Doctor Rosemary Roberts: Companionable Relationships - Transcript

Doctor Rosemary Roberts: Companionable Relationships - Transcript

Pre-Birth to Three: - Doctor Rosemary Roberts: Companionable relationships

I think one of the most important, well the most crucial thing about children’s wellbeing has got to be relationships. We know that it’s the things that go on between the small child and the surrounding children, adults and so on, which grows their wellbeing, those things and I always like to think about this in terms of companionship, which is a wonderful idea that Colwyn Trevarthen has given us so much to think about. My feeling is that it’s children’s companions who are crucially important in wellbeing. By companions I mean, of course, their primary carers, so mother, father or partner, or other primary carer, companions. A child’s companion is someone that that child sees often and knows very well and the child and the adult are bound together by love or affection. So, of course we’ve got the primary carers in the family, of course we’ve got grandparents, if we’re lucky to have grandparents nearby to see often is one of the criteria and the lovely people next door who get to know your children very well if you’re lucky with that. But also, absolutely by central definition, are the child’s key person in the nursery or in the day care, whoever that person is does know the child well, sees them often and should and usually are bound together by love and affection, which is a very essential part of it.

Then the other aspect of it, I think, is that in terms of child development, it’s lovely to think about it in terms of companionable learning and which is quite close to the Epi Projects wonderful piece of finding about the importance of sustained, shared thinking. Thinking together over a period of time without a hurry.

But I think companionable learning has a slightly another layer to that because I would say it’s not just thinking together, it’s about the child and the companion learning with each other, learning together so that when you get that companionable interaction going on with the child and the companion, it’s not just for the child’s learning for the child’s development it’s all about side-by-side learning, it’s all about ... You may not be learning the same things because after all a child may be coming to grips with what sand feels, what water does, what you can do with mud but while they’re learning that, the companion is learning so much about that young child. You know our burning professional question for all of us is what is going on in the mind of this child, and if only we could have a look sometimes but that’s what drives us isn’t it, and that’s what drives our very careful observation and what, how we need to, why we need to learn about children so carefully. It’s all about paying attention in a companionable way.