Birth to three matters - Communities and Local Government

when someone else is upset or hurt, andare beginning to take part in pretend playwith other children or adults. Being ableto agree on what is happening in fantasyplay, even for a short bout, shows theability to ‘account for their partner’sthoughts; in turn,it is plausible that theexperience of collaborating on developinga pretend narrative will foster the growthof such abilities’ (Dunn 1999: 60).Subsequently, between two and threeyears old, children will often use the words‘pretend’, ‘want’ and ‘feel’ according toBartsch and Wellman (1995). But bothKarmiloff-Smith (1994) and Perner (1999)suggest it is rare for them to use the word‘think’ before they are three.Such an observation may indicate to usthe power of a child’s emotional life at thisstage and it is interesting that studies ofchildren’s narratives (Bruner 1990; Feldman1992),said to begin to proliferate betweenthe ages of two and three, are at theirmost sophisticated when concerned withemotional events, especially when theexperiences involved negativeoccurrences. In these cases their storieswere sequentially and causally accurateand usually told of fear, distress and anger(Brown 1995 cited in Dunn 1999). BothBruner and Feldman have argued thatwe use narratives to explain the actionsof others and ourselves, and that, withinany given culture, narratives are used togenerate a person’s sense of self. Theimportance of narratives, the way each ofus makes sense of our lives, is also stressedby Siegel (1999). Even at this young agechildren love listening to narratives aboutthemselves as babies and from these theybegin to construct their own lifenarratives. So telling children stories aboutevents and achievements in their ownearlier lives contributes to their sense ofself and sense of efficacy.Chen and McCollum (2000) explored theperceptions of 13 Taiwanese mothers of12 month old children on the benefits ofparent-infant interaction in relation to thedevelopment of social competence andfound that these were congruent with thetraditional cultural ideas aboutinterdependence. Tronick et al’s (1992)research demonstrated that infants andtoddlers adopt the patterns of the culturesin which they are brought up and that forsome this means that the sense of self isderived from multiple relationships. Harris(1989) explains how different culturesbuild on what may be, usually, a universal,innate ability to recognise negative andpositive emotional states, but this can beimpaired for different reasons. As statedabove, the ability to ‘mindread’, forexample, does not extend to autisticchildren and their difficulties in formingrelationships and restricted imaginativeplay may relate to this inability (Harris1989; Hobson 1993;Trevarthen et al 1998).Hobson stresses the way in which beingable to engage in symbolic play meansbeing able to appreciate how to conveyattitudes, thoughts and knowingly confernovel (imagined) identities onto familiarobjects. Thus the sense of self as agentof interactions and ideas is strengthened,but when these abilities are impaired,the sense of self too may be affected.53