in a centre situation – most parents are so unaware of how important it is and certainly in my experience, some centre owners have no clue as to its importance let alone how to provide it.

Quite probably it all comes down to pounds and pence or dollars and cents – but running a daycare is truly a HUGE responsibility. It isn’t enough to give parents the sales pitch, to sell them on what your facility can (or might) provide, what matters is the standard of care your staff reaches.

Not knowing whether or not you have quality staff nor understanding that continuity of quality care is essential to neurotypical development in young children are two of the biggest missing pieces in administration of early childhood care.

Such irresponsible administrators actually end up breaking everyone’s trust, the children and their families and the staff!

Who can’t love ‘Ducky’, the nickname for the medical examiner Dr. Mallard, played by David McCallum, also known to some of us as Illya Kuryakin, the Russian secret agent in the series The Man From U.N.C.L.E.?

Abbs, Gibbs’ affectionate nickname for the quirkily dressed forensic scientist who works diligently in her lab, Tony (the good looking one) and Ziva (the clear thinking ex-Israeli operative) spar with each other, and let’s not forget Tim, the youngest of the team and resident computer geek.

Leroy Jethro Gibbs is their esteemed leader, played by Mark Harmon. Gibbs loves his NCIS team. His life has had so many emotional ups and downs it seems ‘the team’ and building the next lovely wooden boat in his basement, are all he has in life. (Would you believe in tonight’s episode, just to prove me wrong, he’s building a chair?)

Since it’s a Tuesday I’ll give you a few examples of Gibbs’ Rules.

In no particular order, other than they have resonated with me in the last two weeks:

Rule #11 - When the job is done, walk away

Rule #39 - There is no such thing as coincidence

Rule #1 - Always work as a team

Rule #8 - Never take anything for granted

Thanks to Gibbs and the team!

Last summer my brother and I were trying to choose suitable music for my mother’s funeral. We listened to some of her favourites on CD and clutched each other as we cried together. It was a very therapeutic experience for us both as we looked out onto her garden from her living room. However we deemed at least one tune too emotional for her funeral service, for us really.

In the end we chose the music from our teenage years when we gathered with our parents and other families to enjoy both The Beatles’ and Glenn Miller’s music. The Beatles, music from our own era yet our parents loved it, and Glenn Miller’s music from their own wartime experiences, music we had come to love too. My father and mother loved to dance together and it seemed fitting to remember those happy occasions at Mum’s funeral service. We chose ‘Here Comes The Sun’ by The Beatles to open the service and ‘In The Mood’ by Glenn Miller to cheerfully close it, both seemed appropriate – perhaps only to us who knew her well?

When my husband was in hospital in 1999 and in an induced coma I spent the 10-minute drive to the hospital each morning listening to Keepsake, a Gold Medal barbershop quartet from the early 90’s. One song in particular, ‘How Deep Is The Ocean’, always brought tears to my eyes. That was probably the only time I cried each day; barbershop harmony served a very therapeutic purpose.

When our sons compiled their list of songs for their first barbershop CD, recorded the following year, I asked them to record that song for me – they did.

We now listen to their mellifluous barbershop harmony both live, on CD and on youtube, as often as we can. Coupled with the videos of their barbershop youth chorus, we have plenty of real music to enjoy. I’ve even played one of my sons’ barbershop harmony songs to a 15-month old little girl – she got it – you can’t imagine how calm she was!

The other aspect of therapeutic music is that when you know those singing and you understand their passion for the music they perform, your musical and therapeutic experience is only enhanced.

Much as we all love a wide variety of music, for us what the voice, or multiple voices, produce in beautiful four-part harmony, is like nothing else. Instruments often override a beautiful voice.

Yet I do think four-part harmony is much like listening to an orchestra – each instrument adds its own facet to the whole.

