Preparation for fatherhood

I won't use the resilience of human infants and toddlers to recover from injury, trauma, or neglect as a way of not actively (rather than reactively) seeking and choosing the best path of learning and interaction between my daughter and me.

When I was a nanny seven years ago, one of the reasons I pursued that option was to prepare for my journey into fatherhood; to examine my longterm interaction with a young child as a primary caregiver, to recognize my strengths and weaknesses, and to grow from that interaction. My interaction started with X at 1 1/2 years old, so it didn't include the current interactions I'm having with Delilah. What my particular strengths and weaknesses are I'm not diving into here, though perhaps in some future post.

I know the cliche is that babies don't come with manuals, and I can accept that from individual child to individual child. But, there is a common knowledge base out there regarding the psychology and development of the human infant and toddler which I feel is vital to have a rudimentary grasp of in order to make good parental choices in moment-to-moment interactions. As I've been searching through the body of knowledge available, I'm finding there is no lack of summary information regarding infant development and child/caregiver interactions from sociological, anthropological, and psychological perspectives. The key for me is in finding a source for that summary information that I trusted was as up-to-date as possible and as realistically neutral in point-of-view.

Given that, my first resource I'm going to for much of my gleaning of knowledge is the World Health Organization.

I've found this document very helpful so far: The importance of caregiver-child interactions for the survival and healthy development of young children.

One of the important points I've found so far is how vital non-distracted interaction with an infant really is, how integral social feedback loops are to development on all fronts in the youngest of infants. An interesting illustration of this is:

Experiments that disrupt or distort caregiver-child interaction produce dismay and distress in both the caregiver and the infant. One such experimental perturbation involves asking the caregiver to stop talking and to look at her child in an expressionless way, called the “still face” condition (Cohn & Tronick, 1989; Field, 1977; Tronick et al., 1978). Another, using closed circuit video technology, has the child or the caregiver interact with relayed filmed images of their partner from a previous session, producing an unsynchronised and non-contingent interaction that resists repair and adaptation.
Under these conditions, when the infant’s expectations for rhythmic, reciprocal interaction are violated, she becomes visibly concerned. The infant’s movements become jerky and uncoordinated, and she attempts to draw the caregiver into interaction. When repeated attempts to do so fail, the infant withdraws, averts her face, and shows signs of distress such as selfstimulation, yawning and sleepiness, and fretfulness. The infant is initially puzzled when the caregiver resumes their regular interactional style, but the partners soon pick up their interactional tempo (Brazelton et al., 1975).
Behaviour during perturbation experiments indicates that infants only a few months old are extremely sensitive to the caregiver’s responsiveness, and that babies expect a particular kind of contingent human interaction. In these short exchanges, infants behave in ways that are reminiscent of the behaviour of the toddler in James Robertson’s film, passing through phases of distress, despair and detachment. While these brief experimental demonstrations are quickly repaired, they illustrate the likely response of infants to repeated or enduring experiences of these kinds. These disturbances probably play a part in the development of insecure attachments and in the response of infants and small children to depressed caregivers.

It's findings like that which emphasize to me how I want to carefully monitor my use of swings, playpens, vibrating chairs, and other equipment that could be used as static (as opposed to dynamic) enclosures for a child such that I continue to provide social feedback even when my daughter is in such an enclosure.