Here is a paradox worth exploring: it is all ordinary, and at the same time, it is all extraordinary. I know this paradox applies to information technology, to numeracy and to literacy. It has to, simply because it is all ordinary and extraordinary. However, I want to go back to basics because if you don’t have a good grounding in the basics, what follows can be very precarious.

Basically, we are a part of the biosphere of this planet. As far as we know, we are the one species which, as a part of the creation, can reflect on and wonder at the creative process. That is, we can wonder at the Life on this planet. For adults, it is in the reflection and the wondering that the extraordinary is revealed.

Take rain for example. Most of us have been heard to moan about the rain. That’s us responding in our ‘most ordinary mode’. In our ‘extraordinary mode’ we will wonder at the moisture in this Earth’s finite water system being evaporated into vapour, vapour gathering in the sky and returning to earth to keep gardens watered and plants growing. This cycle goes on eternally and it is pretty extraordinary. Will we wonder out loud with our children? Will we stay in appreciation when it rains because we know our lives depend on it?

Children wonder at the rain. They wonder with their bodies and their senses. They play in it, they catch it in their hands or on their tongues. If we let them. So why don’t we let them more often, do we really have good reasons for curbing their love affair with rain? Or is it that we have lost our sense of wonder?

Babies are natural scientists and ‘wonderers’. They wonder about everything, but not with their minds the way we do, their minds are in the very early stages of formation. Infants and toddlers wonder with their bodies and their senses. We can join them at that sensory level, being very present, in-the-moment, wondering, noticing and matching their intentness they explore. Intuition is the most reliable guide over when to say silent, when to speak and when to wonder out loud. To be sure, children need us to wonder out loud. How else will they grow their vocabulary? How else will they learn that the cicada has spent years under the ground before crawling to the surface, ‘birthing’ itself from its skeleton, and then flying and singing for the first time?

We’ll also need to be quiet enough to see that this ordinary old cicada ‘shell’ is quite extraordinary. With the child, we’ll both silently notice it has dirt on its forelegs, it has a long straw for a mouth. There is a split in the shell, the very place that it extracted itself from. And we won’t tell the child any of this, but we could ponder out loud after we had noticed: I wonder what that’s for? I wonder how that got there?

Answers aren’t important, it’s the right question that allows us to enter more deeply the mystery of ordinary-extraordinary. The right question doesn’t have a right answer. The right question generates more wondering and pondering. The wondering is very focused, it is actually a meditative state. Brainwave patterns change, and you and the child enter a focused peace together, a resonance. Wonder full.

Like any love affair, wondering takes time - a love affair with the rain, with the cicadas, with your family, with Life - it all takes time. Great. That’s what we are here for and we’ve got plenty of time. All this talk about not enough time and too busy shows how badly we neglect the basics in our culture. Too busy doing what? As Goethe noted, “Things that matter most must never be at the mercy of things that matter least”.

Wondering is a non-judgemental state. In the act of wondering you don’t judge, you just notice. There is no ‘good’ or ‘bad’, it just is. So snails aren’t bad, snails are simply snails, ordinary and at the same time, extraordinary. The way we speak about and behave with snails can grow wonder, and it can also dismiss wonder and even kill it:
     They’re just snails.
     Yuk slime. Get them out of here at once.
     We’ll poison them.
     Aargh! Squash them. Now.
The toddler who was fascinated with how the snail moved, amazed by the iridescent trail, intrigued with the retractable ‘horn-eyes’, in awe of how it could all fit back in its shell-house now ends his love affair with the part of Life called snail.

What then is our role in keeping the wonder alive? Two thousand years ago we were given a clue, “Except you become as little children you cannot enter the Kingdom of Heaven”. Whatever other levels of meaning this quote carries, it is also  about the love affair children have for Life on this planet. Children are curious, they explore, seeing freshly with non-judgemental eyes. They are already in heaven, here, on earth. And how do we encourage this?

We have to go outside
Make provision for lots more outside time together. You need to be outside to lie on the grass and wonder about the clouds. Daisies, slater-bugs, sparrows - these extraordinary things live outside.

Stop watching the clock and start seeing
In the long run, does it really matter if you are late for lunch because you were in the middle of watching a blackbird pulling, pulling, and persistently pulling her lunch from the lawn?

Start watching for and weeding out judgements 
Take the tiny scarlet pimpernel flower and the buttercup, these are known as weeds and treated accordingly, yet each is as ordinary and as extraordinary as a lotus or an orchid - if you stop judging. The Teton-Lakota people do not even have a word for weed, there is no such thing.

