open space for infants?

[Harrison Owen]

At 10:05 PM 3/19/2002 -0800, Jeff Aitken wrote:
>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."

>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."

Jeff -- this is wonderful. Do you happen to have a reference? It would be
great to start a conversation. Also I think I may have to sue him for
copyleft infringement :-)

Harrison

>Harrison Owen

7808 River Falls Drive
Potomac, MD 20854 USA
phone 301-365-2093
Open Space Training www.openspaceworld.com
Open Space Institute www.openspaceworld.org
Personal website http://mywebpages.comcast.net/hhowen/index.htm

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