“Are you sure that’s OK with you?” My daughter shrugs, whateverishly, and goes back to studying the cereal packet. The demanding, sunny toddler of my memory has become an imposing nine-year-old, with a healthy disregard for dad’s middle-class anxieties.
“Yeah, it’s OK.”
I’m about to catch a train to London where I’m giving a talk at the British Library on children and digital technologies. I want to show some of the video footage that Athena took as a toddler, when we handed her a camcorder and let her record whatever took her fancy. But I want to make sure that she knows what I’m doing and is happy about it.
As lecturers at Durham University, my wife Lizzie and I often show family videos in our teaching. Our students learn developmental psychology with real-life illustrations from Athena and my five-year-old son Isaac. Last year, though, the spotlight took on a greater intensity. My book The Baby in the Mirror explored nearly every aspect of Athena’s mental development from birth to three: her understanding of objects and people, her memory and language, her understanding of time and space, her construction of a self, and her burgeoning creativity. Since then, I’ve had a chance to work out what effect this attention has had on her.
I wrote The Baby in the Mirror to give voice to a particular kind of wonder. My professional work, studying infant minds for a living, had been overlaid with the new emotions of fatherhood. As a writer, I saw a phenomenon whose every movement, sound and gesture cried out to be carefully documented. I wanted my telling of Athena’s story to be as detailed and engrossing as a novel but also scientifically sound.
The ethics of this gave me a lot to worry about. As a psychologist, I am conscious of the ethical implications of the work we do with children. Obtaining parental consent was obviously not a problem but that only exacerbated my anxieties. Although I talked it over endlessly with family, friends and colleagues, I was aware of not having an independent reference point on the rights and wrongs of the project. Writers’ autobiographies rarely characterise the author’s own children beyond mentioning emotions of pride and love. One reason for this must be concern over writing honestly about an individual who cannot give proper consent for the scrutiny. The furore earlier this year over The Lost Child, writer and critic Julie Myerson’s book about her estranged teenage son, demonstrates this amply.
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One way of defending myself against these imagined criticisms was to be very particular about the kind of publicity I would allow. Apart from one carefully vetted photoshoot, Athena’s image was not to be used. I realised that there was no strong logic to this: why agonise about visual images when you are going so far with verbal ones?
In the end, the criticisms I feared did not materialise. In one or two reviews I was accused of a clinical detachment when I should have been putting down my notebook and enjoying precious moments with my small child. (In fact, I was taking a break from academia, at home with her day after day, so I had time to do both.) Elsewhere, I sensed suspicion at a man venturing into a woman’s territory. Nowhere, though, was there any outrage about the attention I had brought to my daughter.
Perhaps I should have been less squeamish from the start. Today’s child is videoed, photographed, posted on Facebook and tweeted about endlessly. Parenting blogs such as Her Bad Mother and websites such as babble.com broadcast the exploits of small children for the entire world to read.
Many cyber-parents use images of their children rather than themselves as profile pictures on social networking sites. As feminist author Katie Roiphe recently wrote on the website doublex.com, these adults are to some extent hiding behind their children’s identities. A generation of women, Roiphe argues, are relinquishing their identity by inviting the world to see their much-videoed kids as standing for them. What effect does this attention have on the children concerned? How have Athena, Isaac and their generation been shaped, enhanced or harmed by their exposure to digital image-making?
The home movie is not a new invention, of course. Just as the family snapshot changed the way families remembered their shared moments, so from the 1960s onwards home cinema became the means for a new kind of collective remembering. The modern digital camcorder, cheap, light and technologically marvellous, must now feature in the majority of western homes. According to market research group Mintel, nearly half of parents with babies own video cameras. Social scientists David Buckingham and Rebekah Willett, from the Institute of Education, University of London, have conducted several in-depth studies of the use of camcorders in the home. They have found that, whereas in the early days the movie camera was saved “for best” (special events and family celebrations), it is increasingly used to record everyday activities, particularly when the subjects are babies or when children themselves are doing the recording.
I suspect our coverage of Athena’s development, about 20 hours of footage over three years, was typical. Becoming the subject of a book was unusual but the amount she was exposed to the camera lens was not.
As a means of capturing development at a time of rapid change, this kind of scrutiny has no equal. Toddlers engage in a constant revisionist project, destroying the evidence of their former selves as they hurtle towards the next developmental milestone. When I was piecing together the story of Athena’s development, the video record guaranteed that I was remembering her as she was then, rather than some more recent, interloping version. I was keen to capture not just an image but the particular emotional quality of being with a small child. Every detail mattered.
It wasn’t just me who revelled in the incontrovertible evidence of the camcorder. Small children love having their lives played back to them. Several of Buckingham and Willett’s participants describe how watching such footage provided a vital bonding moment. One said this about her five-year old daughter: “She loves it when I explain, and she now sees herself in the cot. And she says, ‘Oh, how cute I was. How nice I was.’ She really enjoys it. She even asks to see the baby films of herself. It’s like they don’t believe they were babies. So I put it on.”
Exposure to such recordings has a profound effect on how we make sense of our own pasts. Photos and videos, watched and rewatched after the event, are absorbed seamlessly into the stories of our lives. From around two and a half, kids have a good understanding of how photographic representations work. They realise that an image represents a bit of reality and are beginning to understand that changes to the reality after the photo was taken will not somehow magically make their way into the representation. Videos are probably more powerful than photographs in cementing memories because they capture the details of the actions involved (riding a bike, scoring a goal), as well as other contextual information such as the wind in the trees or the music that was playing. In more vivid detail than a family snapshot, a home movie will show children where they have been and what they did there, and help to fill in the details of a memory that can potentially last a lifetime.
