Our First Friday

Because my cohort had such long night last night, we began our homework and blogging at ten after the alumni dinner; I woke up earlier than usual. I woke up giving myself just enough time to get dressed and grab breakfast. Instead of going to the dining halls, Oyin, Victoria, and I went to the campus bookstore to grab a coffee and a quick snack before heading to class.

 Today in class we learned about the relationship between an infant and a caregiver. Children can form attachments with their primary caregivers in many different ways. The type of relationship that has been formed can be shown in an experiment called the Strange Situation. In Strange Situation, a child is shown an unfamiliar room with a caregiver, and then the caregiver goes away, and later comes back. One of the most common forms of attachments seen is a secure attachment. This is seen in a little above 60% of the children who were in the Strange Situation studies, and it is characterized by the child feeling safe to explore the room if they are with their caregiver. Once this caregiver figure leaves the room, the infant will react very negatively, but will be soothed quickly when the caregiver returns to the room. Another main category children are placed into based off of their reactions, is the insecure attachment. This can be subcategorized into insecure/ambivalent, and insecure/avoidant. These are not worse than secure attachments because they usually just lead to differences in personality traits later in life and relationships later in life. An insecure/ambivalent attachment is characterized by a child’s indifference when the primary caregiver leaves and their lack of reaction when the caregiver returns. An insecure/avoidance attachment can be seen when a caregiver returns after having left, and the infant turns away from the caregiver and may avoid them. There is one last category. This category is called the disorganized reaction. In this case, when the parent re-enters the room, the child will stop what it is doing, or seem to be taking an unusually long time deciding how they will react. This reaction is common in kids who have been treated badly by the caregiver, or whose caregiver is afraid of them. This reaction can be seen in maltreated children or the children of teenage parents. 

Another aspect of the mother child relationship is how much emotional care and attention children really need. Of course to survive, children need food, so the fact that their mother provides them with food covers that need. But mothers also can provide children with a sense of security and social interaction, and it is possible that babies cannot develop in a healthy manner fully without that aspect of care giving. We also learned about emotion in infants, which were mainly frustration and anger, sadness, and shame and guilt, which appear much later in a child’s development. It has been suggested that the smiling in infants, a social smile that appears a few months after birth, has a very biological purpose. If the infant smiles at the mother, or other primary caregiver, the caregiver will feel special to the infant and therefore want to continue caring and providing for the infant, which is necessary for the infant to survive.

 After lunch, we came back to the class room and worked on our papers by searching for research papers that could support our reasons for choosing the experiment that we did. At this point, the class was having a sort of self-dismissal. If students felt they had gotten enough done in class, they would leave. I made a substantial amount of progress on finding research papers we, my group, could cite in our own papers, so I left and went to the gym for a while. Later I met my cohort for an early dinner in the dining hall. Later we watched some movies and hung out in the dorm lounges. It was nice to be able to spend time doing activities without having to worry about getting up early the next day or having to work on homework for the next day. 

Ratner Athletic Facility

Tomorrow we are all planning to go downtown and spend some time in the city while we have the opportunity to do so.