So the child is too dependent?

Our eight-month-old daughter is crying every time I put her in the crib and go to another room. There is no such thing that she does not raise a cry when I leave her. We have a very close relationship, but can it not be that I made her too dependent on me?

No! You gave her a sense of reliability, and not made dependent. Your child is afraid of separation, and this is normal and healthy behavior, which does not occur because you made your child too dependent.

Once, when we watched the eight-month-old Matthew play, we developed a theory of why there was a fear of separation and why it was a healthy phenomenon. Matthew crawled about the room and looked every few minutes to make sure we were looking at him. He raised his cry if he saw that we were leaving the room, or could not find us with a glance.

What accounts for such curious behavior? As experienced parents who watched a lot of children, we realized for a long time that small children do what they do, not without reason. Fear of separation reaches its peak at a time when the child is able to move. Could the fear of separation be a safety check that starts at the moment when the child has the motor capabilities to go far from his parents, but he does not yet have enough intellectual development to survive alone?

The child's body tells him to "go ahead" - his brain tells him to "stop". Otherwise, he would have gone further and further from his parents.

Parental approval. You do not have to think that you made your child too dependent and that he will always cling to you and he will not develop a healthy independence. On the contrary, the fear of separation in most cases is an indicator of how confidently he will move to independence. That's why. Suppose a child plays in a room with many new toys and unfamiliar children. The child begins to cling to you. Instead of increasing his fear of a strange and unfamiliar situation, you let the child understand that "everything is in order."The child lets you go and gets acquainted with an unknown environment, periodically returning to the home base to get approval from you for further study of unfamiliar situations. The presence of a person to whom a child experiences strong attachment - usually one of the parents or a well-known babysitter that the child trusts - is for the child to push forward, to continue the study. In an unfamiliar situation, the person to whom the child is attached, from time to time calms the child, saying that everything is in order, when the child is moving to a new level of research. As soon as the child gets acquainted with one level, he moves on to the next level. When a child climbs up the ladder of independence, he checks to see if someone is holding a ladder.

Gradual accustoming the child to separation. If the child does not see you, he does not yet have enough mental development to imagine that you are just around the corner or will now be back. Maintaining a vocal contact can sometimes soothe a child who can not see you, and also develops in the child the ability to associate your voice with your mind, by curbing the fear of separation before it begins. Not until the second year of life, most children discover the permanence of objects and people, that is, it acquires the ability to create and retrieve from memory the mental images of people or things that they do not see.

This ability to keep in front of the mind's eye the image of a reliable nanny will allow the child to move more easily from the acquaintance to the stranger in the future.

Strong attachment of

between

parent and child promotes

formation of

independence

As we mentioned earlier, in another context, in our opinion, it would be easier to imagine the child's intellectual development if compared with the process of making a musical plate;this is our theory of a deep furrow. The stronger the attachment between the parent and the child, the deeper the furrow of attachment on the child's plate and the easier it is for the child to lose this path if necessary. The once theories of spoiling claimed that a child who is strongly attached to his mother, and will always scroll this path and will never become independent and will not explore the world on his own. Our experience and the experiments of others have shown the opposite. In one classic study, known as an experiment in unfamiliar situations, the specialists studied two groups of children under one year( one group was called "securely attached" and the other was "unreliablely tied") while playing in an unfamiliar situation. Children with the most reliable attachment, those who had the deepest furrows, actually showed less concern when they left their mothers for toys in the same room. They occasionally turned to the mother for permission to continue studying the toys. It seemed that the mother energizes the child's research activities. Since the child did not have to expend energy on worrying about whether his mother had left, he could use this energy to explore the new situation.

Moving from unity with mother to separation, having a strong affection, the child balances his desire to explore the world and still have the need for a sense of reliability that the person caring for the child gives. When a new toy or an unfamiliar person breaks the balance or the mother leaves and thereby undermines the sense of reliability, the child is tempted to restore the original balance. The constant presence of a reliable nanny provides the necessary support and leads to independence, confidence and trust and ultimately to an important milestone for development, to which the child comes to the end of the first year - to the ability to play alone.