Gunnar – sensitivity and responsiveness

So we constantly hear about the importance of sensitive and responsive care and the challenge is figuring out what that actually looks like. One way to translate that that we’ve talked about is like a game of tennis. Serve and return. This is the basis for all early learning is that kind of serve and return, you have with a sensitive and responsive adult. So the baby goos and you respond.  

The challenge is whether you’re responding too much and that’s where the sensitive part of this comes. I don’t know if you had a hovering mother. Luckily I did not have a hovering mother, but the kind of parent that is just over you all the time. Every little breath you make. They’re there. They’re wiping your face. They’re looking at you. They’re trying to be, they’re being so responsive they’re driving you nuts. That is over-responsiveness and it’s not sensitive to what the child needs. And that’s why we have both of those words: responsive and sensitive.  

So, it’s critically important to be able to read the child’s signals to figure out when they need you and when they don’t, when it might be important to step back and say, “No, you can do this” or when the child falls down say, “Oh, you’re fine. Get up” kind of thing is actually more sensitive than, “Oh poor baby you fell down. Are you all right? Oh my goodness”. Because what you’re trying to do as a parent is to find that balance between what my child wants, what my child needs, and where my child needs to be tomorrow.  

And you don’t want to under-respond: “Oh, you’re fine. Get up”. You know, my parent never understood that I had needs. “You’re fine. Get up.” But you don’t want to over-respond. It’s a tough job being a parent. It’s a horribly, horribly tough job. Some kids are much more forgiving than others. They can grow up into being robust kids in a range, even if we don’t quite get it, none of us by the way get it right, and a robust range of us getting it wrong, other kids are more delicate. They need a bit more, the range of your variation is a bit more narrow.  

But of course we can generally judge by watching how the kids are. And if you’re watching families, if you’re watching families, I sometimes tell my students to stop thinking and just, “How do you feel?” If you’re watching and you’re feeling is “Ahh, that feels good”, then that’s probably they found a reasonable balance. If you’re watching, you’re getting tense, and you feel like, “Eww, I don’t know what’s wrong but I don’t feel good watching this”, something’s off and when you do the analysis you might be able to figure it out.