Thursday's Child

B Waddington Jean C

Description

If you have ever stared into an infant's innocent eyes and wondered what was going on in that tiny mind, then this is the book for you. Very few people have memories of being an infant and even fewer have put those memories to paper. Learn how small children can understand situations before they have any verbal skills and why small children keep secrets from their parents. This book is a 'must read' for every parent, everyone who studies the early development of the infant and young child, and for all who work in child social services. Travel with a child through events leading to World War II and through the blitz of London to experience the fears of war and its devastating effects on the child who has little comprehension and no control over adult situations. This book comes at a time when each one of us has to open our mind to what is happening to children across the globe and to the lessons we are imparting to future adults.

Informations

• Publié par: Austin Macauley Publishers Ltd
• Date de parution: 29 mai 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781528984812
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Thursday’s Child
Jean C B Waddington
Austin Macauley Publishers
2020-06-30
Thursday’s Child About the Author Dedication Copyright Information © Introduction Chapter 1 Earliest Memories Chapter 2 1936-1937 A Busy Year Chapter 3 My Third Year Chapter 4 Chapter 5 At Last, I Am Five Chapter 6 1941 Chapter 7 1942 Chapter 8 1943 Chapter 9 1944-1945
About the Author
The author recounts her phenomenally detailed memory of her early childhood that begins in London before the beginning of World War II and continues through to the end of the war in 1945 when she was ten years old. Few children have this sort of memory and it is possible that she even remembers her own birth process. Fewer still can recount or understand how they felt and reacted to events and people around them. Events that culminated on her fifth birthday shaped and determined her future as a scientist.
Dedication
A memoir of early childhood
Copyright Information ©
Jean C B Waddington (2020)
The right of Jean C B Waddington to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with section 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.
Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
Austin Macauley is committed to publishing works of quality and integrity. In that spirit, we are proud to offer this book to our readers; however, the story, the experiences, and the words are the author’s alone and portrayed to the best of their recollection. In some cases, names and details have been changed to protect the privacy of the people involved.
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.
ISBN 9781528984782 (Paperback)
ISBN 9781528984799 (Hardback)
ISBN 9781528984812 (ePub e-book)
www.austinmacauley.com
First Published (2020)
Austin Macauley Publishers Ltd
25 Canada Square
Canary Wharf
London
E14 5LQ
Introduction
I write this because I want to share a story that is unique to me, but which also helps to shed light on the development, behaviour and hidden workings of a very young child’s mind. I also hope that writing my memories down will address some of my own questions and puzzlement. For instance, there are parts of an infant’s life that must be very pleasurable like being breastfed, so why have I absolutely no recollections of it even though my mother told me that she had to feed me in a darkened room because the slightest noise made me yank my head around to see what was going on. Why have I no recollections of being bathed or cuddled. At one time I wondered if I only remembered the less pleasant moments but that does not seem to be true either, so I put down what I remember, how I felt and how I interpreted what I felt at the time. It is clear to me that infants learn very necessary skills by judging the way people react, the tone of speech and the feel of the way they are handled. Young animals are the same everywhere. We have made some advances in the way that we study the very young child and for a long time I held back on sharing my experiences as I continued to think that I did not want to influence how others viewed the secrets of child development. I kept hoping to read that someone else recalled the events that we call birth. That time is running out. Funding dictates the direction of research and we do not have a good track record when it comes to long-term investigations that continue past the lifetime of the initial researcher, so I think we need to look at collections of memories like this to tentatively fill in gaps in the fabric of our understanding.