Look small
Truly, and ant, a cockroach or a stick insect is just as amazing as a giraffe or a jaguar, just smaller - and easier to get to spend time with and getting to know.

Watch what we say
As we noted with the snail example above, our words can encourage wonder and love for Life, or they can kill it stone dead.

Get yourself a personal trainer
Probably the best qualified mentors I know are children. Infants and young toddlers model to you how to relax, take time and concentrate on your wondering. I’ve observed they have a far longer attention span for concentrating and exploring single-mindedly than many adults. When it comes to a mentor on questioning you can’t go past a child. Children ask the best questions, decent juicy pondering questions like - “Well, how does the moon make the tide come in?” and “How does the baby get in there?”

Save your money
Basics don’t cost anything. You don’t fundraise for a visit to make a daisy chain or to make mud pies. It costs nothing to find a fairy toothbrush or to lie on a newly mown lawn. Your ‘consultant’ will not charge you the earth when she asks “what makes the grass smell?” and “why is one cloud white and that other one black?” Between the two of you, in your love affair with Life, you’ll be growing curiosity and belonging, intelligence and understanding and you will be keeping the spirit of wonder very much alive. That’s very ordinary and paradoxically, most extraordinary.

Pennie Brownlee

Great expectations #1
When a baby is born he is expecting one thing and one thing only, to be on or within sight and/or sound of his Mother. Regardless of what the culture might tell you, there is a very good Nature reason for this close, warm, physical partnership. During pregnancy (gestation) the baby depends on the nurturing from the mother via the womb which serves as a ‘nest’. There he grows his little body and structures to the point where they can survive being ‘outside of the nest’ (without medical assistance). The pattern of Nature is to grow the little Earthling to the stage where he can ‘get out of the nest’ safely and keep on with his growing on ‘the outside of the nest’. Ashley Montague called this ‘outside the nest’ period exterogestation.

Get it right in the beginning
Everyone understands that the pregnant mother and her baby are ‘a unit’. What our culture has lost sight of is that after the birth the Mother and the baby are still a unit for exactly the same reasons as during pregnancy - the baby needs to be with or on the Mother while his little systems develop and grow to the level of functioning where they can regulate themselves, independently. This takes all of the first year while the sensory-motor brain gets itself up, running and fully functional. And that is only the start of the complex task of emotional regulation, and it is the 'mother matrix'* that acts as 'the trainer wheels' for this development. This close, warm, sacred partnership is the human baby’s Greatest Expectation and meeting it needs to become our first priority as individuals and as a nation if we are to align with the Wisdom of Nature and Nurture. It is the safety and security of the close relationship that allows the baby’s systems to relax into the harmonious state, the state that frees him to enter the experiences which simultaneously grow and unfold him.
* If it cannot be the mother then there must be a substitute set of 'trainer wheels of nurture': father, aunty, grandmother.... 
In the childcare situation centres are implementing primary care (one main carer for the child, their trusted other**) because not to do so is cruelty. Failing to provide primary care ignores every baby's and child's greatest need - to have an emotional anchor for emotional safety and stability.
** I am not keen on the term 'key teacher' because it elevates teaching above caring. Humans of every age would choose caring over teaching any day if they were looking to the big things like happiness, belonging and love. How much more-so for the young child who has to have caring to unfold her potential so that she can make the most of any teaching?
 
Great expectations #2
Having established the relationship, the safe place from which to continue growing and unfolding, the child is expecting freedom: the freedom to move, freedom to explore and freedom to play. When not ‘in the arms/on the back’ of her Mother, the baby is driven to move. The patterns of the movement are within the child but the child needs the freedom to respond to those urges. In responding, the child not only unfolds the pattern, but she grows both her body and brain at the same time. Carla Hannaford points us in the right direction when she reminds us, “Movement is the architect of the brain.” This is co-creation, and the starting position for this ballet of unfolding and growing is on the back, on the ground (or the floor). Every baby who is lucky enough to be nurtured naturally by being placed on the back - and not in a bouncer, high chair, jumping swing, ‘walker’, ‘sitter’ etc  - will demonstrate the Wisdom of Nature by unfolding perfect balance, agility and posture. These children think and process, look and move very differently from those whose big-people-in-their-lives didn’t know how to support them naturally. Children allowed the freedom to move are at home, balanced and agile in their bodies, they are set up perfectly for the exploration and adventurous play that is coded into them, awaiting its turn to unfold and grow.

