Educaring^® Principle: Sensitive Observation

“A central concept in RIE is that we use sensitive observation in order to understand the child. Observation is a human default mode. It’s part of our survival system. But when we’re talking about understanding children, we have to tune our attention a little bit differently. When a child needs some help from us, we use what we have as our first impulse to try to intervene on their behalf. And sometimes that doesn’t work. And so when our first instinct doesn’t work, we step back a little bit and we start consciously observing to see what might be needed. We pay attention in a more focused way to the cues the child is putting out to the clues in their communication. The goal of sensitive observation is to increase our attunement with the child, to give the child the genuine sense of being understood, and when the child feels understood, then there’s more likelihood that we’re going to be operating in harmonious ways with the child. So the purpose of sensitive observation is improved communication and more well-targeted interventions.”

Ruth Anne Hammond, RIE Associate

“In the RIE approach, we encourage adults to allow children to be active participants rather than passive recipients in all the caregiving activities. You’d be surprised how quickly an infant can begin to understand your requests. You think it’s silly to talk to babies because they don’t speak, right? You think they can’t understand you, but they actually are learning from early on, and even a very young baby can lift a leg or put a leg down in helping with a diaper change. They’ll even kick their leg through their pants when you ask them. The main thing is to remember how important it is to slow down. They don’t process our requests at the same speed that an adult does. If we slow down, they can keep up and they can become really involved, and this gives them a very strong sense of their own ability to be part of every event that concerns them.”

Ruth Anne Hammond, RIE Associate

“Place is important for young children just like it is for adults. What we want to do is to try to create a cognitively challenging, physically safe and emotionally nurturing environment in which they can be the explorers, the small pioneers that they really are. Think about what explorers do, right? They scan the environment for what’s out there, what’s here for me, what can I do with it? They check for safety. Is it safe here? Is there danger around the corner? So children are testing their environment just the same way an explorer does when they’re out in the wilderness.

Usually the environments we see infants and toddlers in are manmade or human made environments, and everybody wants to provide children with the optimal learning environment, right? Parents want to provide that for their children. Oftentimes, the most guidance they get is from toy manufacturers, but there’s another way to do these things. And in RIE, we offer children a variety of actually quite simple everyday objects that they can explore in many different ways. We don’t want to offer them things that have only one kind of use or that have hidden mechanisms in them that are run by batteries. We take things from the kitchen. A small metal bowl will offer children many hours of play that they might not get from a busy box. A simple cloth napkin may give them the chance to learn peekaboo, and then later on, it can become a doll blanket or a washcloth or whatever they imagine it to be.

So it’s very simple. A big jug of water that has the lid glued on can give them so many opportunities to test their balance and figure out how do I keep standing up while I’m holding onto something really heavy? So it’s actually fun to explore your own house and figure out what things that children can safely play with. But thinking of the social environment, it’s really a fact that our attitude is what sets the tone of the environment for the child. What is it that the air has in it? What – is it the air of freedom? Or is it the air of – I better be careful. Somebody’s going to tell me no. I don’t know if I’m allowed to do this. So creating a space in which children feel an expansive sense of themselves and what’s possible is what we want to do.”

Ruth Anne Hammond, RIE Associate

“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

“The freedom to explore and interact with other infants is something that we cherish at RIE. It’s surprising how much they really enjoy being together. It starts off – they just gaze at one another and then you might see a smile, and then they reach out and they touch and it’s just magical. And sometimes they make mistakes. Little babies might be interested in the other child’s eyes and maybe start to poke a finger, and so it’s important to be there to intervene if necessary, but you don’t want to give them the idea that there’s anything wrong with wanting to touch and interact with the other child because that is so central to their humanity. Getting in touch with the other person in that way, that brings on curiosity and interest and wonder. We want to support that, and that’s what we do at RIE. There was a brand new class of infants at the stage of crawling, and they had not been with other infants ever before, and you could tell that they were so amazed that there were other people their size! And I’ll never forget Theodore crawling up to Georgia and kissing her, and she went back for a second kiss. Being together is important for adults, but it’s also really important for even babies.”

– Ruth Anne Hammond, RIE Associate

“Sometimes people get the impression that RIE children are allowed to do whatever they want, all the time because we let them play freely – but this is not the truth.

Parents and caregivers need to provide consistent expectations and limits for children in order for them to be able to know what to expect in their day.  And we offer them the security of being able to anticipate what is expected of them.

So even if a child needs to test – which of course they need to do because that’s in their genetic makeup, is to try things out — we don’t want to shame them for their desire to try, but we just stop the behavior – for instance if a child is very disappointed that there aren’t strawberries at lunch, but only apples, they may decide they’re going to throw their milk on the ground in protest, and we can sympathize with their sad feelings of not having strawberries, while at the same time stopping the behavior in a firm but kind and calm manner.”

– Ruth Anne Hammond, RIE Associate