Interview with Nathalie Casso-Vicarini, Part 2

In the great classics, another question about managing baby’s crying and tantrums.

A quick remark on the name of : “5 senses for kids Foundation”. I think it’s a very interesting and promising name, because babies learn through their five senses. They are the gateway to their knowledge.

They need to taste: the mouth is their “third hand”. Educators have been saying this for a very long time.

They need to hear a melody: the prosody of their parents’ voice, for example. This language music will then give them their mother tongue.

They need to be able to touch, which is essential, and to smell as soon as they come into contact with elements through their five senses. This will provide important information for the brain. If babies are surrounded by plastic in a room, they won’t learn the same things at all! They need the outdoors, lots of natural surroundings and, above all, the reassuring presence of their caregivers. So when babies need something, they cry. It’s his own way of saying: I’m hungry, I need a cuddle, I’m tired, I’m not potty-trained… Their priority need is the need for attachment and they have physiological needs to be fed, to be potty-trained, to be in a safe environment to sleep, etc…

So the baby cries, and that’s natural! We tell parents “Your baby cries, it’s normal. It’s not because you’re a bad parent, it’s normal, he’s expressing his needs”. So you gradually adapt to your baby on a day-to-day basis. He/she’ll give you signals, you’ll send signals and you’ll adapt to meet his/her needs absolutely unconditionally. Because if you don’t respond, well, he/she’s not going to do it on his/her own. So, until the age of five or six, the emotional brain and the limbic brain are extremely strong brains. The emotional brain is a very immature brain because children cannot regulate their emotions.

The neuronal connections with the frontal orbital cortex are the brain of reflection, the brain of perspective-taking, the brain of executive functions and memory, of the intellect that will say to the other brain “calm down”. If the parent is unaware of this cerebral immaturity, he or she may get angry and say “My child is having a tantrum. Calm down! Except that this child needs to acquire experience, and this experience is acquired up to the age of five or six in situations that the child is unfamiliar with or hasn’t experienced sufficiently. Emotional regulation doesn’t just happen through example, it happens above all thanks to the parent who adopts a caring attitude, who puts themselves at the child’s level, who tries to understand what is happening, who tries to put into words or tries to hypothesise with the child what might have happened.

Was he/she afraid? Is he/she angry? Is he/she sad? You need to have the full range of emotions to provide the best possible support. But if the parent themselves have a calm and caring attitude, that’s what’s going to help the child the most. I’m thinking of the early childhood professionals who are the secondary attachment persons in whom the child trusts. All these people will help the children, through their calm and caring attitude, to gradually take a step back and name the emotions and adapt to the world around them. I’m talking about a lot of experience and, above all, a lot of special attention.

That doesn’t mean that you’re always going to say yes to a child, that’s got nothing to do with it. When you set a framework, it’s important that it’s stable. It’s going to change over time, of course, but it’s important that it’s stable and that both parents are consistent with it. For example, it’s not up to the child to choose the meal, the food, who gets to go to bed at what time and when. No, that’s the role of the parent: to know what is good for the child and what is not.

Talking of development, what can you say about babies’ skills and what link do you make with the child’s enjoyment of these skills?

That’s an excellent question. Babies are very competent already ‘in utero’. They know how to do lots of things. It can roll, it can feed itself and it can already hear. The filter of the uterine wall is a filter, but it doesn’t filter everything: so he’s practising a lot of things and touch is his first skill when he’s born. This is the reason for skin-to-skin contact. Touch is a highly developed sense and a highly developed skill. We also know that babies can count (c.f. the work of Ghislaine Dehaene-Lambertz).

Babies have innate skills and they will also learn later on. We adults are going to support them in their skills. This is the whole issue of school and learning in general. In other words, we don’t learn by force, or else we turn children into parrots whose knowledge doesn’t make sense to them, and they won’t explore it to the end because it doesn’t make sense to them. It’s different when we learn through pleasure: when babies are in a relationship of shared pleasure and dialogue with their parents. This is the case with a lot of teaching methods in the four Nordic countries, in Quebec, in Australia and in other countries…

It began with the work of Professor Antoine Guedeney and Doctor Josette Serres. Before the age of two and a half months, babies had an involuntary muscular smile, but after that this social smile will enable them to initiate a relationship of pleasure in a dialogue with an adult or a child. This is where we immediately see the baby’s rhythm and the extent to which this relationship of pleasure will nourish his appetite for future knowledge. Maria Montessori said: “Play is the child’s work” Experimenting on a daily basis and playing because through play and experimentation this will give the brain much more information than touching the same yellow plastic toy over and over again. So babies need to explore in order to develop their skills.

They need to explore to the end because babies are researchers. This is very important. They will explore because we give them the means to explore. So I don’t have any advice to give, just suggestions. I encourage babies to spend as much time as possible outdoors, especially when it’s raining, because rain also gives babies a lot of information: what they can do, what’s on the ground, the rain falling, the noise it makes on the little pebbles. All this is very important for the very young children, and they will build their skills thanks to the means we provide to help them complete their explorations.

This ties in perfectly with the last question I wanted to ask you. In our fast-paced world, would you have any suggestions for parents or future parents? And do you have any examples of your own experiences with parents that would illustrate this advice or these suggestions?

You’re right to mention these two terms, because advice has been around for a long time and I’ve banished it from my vocabulary. Since my experience in Australia, I’ve never given advice to parents. On the other hand, I do provide reliable information. Parents know, they’ve carried their baby and they’re the ones who know their child best.

Encourage everything that will allow the five senses to develop. Music, of course. The baby is helped and carried for nine months in a musical bath. This prosody of language is music to them, and this is what will forge their mother tongue. There are many scientific studies on the benefits of music for very young children. It’s not by playing Bach or Mozart every day for my child to become more intelligent! You have to think about it. The rhythms should be adapted to the time of day, the child’s development, age, etc

I encourage everything that promotes the child’s five senses, obviously under the watchful eye of the adult, like a beacon that is, as Anne-Marie Fontaine says, caring, attentive and attentive to what the child is doing. If the exploration is rich, sufficient and nourishing, then the baby will learn a lot more. In their first 1,000 days, babies will learn much more outdoors, because the explorations are more intense and richer than indoors.

Any object can be interesting for a child. Look at what Maria Montessori did with toddlers to teach them to do things on their own. The children’s sensitivity meant that on our last study trip to Germany, the children respected the little ones in this Kita, which is a crèche in Germany. They set the table with porcelain plates! Learning to be beautiful is very important too! Providing a respectful environment for children means that they can respect it and will in turn respect their environment. Because we’ll have been respectful with them and we’ll have trusted them, and that’s very important for children’s self-confidence.

Thank you very much Nathalie Casso-Vicarini!

Click here to see the first part of the interview.