Great expectations #3
Every child expects to play. They are not expecting our obsession with literacy and numeracy, they are expecting to play. There are patterns of play coded into the Earthling just waiting for the chance for expression, and in the expression of those play patterns the child will grow and develop. Many of human play patterns are patterns shared by others in the mammal family, patterns that grow agility and social competence, build strength and usher in pleasure: think running, jumping, leaping, swinging, tug-of-war, chasey, rolling, tumbling, wrestling. These important patterns are very often stopped or forbidden by grown-ups who are unaware of the benefits to the child. Better to allow the play patterns, and if you need to, divert them to a more suitable setting.

Play is the whole point of being human 
Human Earthlings have an ‘old mammalian brain’, the limbic system. It is the emotional-relational brain, and if you have seen documentaries about the complex social communication systems in wolf packs, horse herds, whale pods... you will know that growing this part of our being is where our happiness lies: the ability to get on gracefully and graciously with our own kind. As every mammal instinctively knows, it is play that grows this part of our brain and being. You don’t see too many dolphins or cows out there with alphabet friezes and counting charts - that stuff all belongs to the neocortex, the ‘great thinking brain’ or the ‘new mammalian brain’. The neocortex itself requires a fully developed limbic system for it’s own intelligence to be able to unfold its limitless potential. As in building any structure - including the structure of the brain - every effort goes into completing the foundations before you think about building the ground floor or the first floor. By analogy, our obsession with literacy and numeracy (both amazing human skills) is destructive when it takes time from the focused play required for constructing the ‘foundations and ground floor.’ This obsession with literacy and numeracy is politically driven and is the equivalent of building the roof onto the concrete-foundation pad. 

Great expectations #4
Every child expects to play outside in Nature - that is, they do until they contract the fatal sedentary-stay-inside-and-be-entertained-habit. Outside, all of the things we have talked about come into their own. The child is secure and can regulate her own emotional and physiological systems thanks to the ‘trainer wheels’ of that sacred first relationship, she has incarnated into her body and is at home there, thanks to the freedom of movement, exploration and play - and now she can go outside and play***. For hundreds of thousands of years every child has played outside. In doing so they have grown their sense of belonging beyond their parents, beyond their wider family-tribe-community, and into the part of Nature where they live. Many cultures recognise this stage of the ‘nested-bonding’ in their language by referring to Nature as kin. They speak about Mother Earth, Father Sky, Father Sun, Grandmother Moon. Many cultures refer to stones, mountains, rivers, plants and animals as brothers and sisters, or as the Lakota people sum it up, Mitakuye Oyasin, All Our Relations. This belonging is the belonging every Earthling is patterned to realise. It ushers in a contentment and grounding that underpins the life-journey. It includes - and goes far beyond - the ‘Belonging’ written into our NZ early childhood curriculum, Te Whariki.
***This is not the first time she has been out to play, she has been taken outside from the very beginning: into the garden, to the river, to the park, into the orchard, to the beach, into the bush... Just as the baby in the womb listened to the heart to know about her next matrix, the child imprints with Nature and the earth before shifting to the earth matrix.

Great expectations #5
Children are expecting Life outside. For hundreds of thousands of years children have left the cave or the castle to play outside in the grass, the stream, the sand, the garden, the bush, the trees, the snow. What they have found in their particular eco-niche is family, All Our Relations - the green and growing ones, the swimmers, the slitherers, the crawlers, the hoppers, the winged ones, the four leggeds.... Depending on the culture and example of the big-people-in-their-lives, they have cared for these Earthlings, hunted them for food, taunted them for pleasure, killed them for power, and latterly poisoned them for convenience. The way you learn to behave with your wider family decides how you will care for the Family on Earth, including your own family when and if you make one. You model and meet this expectation when you understand All Life is Sacred and you live your Life accordingly.

Children expecting Life outside are let down when we who control their environment betray them. Betray is a hefty word, but we do betray children when we strip the Earth of Life to make it convenient for us. Grass and mud are replaced with safety-surface and paving, trees are replaced with garish plastic climbing structures, bushes are replaced by garish plastic huts, gardens are not replaced. This modelling of gross disrespect for Life and the Earth is legal and ‘approved’ by the ministry of education. Lucky are the children in Europe where the actual eco-niche can be the childcare ‘centre’ itself - be it lake-side, mountain pasture, seaside, forest or copse. Nationally, we will know we are making progress in nurturing our children when our ministry gets wise enough to license programmes instead of its restrictive practice of issuing licenses for premises only. 

