Educaring^® Principle: Trusting the Child

“On the subject of trust, there’s much to say. In RIE, we say we should trust infants to be initiators, explorers, and self-learners, which is a little different than the traditional idea of basic trust. Babies are learning to trust parents, trust themselves, trust the world. But what Magda Gerber taught is that we need to also trust them, that it’s a bi-directional relationship of trust. And there’s trust coming from the adult to the child, just as we hope there will be trust from the child to the adult. The child needs to have faith that when they’re in discomfort, when they’re hungry, when they’re upset, that a grownup will come and be with them and comfort them. And then the adult needs to learn that the child actually has many, many inborn capacities. And what RIE teaches is that that self-initiation is what we come to trust. So if we think that babies are empty vessels that need somebody to pour a lot of knowledge into them, then we’re going to think that we are in charge of what they’re learning. But in fact, they come into the world actively seeking experiences and information and all kinds of joyful times and learning to problem solve and learning to fill their own time in a meaningful way. We don’t have to spend all of our energy making sure that, oh, they’ve got their letters, they’ve got their numbers, they’ve got their colors, their shapes, because they absorb those things so organically as they’re exploring. The father of affective neuroscience Jaak Panksepp discovered there are basic genetically passed-on systems in the brain that cause humans to instinctually seek out what’s in the environment. He also discovered that there are brain parts dedicated to play. And so trusting infants to find experiences and find knowledge, it is not just an idea. It’s built into human nature to go and do that. And babies come into the world, human, fully human. They may not be fully mature humans, but they have what it takes to go out in the world and find what they’re looking for.”

Ruth Anne Hammond, RIE Associate