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Do children actually recognise themselves in these vignettes? Identifying yourself in this way requires a skill called mirror self-recognition. If you have a willing toddler, you can easily test this out at home. Let your volunteer have a few moments of fun with their own reflection, as toddlers do. Then surreptitiously apply a blob of rouge to the child’s nose. Children younger than about 18 months typically show no reaction to the temporary disfigurement. They may think it’s odd that the child in the mirror has acquired a red spot but they make no effort to reach up to their own nose to remove it. In failing to reverse the change, they are showing that they do not recognise the face as their own.
Mirrors give us a way of assessing young children’s self-understanding but do they actually play a part in the development of that knowledge? Mirror self-recognition has been studied extensively in animals, including primates, with no evidence that the amount of exposure to mirrors makes self-recognition more likely. In one study, mirror self-recognition was assessed in a sample of Bedouin families who had had little experience with mirrors. The toddlers from these families were no worse at recognising themselves than a comparison group of Israeli children for whom mirrors were commonplace.
When it comes to recognising yourself in a home movie, the situation is a little more complicated. Families use camcorders as mirrors on to the past, not the present, and locating yourself in the past is one of the greatest challenges of toddlerhood. Knowing that the kid riding your bike on the screen is you, as you used to be, doesn’t typically happen until around the age of three. When Athena watched videos of herself at this age, she referred to the child in the picture as “Athena”, not as “me”, as though suspecting that her historical self was an impostor.
The understanding of how your self extends through time continues to develop through the preschool and early school years. We need more research before we can be sure whether watching home movies really helps to shape a developing self.
What camcorders do give us is a chance to see how the world looks from those 2ft-high points of view. Handing the camcorder over to children is a great way of finding out what interests them. Developmental psychologists use special head-mounted video cameras, embedded in a soft headband and worn by children as they play or solve puzzles in the lab. Looking back at our own footage, I noticed that Athena took an interest in widgets and knobs, such as the light in our car’s ceiling, and also in parts of her body (there was much cinematic pondering of her own feet, for example).
Filmed evidence of our early lives is never going to be a perfect record. For every scene that takes its place in the director’s cut of Athena’s life, there will be plenty – unrecorded, and so never replayed – consigned to oblivion. This contrast between the remembered and the forgotten is likely to be even sharper in Athena’s case, given that the remembered has now been written about and reproduced in a couple of publishers’ print runs.
What about the scenes I cut from the book? Have I rendered them unrememberable? There were scenes I did not want to write about, of course, just as I instinctively stopped filming whenever she hurt herself or became upset. This is an extreme version of a problem that all parents have to face. We each play a part in editing our children’s life stories, by talking about this and not that, by packing the camcorder on one day but not another. Children will still remember the unrecorded bits, of course, but the constant struggle for coherence that is memory-making will have one fewer prop on which to rely.
It’s almost time for my train. I kiss the children goodbye and leave for London. Today I am going to show some videos of Athena’s life for the first time, excerpts from the footage she took as a two-year-old. In my struggle with the ethics of my project, I am still editing, censoring, erring on the side of discretion. There are clips that seem so intimate an invitation into her imaginative world – what she saw, what mattered to her – that I couldn’t show them in public. And I’m still not sharing any footage in which her image appears. Like an anxious tribesman, I am superstitious about the soul-stealing power of the camera. If my audience want a picture, they will have to imagine one for themselves.
Charles Fernyhough’s ‘The Baby in the Mirror: A Child’s World from Birth to Three’ is published by Granta, £8.99
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A short history of the psychology of childhood
Developmental psychology, the study of how children grow and develop, has roots in the work of German biochemist and psychologist Wilhelm Preyer (1841-1897), writes Jonathan Openshaw. In the 20th century this new discipline was shaped by psychologists such as Jean Piaget (1896-1980), Lev Vygotsky (1896-1934) and John Bowlby (1907-1990).
Developing children think in a fundamentally different way to adults but there is still some debate about how exactly children approach the world. In this fast developing field, here’s a brief guide to this theoretical minefield.
Attachment theory
Bowlby, the founding father of attachment theory, was the first to suggest that babies have an innate drive to form an attachment to another person.
Bowlby’s experiences as a child psychiatrist in the aftermath of the second world war led him to focus on how losing an attachment figure can be detrimental for children’s psychological development. Later research by Mary Ainsworth shows that children form attachment relationships to anyone who cares for them. The crucial issue, however, is that the attachment relationship will be insecure if the caregiver has not responded sensitively to the child.
Theory of mind
Developmental psychology postulates that children need to develop a “theory of mind” in order to understand that people’s behaviour is largely governed by their beliefs, thoughts and emotions.The most widely used test of this theory was developed in 1983 by Heinz Wimmer and Josef Perner and establishes whether the child realises that a person can believe something that is, in reality, false.
Moral development
Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) hypothesised that we develop a super-ego that strives for an acquired sense of perfection. This acts in contradiction to the pleasure- principle driven impulses of the unconscious id. Piaget saw morality as an acquired system, postulating that children lack personal values at birth and lack the ability to judge right from wrong. By adulthood, most of us will have developed a socially compatible sense of morality.
