Is group membership basic to infant mental health?
Establishing a method - The babies-in-groups project.
What is the study about?
How do children learn to join in with groups of other children? How early can group life begin?
What exactly are we doing?
We bring babies aged between 7 and 12 months who have not met before together in groups of three or four. We place them within reach of each other but safely strapped into baby chairs. We leave the room and video-record what goes on. Their parents and the researchers watch from next door through CCTV. Parents usually find what the babies do enthralling and sometimes very amusing! We stop recording if a baby becomes distressed or a parent requests it. We are finding that even young babies develop quite sophisticated interactions with each other, responding to each other’s moods, taking turns, getting games going and so on. We are analyzing the video to understand more about the babies’ ‘conversations’ with each other and how they manage these.
What will the impact of the study be – how will it make a difference?
It is important for young children to be able to relate to each other and to participate in groups, at least by the time they go to school and perhaps earlier. Many studies assume babies learn social skills from their parents, especially their mothers, and that this allows them to join in groups later on. But interacting in groups, with several other people at once, is different from interacting with just one other person. Human beings are a very sociable species and throughout history and evolution humans have always survived in groups within communities. Perhaps babies are more able than we think! We have shown that babies between 7 and 12 months enjoy the company of other babies. Without adult support they can manage ‘conversation-like’ interactions in which all the babies are involved actively. Perhaps adults’ abilities to engage and entertain babies depend at least in part on the adults behaving in baby-like ways! We hope that respecting babies’ social and emotional sensitivities will lead to interventions that will enrich babies’ experiences when they are looked after away from their parents, for example, in nurseries.
Who is working on this study?
Dr Cathy Urwin and Alana Loewenberger at the Tavistock Centre, in collaboration with Prof Ben S. Bradley, Charles Sturt University, Australia and Dr Jane Selby, Cambridge, UK.
Can patients take part in this study?
No. This study involves a non-clinical population. Parents and infants routinely attending GP surgeries and baby clinics have been asked if they would like to come along.
Where are we currently with this study?
We are writing up our initial findings. We plan to establish further projects looking at how to support babies in groups in nursery care, crèches and day centres. We also want to find out more about how what babies may do in groups may develop and change during the first year.
Relevant publications
Cathy Urwin and Janine Sternberg (eds.) Infant Observation as a Research Method: Emotional processes in everyday lives. London: Routledge (in press).