open space for infants?

[Jeff Aitken]

My friend Beth recently met a prominent expert on early childhood
development. Beth asked him, "what does a young child most need for
development?" and he replied, "open space."

Beth loves OST, so her ears perked up. "What do you mean, open space?" she
asked. And he proceeded to basically describe OST, although he had never
heard of the process we use in organizations!

Here is a snip from a recent paper by Dr. Louis Sander (1997):

"(T)he essential features of self-regulation and self-organization that are
required of every living organism cannot be bypassed when we come to deal
with the developing human infant...

The essential requirement that each living organism be self-regulating
requires that the initiative to take one or the other direction must come
from within the organism itself, not from an extrinsic source...

(One example) is illustrated... by the bassinet-monitoring study. This was
the appearance over the course of an infant's awake period of an 'open
space' (Sander, 1977) in time that allows the endogenously activated, self
organizing initiative of the infant to emerge and begin the process of
constructing its own idiosyncratic goals...

(T)he mother puts the infant in a reclining chair where the baby can see
and hear her, and goes about her other work or interests. This is a moment
of disengagement, but one in a state of regulatory stability, a coherence
in the infant-caregiver system as a whole. This is an open space in time
when the infant's 'primary activity', its agency for generating
self-organization, can take off in initiating and organizing an
idiosyncratic network of proximal engagement of its own...

Here we have a systems model, then, of equilibrium constructed by an
enduring coordination between infant and mother over time that provides
containment without impingement."

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