Then again I also believe in singing with even larger groups – where it doesn’t matter which voice part you sing! That suits me quite well. I’d do quite well singing with a flash mob, just not doing the dance routines! The actual experience is singing beside so many people, as our oldest son did in Edinburgh this year. He joined with some 80,000 others in that Scottish city singing Olde Lang Syne just after ringing in 2012 – quite the once in a lifetime musical experience for him I’m sure.

Or as I did a year ago singing along, with my then 91 year old mother, to those well known Rogers and Hammerstein tunes from their famous musicals of the 50’s and 60’s. We had a very happy evening together; she, even with Alzheimers, remembered the words and melodies (!) and I am left with very fond memories.

Music needs to be in our lives therapeutically. It isn’t therapeutic if it is ‘prescribed’ by anyone else and doesn’t fit our own personal idea of making us feel wonderfully happy or even making us cry.

I believe that those without beloved music in their lives are truly bereft of the full range of emotional being.

I make something I love every day but in my case my work intersects education and healthcare at its very root: I am nurturing babies and young children.

They are the biggest contribution any of us can make to society. Babies and young children are our future. If we do not nurture babies from day one they will consign us to nursing homes filled with dubious staff members just as many (most?) parents all too often consign their babies into the care of centres (which may call themselves schools, even Montessori schools) with the high possibility of likewise dubious staff members.

Those who attend Brooklyn Beta are arguably the brightest and the best at what they do. Where then does it leave their babies and young children? Is it really good enough to consign them to those who are possibly at the bottom of the brain rung?

I can freely say this because I have worked in a child care centre-come-school for four years after many years of successfully caring for and educating young children (and my own) exactly the way I wanted. My methods have healed emotionally delayed children and aided those with Down’s Syndrome to be the best they can be, and I’ve sent several neurotypical children (what used to be called ‘normal’ but now sadly no longer ‘the norm’!), including my own two sons, out into the world to make it a better place.

After much debate in my own brain and within my family I have determined that in our facility we have a destructive 29 year-old Infant Lead teacher who has never had a child of her own.

How can I combat this person and her, now obvious, ‘personality disorder’ that has already severely delayed the emotional and physical development of five baby boys during my tenure, all with their parents’ unwitting consent?

We are all stymied by the support given this person by our inexperienced 30-something school owner (albeit with her own two children, questionably somewhat delayed).

You might well ask why I haven’t moved on. That would require a long, very drawn out answer - I suggest you read some of my earlier blogs and you may discern why I find myself in this predicament.

My goal now is not to allow anyone to ‘break’ the majority of the babies currently in our care. ‘Fortunately’ for the majority of babies in our care our Infant Lead teacher always chooses one baby each year that she makes her priority. But that also means that every year one baby is deprived of optimal development at the same time creating tremendous staff stress because the other five infants are in the care of just one other staff member!

The other Infant staff members (not just me) are well educated, substantial and diligently serve to compensate with the extremely high standard of care we prefer and advocated by RIE/Magda Gerber (rarely seen in most daycare facilities).

Yet those five remaining babies simply make ‘satisfactory’ progress not the ‘excellent’ progress that I expect and too often demand! Their progress would be so much better if we had a genuine and highly competent 2:6 ratio. With a 1:5 ratio there are some challenges as everyone caring for babies knows - what mother with quintuplets can manage by herself?

I would love it if I didn’t see a blog about a geek’s 4 month-old baby in which the infant’s four favourite films are posted (three are cartoons)! That baby could already be on the downhill run, developmentally speaking, as I have seen many times before.

As the brightest and most intelligent of your generation it behoves Brooklyn Beta participants to create the most well balanced offspring you can. Your child will always be different - look at his parents! But let him be different from the mainstream, let him make a difference in this world.

Don’t be afraid to stand out from the pack in the real world. Your child could make a remarkable difference, if only you give him the foundation he really needs.

Videos, DVD’s, educational TV, ipads, iphones (sadly, all the accoutrements of your daily work!) are not what he wants from you. He needs you to be truly available as a human person. You need to be able to fill him up each day in such a way that he’s self sufficient, cooperative, emotionally balanced, physically strong, HIGHLY VERBAL AND COMMUNICATIVE and well nourished, before you even entertain putting him in the care of others.

