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Newsletter of the Infant Mental Health Promotion Project (IMP)
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Volume 10, Fall 1994 &
Volume 11, Winter 1994-95
THE FIRST SEVEN MONTHS OF LIFE:
Emotional and Psychosocial Development
Peter Sutton, Head, Infant Psychiatry Program, The Hospital for Sick Children
This article is a summary of the first two of four seminars held by IMP in the fall & winter of 1993/94. The remaining
seminars covering the developmental periods from eight months to three years are summarized in the following article.
To understand infant emotional and psychosocial development,
three organizing “axes” are helpful: 1) what the parent brings to
the infant-parent relationship; 2) what the infant brings to the
infant-parent relationship; and 3) the developmental tasks that
need to be achieved in the period under consideration.
Birth to Three Months of Age
The two main developmental tasks of this period are: 1)
homeostasis or the capacity to remain regulated in the face of
stimulation from within (various body sensations, urges,
discomforts) and from without (sights, sounds, touch sensations,
etc.); and 2) the capacity to attend and enjoy. Each of these
tasks is influenced by and dependent on the other. Attention is
facilitated by good regulation and regulation is assisted by the
capacity to attend.
babies in a number of areas: physical (height, weight, body type,
sex, etc.), age and maturity at birth, preconception and perinatal influences. These have significant influences on the
caretaker’s experience of the baby. Some of these individual
differences have been subsumed under the term temperament,
something that is quite difficult to measure and the effect of
which is difficult to determine. Babies do appear to differ along
the lines of activity, sociability, and emotionality, but early infant
characteristics are much more unstable than later characteristics.
It is likely that early stability in the infant-parent relationship is
related more to the stability of parental characteristics than infant
characteristics. Individual differences between infants influence
development by having an effect on caregivers and imposing
limits to the possible range of experience.
Three to Seven Months
These tasks require caregivers to get to know the baby and to
respond sensitively and contingently to the baby’s signals. The
ability to do this depends on both the infant’s competence and
on many factors in the parent. These factors include the meaning
of being a parent to each parent, for example the extent to
which parents may feel they want to repeat their own experience
of being parented or to change it. Other factors are the parental
character (personality) and the unconscious and conscious effects
of their own experience of being parented, or the extent to which
parents came to value relationships as sources of comfort and
pleasure and so view themselves as good sources of comfort and
pleasure for their own infant. As well, the parent’s current
relationships and life circumstances are important. The extent
to which primary caregivers have intimate relationships which
support or undermine their self-esteem and competence will
influence their ability to parent.
The developmental tasks of this period can be summarized as
attachment (falling in love), developing a sense of effectiveness
and interest in the world and a core sense of self. This period is
sometimes characterized as the period of “primary sociability” –
the infant is more interested in social interaction than anything
else. Parents contribute to these developmental tasks by
continuing to respond sensitively and contingently to the infant,
but also by having fallen in love with their baby and wooing the
baby to fall in love with them. This is influenced by the factors
described above: the meaning of being a parent, parental
character (personality), the unconscious and conscious effects of
the parent’s own experience of being parented, the parent’s
understanding of the way in which s/he was influenced by
relationships, the parent’s current relationships and life
circumstances, and the way in which the child’s behaviour acquires
individual meaning for the parent.
The infant is by no means a passive partner and brings a great
deal to the relationship that can help to make it work well, or
make it more difficult. A newborn infant has essential pre-existing
competencies and adaptive capacities including sensory, motor
(self protective and gestural), learning and physiological
characteristics. The baby actively (though, at the beginning, not
consciously or intentionally) shapes events by eliciting responses
in the environment. There are individual differences between
Again, factors in the infant influence the negotiation of this stage
of development including: the degree to which s/he has
successfully achieved the previous developmental tasks;
maturation (gross motor, perceptual, cognitive, etc.); and the
individual differences referred to above which have now already
been built on and changed by emerging differences in the
relationship.
FROM EIGHT TO THIRTY-SIX MONTHS OF LIFE:
Emotional and Psychosocial Development
Peter Sutton, Head, Infant Psychiatry Program, The Hospital for Sick Children
As with the earlier period, it is helpful to understand infant
emotional and psychosocial development using three organizing
“axes”: 1) what the infant brings to the infant-parent relationship;
2) what the parent brings to the infant-parent relationship; and
3) the developmental tasks that need to be achieved in the period
under consideration.
From Seven to Eighteen Months of Age
The developmental tasks of this period are: 1) developing selective
attachments that can be used as a secure base for exploration
and a source of security and comfort when distressed; 2)
developing a sense of psychological separateness that allows
also for the capacity to “be with” others; and 3) developing an
interest in practicing basic skills.
