Wellbeing Birth to Three - Transcript
Part 1
Dr Rosemary Roberts
Dr Rosemary Roberts is an Early Years Consultant and Trainer
visiting from the United Kingdom. She’s worked extensively in early childhood, primary and higher education.
In 1999 she was awarded the OBE for services to early childhood.
Dr Roberts completed her PhD on ‘Companionable Learning’.
In this interview, Rosemary shares with us some of her research and insights on wellbeing in children from birth, particularly the ‘birth to 3’ period.
We have a lot of research over the last twenty years or so that tells us how important those very earliest years are for the development of the brain, and how that’s a long term impact on the whole of the rest of a child’s life.
And the ‘one liner’ of that research is about the quality of relationships that each child has. That with every interaction a child has, that’s helping to build the brain. So, positive interactions build it in a positive way and not so positive, the reverse.
And what this research is telling us is that we need to really think about how we do activities and focus on the interactions. Of course what we do is important, but it’s how we do it that really makes a difference.
So, I, at the end of my research, had four constructs to do about wellbeing. What is it?
There’s the child’s physical development and we’re really up to speed with that so I won’t dwell on that.
And then there’s the child’s communications, and by that I mean,
communication in the very broadest sense. I don’t just mean when we speak and they hear us and further down the line when they use spoken language too.
I mean all the interactions that we have with babies and young children and the interactions that they have with us. It’s how they learn about the world. It’s all the connections they make with all the people around them.
That communication comes in through all our senses. And the very first language that they have is body language. Babies and young children use it a lot.
I would suggest that we all go on using it all our lives and further down the line it’s all the ways they use to represent their world. So that’s a whole range ofdrawings and telling stories and dance and movement and musicand all the ways that we do re-present what’s been happening around us.
Part 2
Dr Rosemary Roberts
The third construct I call ‘Belonging and Boundaries’which you might think are two separate things and indeed they’re very different in our worldas we know it now.Because on the one hand we’ve got everything we doto support the youngest children in belonging where theyare so, it’s all the nurturing, welcoming, affirming stuff that we do with them.
And then on the other side, there’sthe boundaries bit which is kind of about rules and expectations and behaviour management.
But if you put those as two sides of the same coin, which I would suggest,and see the boundaries bit as a consequence of belonging….puts a whole new slant on it for children.
And indeed wouldn’t it for teenagers if they had grown up realising that the only reason that they have these boundaries and routines and so on is because they belong.It’s because you’re part of us. It’s because this is your place that these things apply.
And then the fourth one is called Agency. It means feeling that you can make a difference to what happens to you.Kind of being an agent in your own world. That’s having a sense of agency.
And, in this research, it’s made up of four different aspects that are all bound up together.
One is about our sense of identity. Now we talk aboutchildren having a sense of identity but there are two kinds. Soit’s how you fit with the people around you. The other half of it is yoursense of what kind of a person you are. Simply your inner sense of yourself.
And babies and young children grow this sense of identity in a sort of mirroring process that goes on. So when as an adult or a companion to a childwe are looking at them with that absolute look on our faces which says‘Oh I’m really glad I’m with you at this point. I’m having such a nice time with you.’
The subliminal message to thebaby is ‘I am enjoyable. This person loves me, wants to be with me’ and that’s how they grow that inner sense.
Second strand of the Constructive agency is about learning dispositions.
So do we have that habit, that tendency, that disposition to listen carefullyto watch what’s going on around us, to explore, to experiment and not worry about making a mistake. You’ll do it differently next time.
Part 3
Dr Rosemary Roberts
And the last thing, kind of at the top of the tree really is something calledinfluencing which goes together with this thing about being and an agent of your own wellbeing and the bits of influencing are about
‘Who makes the decisions for me?’‘Am I the one who makes the decisions or does somebody else make them for me?’
In the literature it’s called ‘Locus of Control’ and do you have an internal one or an external one?
So that’s one thing. The other, another thing is something very familiar aboutempowerment, and the last bit right at the very most important is about caring. The act of being able to do that caringfor other people feeds your own wellbeing directly.
That, paying carefulattention to children, is exactly what they need to build their wellbeing. So it isthe heart of your work. So I wanted to find some structure or basis of making sense of what I was seeing, which would make sense in terms of the child’s development,needs, wellbeing, all of that.
And what we had was….. we called them ‘pebbles records’ and across the middle of the sheet are four linkedpebbles which have a reminder of what wellbeing’s all about.
So just a reminder of agency and that thing about ‘sense of self’ ‘learning’ and ‘influencing’, one about ‘belonging and boundaries’ one about‘communication’ – everything you take in and one about physical development.
But when you sit down side by side with parents, both looking at the pebbles record it would make sense and it’s very interesting how much morefascinated, engaged, understanding the parents are of the child you are talking about.
There’s another useful thing about thesepebbles records though and that’s thatthe way the wellbeing framework is constructed was deliberately about…..enabling us all as different services to work together. It’s that integratedservices idea and how can we have the conversations, build up the relationshipswith each other about our work…what’s the language we could usethat makes sense for all of us.
VCAA Early Years Exchange No. 10 2012Page 1