He needs to be able to tell you that he’s not happy with what our family called ‘red flag people’ - those they instinctively knew weren’t safe, reliable or trustworthy enough to be around.

I know you are the generation that went to pre-school and daycare and feel “I did OK” but the fact is that you could have become so much better than ‘OK’ had you been at home with your mother (even Donald Winnicott’s ‘ordinary good enough mother’) in those early years to help you truly develop the essential basic skills you needed for true life long learning to occur.

Now to making something I love.

I prepared our oldest son for school at five-plus little knowing that the very informal preparation we were modestly doing in a loving household was way beyond that being done by other parents who had already consigned their child to full time daycare at age 2. Our son had nearly four more years to grow and mature at home - only for us to discover that he was overly ready for learning and the school couldn’t offer anything for him: “We aren’t obliged to offer anything more” said his principal. The good news is that he wasn’t a behavioural problem or an emotional basket case but that first year at school did ‘break’ him from one wonderful habit - inventive story telling.

The alternative? Extreme. Home education. I made something I love - oh boy did I! Then I did it again with our next son!

Now there are at least two unique, contributing adults out in your world and in mine - they work hard, they play hard and they care about their family and making the world a better place.

What more could you want out of ‘a career’?

‘Make something you love’ and start with your babies and young children!

Part of the reason that music isn’t always in my world, much as I have CD’s that I absolutely love, is firstly that my own CD player (I have yet to move to having my music on my phone or owning my own ipod!) isn’t in an accessible place to be permanently plugged in, secondly I am rarely at home by myself, but perhaps more to the point our main home CD player setup has always been too complicated for me to operate!

However, music is vital in my world of working with babies and toddlers. I regularly try to sing to one, or several, knowing each of them well enough to understand their favourite tunes. Sometimes it just involves singing a fun song or even a made up one that’s personal to the child, sometimes it’s singing along to a favourite nursery rhyme in a book. (I always tend to ‘read’ the book afterwards so that we can diversify the experience and label more of the characters in the book - adding broader vocabulary, vocal expression and actions too).

It is disheartening most days to work with one colleague who really doesn’t love music, especially music which works well with children – even pleasing classical music!

I perform music therapy experiments in our classroom almost every day. Asking myself if I have a special song which will captivate at least one child. I am grateful to one family whose little girl loved ‘Baby Beluga’ - when we finally got the book in our classroom I started singing the song as best I could - apparently I was close enough because she always sat and listened! It even became a tool, a reward, to persuade her to cooperate, and she did.

I offered one of our 15 month olds the chance to listen to my sons singing barbershop harmony - it was a quiet day, otherwise I wouldn’t have taken out my phone and pulled up youtube! However, this experiment has been remarkable because of its effect on that child and that I’ve been able to repeat the same piece of music once a day for several days and get the identical response from her: she peacefully lays against me slightly swaying, occasionally burbling along and asking me to name the four singers (which I’ve done each time we listen and watch). She now calls them ‘boys’ because I ask her if she wants to ‘hear the pretty music with the boys singing’.

Conversely, one other more agitated, dysregulated and emotionally unstable 18 month old simply said “No, No” when I played it. Barbershop harmony didn’t calm him. For him I tried a little comedy song that I sang from my childhood, and my children’s, called ‘The Bee Song’. I really just sang the refrain for him, but he loved it, it made him feel happy and he smiled and laughed a lot! I repeated that experiment for several days until he transferred to his crying state in our Toddler classroom. No one knows the song there and sad to relate I’m not sure it would fit in their ‘programme’ either, however he does seem happier than he’s been in more than 18 months!

It is even sadder to relate that no other teacher seems capable of using ‘my’ type of music therapy with our babies.

In my experience my ‘music therapy’ renders these babies calm and happy - what more could we want of music?