The tasks of this period are dependent on and modified by the
way in which tasks of the previous developmental stages are
achieved. There continue to be differences in the infant that
contribute significantly to the character of the infant-parent
relationship. For example, some children are highly mobile by
the time they are seven or eight months of age, and others a
number of months later. This has a significant impact on the
kind of supervision, help and care an infant requires. The
development of social referencing (the infant looking to the
parent’s face for affective information when she is uncertain
about a situation or stimulus) is driven by the development of
crawling. Once a child crawls, her environment—its dangers and
pleasures—is radically changed. Obviously, sensory and motor
disabilities will have a significant effect on the infant-parent
relationship which is necessarily so physically based. The channels
of communication for attitudes, affects, qualities, and ideas at
this stage of life are much more dependent on the whole body
than later.
The previous phase (two to six months) of wooing the infant to
fall in love with the human world prepares the infant to develop
highly selective attachments to those with whom he is familiar
and who have been effective in relieving distress in the past.
Stranger anxiety (uncertainty, inhibition, or distress when in the
arms of an unfamiliar person) signals the development of these
attachments. Secure attachment requires that the baby’s parents
have been able to respond sensitively, contingently and effectively
to the infant in relieving the infant of distress. There is a strong
correlation between the development of secure attachment in
infancy and the pre-existence of security and autonomy in the
parent. Thus, parents who tend to be dismissive of the importance
of relationships tend to have babies who become insecureavoidant, and parents who are uncomfortably preoccupied and
ambivalent about their major attachment relationships tend to
have babies who become insecure-ambivalent-resistant. This latter
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Volume 11, Winter 1994-95
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group of infants shows distress on separation that is not rapidly
resolved by reunion. These correlations point to the major
influence of the parent’s own personality development on the
infant-parent relationship and so on the socio-emotional
development of the infant.
During this time the infant develops a beginning sense of a major
guiding idea in life: that other people have an experiencing self
just as she does. This is associated with the differentiation of a
psychological sense of separateness, and is indicated by the
development of the infant’s capacity to share attention (as
evidenced for example by her pointing), sharing feelings (for
example looking up at mother with pleasure when she has just
achieved something, and being aware of mother’s pleasure too),
and teasing games.
Once the child is walking, he is firmly established in what Margaret
Mahler called “the Practicing Subphase of SeparationIndividuation” meaning that he appears to be very interested in
practicing certain skills. There is often a rather elated mood at
this time in development, because he appears to feel that life
and the world are just wonderful now he is walking. This period
has been characterized as the time of the “love affair with the
world.” The toddler may be relatively impervious to knocks and
bruises, just picking himself up and going on. (Some parents feel
disturbed by the child becoming more sensitive to bumps and
scratches after this phase is over, feeling that the child is
“regressing,” rather than recognizing that the increased
vulnerability is a developmental progression.)
From Eighteen to Thirty-Six Months of Age
The developmental tasks of this period have to do with 1)
becoming increasingly able to tolerate some frustration as a result
of using the memory of good experiences to modulate bad ones;
2) developing a sense of emotional autonomy and the capacity
to have ideas of one’s own; and 3) learning about fears and
conflicts.
This period has been characterized as “the terrible twos,” meaning
that many parents have a hard time with the problems posed by
toddlers. It is important for parents to be calmly or gently firm
when necessary, understanding the urgency of their young child’s
experience or the impossibility of their conflicts, without becoming
angry or retaliatory. Children in the second and third years of
life are very interested in doing things for themselves, and can
become enraged at not being capable of doing what they want
to. The problem for the adult is that if she does not help she
leaves the child to experience his helplessness, but if she does
help, she points out how he cannot do it himself—so that either
way the child is upset and angry. The parent can feel angry at
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Newsletter of the Infant Mental
Health Promotion Project
the child in this predicament because it is as if the child is saying
nothing the parent does is right. Many of the conflicts of this
period have to do with the painful dilemma of wanting two (or
more) things at once that are apparently incompatible: for
example, wanting to go and to stay.
During this time children find themselves increasingly aware of
their dependence on the competence and willingness to help of
grown-ups, which is increasingly offered only on condition that
various behavioural requirements are met by the child. This means
that the child has an increased experience of helplessness, which
is an unpleasant experience and a significant contributing cause
to the storminess of this developmental epoch. A child’s
experience of his parent may be quite rapidly changeable during
this time, swinging from “angel” to “witch,” and successful
negotiation of this developmental phase allows, as it were, the
“angel experience” to soften the “witch experience” and so
generate hope that “things will improve,” an essential component
of frustration tolerance.
During this time the toddler is having increasing experience of
his or her own ideas, and the ideas of others, and they are
complicated by the conflictual experiences already described.
Two year olds often show interest in stories where there is an
elementary dilemma, which reflects their own experience of
having dilemmas. If the grown-ups can avoid becoming locked
in conflict with children at this age, there is great delight and
interest to be had in the young child’s growing awareness of and
coping with the problems and pleasures of life.
Newsletter of the Infant Mental
Health Promotion Project
–3–
IMPrint, Volume 10, Fall 1994 &
Volume 11, Winter 1994-95
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