Understandably, some will be very sceptical about the supposed mental abilities of the infant and very young child, particularly in the realm of learning language and here I readily acknowledge that there will be wide differences in interpretation as well as actual or perceived performance. I compare my developing language skills as a young child to the way in which I learned a foreign language as a teenager. I had high school level French when at 16, I asked to go to Paris and live with a French family to improve my conversational skills. After a week in Paris, I was invited into an evening salon where my host presided over a gathering of his friends and I sat listening to their conversation. At some point, my host who enjoyed teasing me started to relate how we met up at the railway station. It was an amusing picture of a very young girl with no language skill who was trying to find out if this unexpected stranger (I had been told that I would be picked up by my hostess) was really who he said he was. The others were smiling, but I laughed out loud and was surprised when my host turned to me and asked if I had understood what he had said. “Oh, yes” I replied. Someone else asked if it were true. “Oh, yes” I replied, and explained that I could understand quite well but lacked the verbal skills to banter back and forth. One morning in Paris, I found myself thinking in French ‘now where is my toothbrush’ and recalled that my school teacher had predicted that one begins to understand a foreign language when one starts thinking in it.
Was I any closer in understanding something that happened to me around my second birthday. At the time my parents tried to comfort me with explanations that I knew were false, but I could not argue so I pretended that they were right and went back to sleep. Later years would convince me I had experienced a very scary hallucination, but questions still remained. How can one have a hallucination when the situation is totally new and one cannot understand any of the verbal language, but the threat and fear are all too tangible. If an adult has a one-time hallucination it is possible to come up with all manner of explanations ranging from scary stories, through movie experiences to the food eaten etc., but there were no videos nor coloured three-dimensional movies that could be projected onto a wall when I was two years old.
In a small child’s life there are many times when parent and child completely misunderstand each other, and this is largely because the child has no sense of cause and effect, and also has too little vocabulary to begin to explain why it did or did not do the thing in question. Add to this the busy often stressful life of the parent does not offer the opportunity to sit down and spend time really listening to what is going on in the mind of a child as it struggles to express an idea. Think how difficult this is for us as incoherent teenagers and then extrapolate to the small child who is confronted every day by new events that need to be sorted into some sort of coherent sense. I remember drinking from a kiddy cup and then as I became more proficient at not spilling, I was given a beaker. Eventually, I registered dissatisfaction that I was not allowed to drink out of a proper grownup glass and made a fuss, but it was in vain. As an adult, I entertained a visiting young mother and her little girl. The child wanted a drink and the mother said ‘in something unbreakable please’ I saw the look of resigned disappointment on the child’s face and gave her the drink in the same glass as her mother and me. I was rewarded with a big conspiratorial smile and watched the child making a huge effort not to spill or drop the glass. A grandmother remembers, while a mother is too busy to be bothered with small details she suspects will cause her added work.
It is widely accepted that young children think anyone older than themselves is really, really old, but I never shared that experience. I recognised the gradation of the different generations and thought of children older than myself as children not yet adults.
As a very young child I was conscious of a person’s mental ability and classified people as clever, or stupid, or even as too stupid to bother with – as in the case of an early babysitter, who danced with a floor mop while stroking its ‘hair’. I view this ability to recognise intelligence as essential in terms of survival of the infant.
Children have another difficulty with parental dictates. In particular parents tell their children not to talk to strangers or accept candy or gifts from people who are not family friends. This is a sensible adult rule that is frequently broken if the child is approached by a friendly stranger who stops to greet a puppy or remark on a pretty dress. Although at least some children may be good at picking up good or bad vibes from a stranger, no child has the skills to cope with an aggressive adult or bully and I think that as parents and teachers we have the responsibility to teach these essential skills As a twelve-year-old I was walking along an unpopulated beach out of sight of my parents and was unexpectedly grabbed from behind by a strong woman who frog-marched me while I struggled and screamed. She insisted that I join the other children she had corralled to sing hymns with her creepy brother. I used all my wiles against her but was no match for her strength and escaped when my parents finally appeared.
From the age of two until I was a teenager, I suffered from a horrible, debilitating phobia of feathers and I decided I had to try to discover how this phobia could have started. By going back far enough I persuaded myself that I had found the answer and the phobia was put to rest. The interesting question here is this, had I found the answer that released the phobia or had I merely persuaded my brain to accept a plausible explanation. Years later I heard it proposed that when Columbus sailed into island waters the natives had never seen such a vessel and so their brains could not deciphe