Contrast that with the recorded music used in our Primary classroom wherein the words and the voices are garbled (as in so many ‘made for children’ CD’s), even though the sentiments of issues like ‘recognising strangers’ are most valuable. The response last week of the oldest child (almost 5) was quite telling, to me at least: “Why do we have to listen to this every day?”

I feel that such a song would be better taught by the teacher’s voice alone in her very clear diction. The effect of learning by rote from a CD was brought to my attention after the school holiday party when that oldest (and probably brightest child) in the Primary classroom lead the group loudly singing for me ‘Rudolf the Red Nosed Reindeer’, ending with ‘…he’ll go down in my…ste…ry’ NOT ‘hist…o…ry’!

We need to be close to and facing our babies and young children as we teach them language through speech or singing - otherwise they simply learn the garbled version from CD’s, DVD’s and TV, and, as I discovered several years ago, language learned that way is extremely hard to correct!

Let’s all expand our musical repertoire and share those riches to create a more amenable learning environment every day.

I don’t know how many of you have watched cartoons with the sound turned off? When you finally do you will instantly recognise that you can’t understand a word that’s being said. You can’t lip read a cartoon. We adults need animated human faces to interpret what’s being said - which is also why phone texts are so often misinterpreted, they lack the emotional intent of face to face conversations.

Lip reading requires the speaker to be genuinely animated and expressive in their conversation - what’s called ‘prosody’: how we put the emotional foundation, meaning and interpretations into our conversations. That’s why I always talk clearly to babies and from about age 9 months, sometimes younger, I read to babies using plenty of sounds and changes in my voice tone - such sounds (made using…the lips!) force the child to look at your whole face and hopefully grasp meaning from your language and total expression. When I read or sing to babies - they get it! It’s a fun way to learn.

I recently reflected on several families (close to 10 or more now!) I personally know where at least one child struggled with their early use of language. In many of those cases the predominant babysitter of choice at home was……cartoons! Help!

Many of those children as babies were also not held when drinking a bottle once they could hold it themselves, or did not have a cozy nursing relationship (by observation I noted that the mother and child connection wasn’t present at what should be this most tender of times). Consequently those babies missed out in so many ways on connecting with their mother’s, then their carer’s, face, reducing even the possibility of lip reading let alone good eye contact.

The other week by chance I read in an online newsletter new parents had proudly published about their 4 month old that they included ‘her four favourite movies’ - three are cartoons! The parents do comment that they try to limit her viewing, but…she’s only 4 months old! I was aghast and this new research from FAU goes towards proving my theories.

We really need plenty of genuinely animated human contact from birth to become genuinely animated human beings.

Perhaps that’s how we’ll subvert the autism epidemic. Join me!

I now understand the benefits of moving far away (4000 miles) from my family and my quite traditional English upbringing. It has given me a chance to find out who I really am and what makes me tick; not without many trials and tribulations of being very foreign living for 39 years in America!

So how do we learn the range of emotions to become a wholesome human being? What separates a person with a full range of emotions at their disposal from those who show little or none, or even go to emotional extremes, like those with autism or other related developmental delays, or even individuals whose emotions are crippled by their childhood or early adult experiences?

I have decided recently to revert to my blink impression of adults I meet. I was very outspoken before I was 5 years old but of course growing up in England what I now call my ‘clarity of thought and observation’ was promptly squashed! Deemed impolite. Those thoughts are still mostly underground sixty years later, which is probably why this blog is my most useful personal tool – whether or not I have many followers!

Such memories have come to the fore with correspondence in the early part of this year from a fellow student from my primary (elementary) school era who also turned up many photos of us together from that time. He is the only person to ever confirm that one particular teacher ‘disproportionately picked on me’ in the year I was about 12 years old (we had both transferred to another school at 11, typical for an English education). I remember well being profoundly uncomfortable around that teacher but had no recourse through family or school.

Such treatment apparently had a profound effect on my fellow student, especially the fact that he could do nothing about it – he even named one of his daughters after me! All these years and I never knew how big his heart was! But it’s wonderful, life-affirming news to receive.

