Leaping Forward # 14: When we properly adopt systems thinking, complicated babies and infants magically become more straightforward. Then we know what to do
Leaping Forward with systems theory in the development of early child & family support
This is the 14th and final article in the 'Leaping Forward' series. It is prompted by next year's Portugal 25 event:
I do sincerely hope there are some effective national systems somewhere and I anticipate the word ‘advancing’ means the conference will try to leap forward breaking free of academic and medical tradition and fragmentation. Putting the word ‘systems’ in the conference title gives me hope that systems will be discussed at the grassroots level where the children and families are.
How can systems thinking help us support babies and infants in a less complicated way?
In terms of development and learning babies and infants come as a whole. Their functioning can be described as global, bringing everything into play at the same time. This includes emotions, motivation, attachment, communication, movement, looking, listening, learning, sense of fun, apprehension, understanding, anticipation, relationship, etc. We might as practitioners try to pick these things apart, but the child makes no such separations. So the young child is a functioning system in which each bit of understanding and each new skill interact with each other in all activities all day long.
When baby or infant has two or more diagnoses or expected diagnoses of impairments to do with cognition, movement, looking, listening, etc. then these conditions inevitably interact with each other rather than remaining separate. Such a child can be seen as having a single unique multifaceted condition in which, for example, increasing perceptual skills will support movement and the development of communication will support growing cognition. It is impossible to help a child with one impairment without paying some heed to the others, except perhaps in the most austere clinical environment.
It is also impossible to support a young child without appreciating the system created when all the positives are added to the negatives, when all the aspects of global development are interacting with the interconnected dis-abilities. This is to see the whole child as an inspiring interconnected system of emotions, understanding and skills, etc. at different stages of development.
An early support practitioner cannot do anything useful to such a baby or infant. It is more a matter of doing something with the child in which case the infant and practitioner join themselves together into a bigger system of interacting and interconnected elements and hopefully creating pleasurable magic. It is a bigger system again when child, parent and practitioner are working/playing together. For many of us this is the ideal.
It becomes a straightforward approach when we keep the whole child in mind as a functioning system rather than trying to juggle all the ‘separate’ aspects of child development. This is good practice which copies how most parents treat their children. The main questions an early support practitioner has to address are: What is the child’s level of understanding? What are the present skills as the child acts on their world? What signs of readiness can we see for new skills and understanding?
Of course, while pondering these questions, the practitioner is observing everything about the whole child; emotions, eyes, ears, hands, movement, relationship, communication… Surely systems thinking brings us very naturally to an effective whole-child approach whatever the child’s multiple labels and diagnoses. This is very high-level skill in early support practitioners. It comes mostly from experience. It affords practitioners rich opportunities to grow and develop. Sadly, to my knowledge, it is not part of anyone’s training. We come back to systems thinking now, because universities and colleges that qualify people for particular roles with babies and young children have separate departments that almost never interconnect for training or research programmes. Many academics are so far down into separate silos in their separate departments that systems thinking must sound to them like a foreign language.*
Following the lead offered by the coming Portugal 25 conference, we need intelligent systems thinking from the top down, from where the children and families are down to the academics in their institutions.
