What does it mean to provide ‘rights-based learning and care’ in the baby room? What makes anything ‘rights-based’? Children’s rights go hand in hand with thinking about children as having self-determination and agency. Let’s break these two terms down and think about what they might mean in the baby room.
Self-determination is being able to make decisions for yourself. We can respect babies’ self-determination by seeing the choices they make day to day. They might have many needs that we are striving to meet, but this does not stop them from having views about what they want and what they don’t want. We can’t be so overwhelmed by the needs of babies that we forget that babies have choices too.
Any time spent in the company of babies shows us that babies have excellent ways of showing us that they are invested in what happens to them – that they want to make decisions for themselves. In the baby room, we can tune into babies’ self-determination by looking for opportunities for babies to make active choices. A few examples of choices in the baby room might be: where they want to play, what they want to play with, who they want to play with, what they want to eat, when they want to sleep, when they want to be picked up and when they want to wriggle around.
Agency is the ability to take action and make things happen in the world. I’ve always been so struck by the capacity of my own newborn babies (I’ve been blessed with four children) to make big things happen. It is the sucking of newborn babies that makes their mothers’ milk supply start up and strengthen. The touch of newborn babies flood their parents’ brains with oxytocin – an incredibly powerful bonding hormone that instantly deepens family connections. Newborn babies communicate with us by mimicking us – babies just born have been shown to stick their tongues out in response to their parents doing this. All of this is agency – and that agency is still right there front and centre stage when babies are 3 months old, 6 months old, 9 months old and so on.
In the baby room, we can tune into babies’ agency by recognising and validating how babies’ actions are changing the world around them:
- ‘Oh wow, you’re reaching out for this toy because you want to hold it’
- ‘You’re telling me through that cry that you don’t want mummy to go yet’
- ‘Look at you – cooing yourself to sleep’
I’m so excited to dig deeper into all of these ideas and questions with baby room educators on Wednesday 22nd November when our course about rights-based learning and care in the baby room begins. If you’re interested in the course, please do take a look – there are still a few places left and it isn’t too late to book.