Which gets me to how we treat tiny babies and young children. I have a question in my mind about people who are very ‘gushy’ with babies and yet have no apparent warmth towards their colleagues. The same individuals can be angry, mean and absolutely horrible to 2 year-olds whose behaviour they can’t control! I should note that the two people I’m thinking of have absolutely no child raising experience, teaching experience, in fact no skills at all with young children!

So where do our emotions ‘go’? How is it that we have no range of emotions as adults and then we observe the next generation having the same lack?

It all stems from our childhood. As a first time mother I was initially very much the same rigid unemotional mother that my mother seemed to be. I thought that was how one behaved, it never occurred to me until more recent years that my mother had had certain tragic experiences in her early 20’s during WWII that profoundly affected and stunted many of her emotions when she had me 5 years or so later.

I’ve come to know life can be otherwise. It doesn’t mean that our children aren’t loved but I don’t think our oldest son was initially shown how beloved he was in a cheerful and passionate enough way, with enough emotion. I hope he disagrees!

Adults missing that feeling of being truly beloved (not simply “I love my baby, I miss him so much”) from infancy usually show it each day. The façade of caring that those adults present to their children is usually well ‘over the top’, is unstable (by which I mean it’s not consistent) and can turn to the reverse emotion at any moment and that turn cannot be predicted by those around them! How do you think a baby feels when he is treated or cared for in such an unpredictable way day after day?

He ends up feeling very confused about his world. Even otherwise happy children become moody and emotional by age 3 when there is sudden emotional turmoil in their family life – like sitting in the middle of an unexpected, acrimonious divorce (what young child can anticipate all that his parents’ divorce entails?).

I am starting to think that seizures in young children are another consequence of an emotionally confused childhood.

A lack of a range of appropriate emotions seems a prevalent ‘disease’ in the under 3’s. Shouldn’t they seem happy most of the time? Shouldn’t they simply cry when life isn’t going well or they really hurt themselves and then be easily soothed by a loving carer or parent?

It doesn’t seem to happen. In my experience most 3’s and under are angry – some one year-old babies wail or scream to get what they want, some are virtually struck dumb, and what seem to be a very rare few, at under a year of age, have a range of emotions and are thus easier to read, teach and assist – for me at least.

Anger prevails in the 3’s and 4’s mostly due to spending vast amounts of time watching DVD’s (frequently depicting some sort of violence!) of movies, cartoons, etc. instead of interacting with their parents, family and friends, teachers and playing outside. They aren’t making human and natural connections in their daily lives.

All this doesn’t bode well for future generations.

I now understand my own lack of emotions plus emotions sometimes being out of control when bringing up my oldest son for his first three years – he reflects the same complex mixture of emotions thirty years later. When his brother was born I feel I was more human and confident in myself and he reflects that greater balance of emotions. Both are thankfully extremely kind people so I don’t think I got too much wrong!

My late father, the third child and only surviving son of then older parents, was beloved by his family growing up, highly respected by all those he met in his working life, and is greatly missed by us all for his emotional stability. He was always available to listen and help us. He seemed to be well balanced for most of his life and had only seriously lost his temper on a very few occasions and for very good reasons, well before my brother and I were born. He wasn’t an angry or unpredictable man.

There is a time and place for warmth, happiness and humour – just about the only emotions a baby needs to see.

Gradually we adults can incorporate a serious face towards the end of the first year of life. But the balance for discipline needs to be so full of genuine kindness and love that it alone is the only tool needed to steer young children in the next 4 years – and then the foundation is in place for a solid future of cooperative behaviour and learning well.

Passive, baby-pleasing parenting, coupled with frequent anger towards one’s child, spouse, work, family etc. doesn’t make for an emotionally stable child, ready to learn.

We parents and caregivers are so responsible for how a child learns from their earliest days – understanding ourselves and our emotions well allows us to teach at the highest level from day one.