You’ll know from previous blogposts, that I’m particularly interested at the moment in how babies show self-determination and agency – how they make choices for themselves and how they make things happen in the world around them. I wonder how this focus on self-determination and agency might change the way we see touch and affection in the baby room.
What I immediately see is that often when we think and talk about touch and affection in the baby room, we are thinking about how babies receive touch and affection from adults rather than how they themselves offer it. We focus on how adults should and shouldn’t touch babies. For example, I’ve spoken with baby room educators who have been told that they need to limit the physical affection they show to babies because of parental anxieties and parental jealousy. In one nursery, baby room educators were categorically told by the manager not to have babies on their laps at pick-up times because ‘the parents won’t like it’.
There are many things wrong with a policy like this. We know that touch and physical affection are fundamental for a baby’s learning, development and their emotional security. As well as arguing on this level though, we can also make the case that in positioning babies as objects that we either place on or off our laps, we are failing to recognise their self-determination and agency.
Babies make decisions about where they want to sit and as baby room educators, we need to respond to and respect these decisions. Sometimes they want to sit in our laps and sometimes they don’t. Young babies will make noises and perhaps cry when they want to be picked up – this is their agency. My daughter Nina, 6 months old, makes a very particular shout when she wants to be picked up and she’s bored of playing on the floor. Older, more mobile babies will move towards you, perhaps even crawling into the lap of particular educators when they want that physical closeness.
Given babies’ capacity to choose the kind of touch and affection they would like at any particular moment and given their capacity to act on this and make it happen, it starts to make nursery policies around how much touching happens in the baby room seem a little bit absurd. Babies and baby room educators are in a kind of physical dance with each other, responding to one another’s actions. The only way to limit touch and affection in the baby room would be to cut off this responsiveness – and that can’t be right for good baby room practice. Can it?
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.