Great expectations #6
Every child is born longing for and expecting stories. As author Ursula Le Guin noted, “There have been great cultures that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories.” Stories and play combine to begin an alchemy in the neocortex, the alchemy of imaginative play. This uniquely human form of play is the foundation of symbolic, metaphoric and abstract thinking upon which all higher learning depends, and once again, it is the loop of creation. The child takes images stored from previous experience and overlays them into time-space reality creating a new reality. This reality is not a virtual reality, this reality is multidimensional and the child lives within it, in charge of her ‘world’, and modulating it. If that sounds a bit abstract, it is simple: The child pretends that the fallen tree is a house (overlays her house image onto the tree creating a new reality) and ‘climbs up the stairs to the bedroom’ (lives within her new reality in all of her human dimensions). She invites her friend to join her and tells her she can have the ‘top bunk’. Down in the kitchen hydrangea leaves ‘become’ plates, sticks become cutlery and conkers are the (metaphors standing for) hamburgers. This play becomes richer and richer the more children do it. The richer it becomes the more brain connections are made as images and symbols are recalled, combined, joined, synthesised, created. Every one of these neurological events creates the ‘brain-grunt’ that will power future symbolic abstract thinking, including reading, writing and calculus. Play researcher Stuart Brown notes that imaginary play with friends builds the social literacy (the ability to read people and interact with them cooperatively) that is crucial to a child’s long-term health and happiness.

The heart is the compass for all Earthlings. Listen to the subtle wisdom of your heart and let it guide you as you meet the expectations above. You'll know when your heart is pointing you in the right direction for each child, because it feels right. The question "Does it feel right?" is the ultimate check on whether or not it is the heart you are hearing. And if it does feel right, follow your heart and you will end up in the right place. Guaranteed.

Recommended reading:
Nature and the Human Soul: Cultivating Wholeness and Community in a Fragmented World by Bill Plotkin
The Death of Religion and the Rebirth of Spirit: A Return to the Intelligence of the Heart by Joseph Chilton Pearce
The Biology of Transcendence: A Blueprint for the Human Spirit by Joseph Chilton Pearce
Magical Child by Joseph Chilton Pearce
Play: How it Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination and Invigorates the Soul by Stuart Brown

And a link
Jeremy Rifkin - The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis
Warning: As Jeremy says, "I want to start off on a very sombre note" and he does. But we are all citizens of this planet, all in it together and we need to see what kind of future we are preparing our children for. If you aren't brave enough to do sombre, do this edited version - you will still learn a lot about your children's capabilities and what that means for us.
RSA: The Empathetic Civilisation 

Special offer to parents: ‘Ultra Parenting Glasses’. These highly desirable glasses have lenses lovingly crafted from very pure crystal enabling you to see ‘the interesting moments’ of parenting from a new and clearer perspective. These special glasses are free to all parents of young children and they can be fitted and functional by the time you reach the end of this page. 

As a parent, there will be times when you are very challenged by your children - they won’t listen, they won’t do what you ask, they fight when you have asked them not to, they won’t stay in bed when you put them there, they melt down when you are out and other people are looking at you.... That is the nature of parenting. And you have two ways of viewing your child in situations like this: you can view your child as a problem - that’s what most people do - or you can fit specially ground pure crystal lenses and view this child as your teacher. The child who challenges you can teach you more than any other teacher you have ever had or will ever have, and without a student loan. So how does a ‘problem’ suddenly turn into a teacher? Your perspective.

The child who drives you to despair: this child is the one who takes you to the very edge of your knowing, every day. He shows you when you have used up all the skills that got you to this point. She prods you into getting the upgrade, installing the next module of communication and partnership skills. Children are Life’s way of educating parents in the things that really matter, things like getting along with each other harmoniously, things like living together and staying friends. Children ‘grow us up’.

Fit your new lenses and stand beside your child’s bed when he or she is asleep - all children look like angels when they are asleep. And there, silently from your heart, acknowledge your child not as a problem, but as your greatest teacher. In a way, nothing changes. But in a way, everything changes. The next time your child’s behaviour challenges you, instead of viewing the child as the problem, you just notice: “Here we go. Here’s my next lot of learning, courtesy of my greatest teacher” .

Be the best you can
The ‘new age’ literature, which many people scoff at, makes an important point when it says that the best gift that we can give this planet is to Be The Best We Can. The assumption in that advice is that you and I have it in us to grow, and to become more skilled as we grow. This is another way of saying that as adults, we have the capability to change the habits of our behaviour, we can change our ‘default settings’. And as we change our behaviours becoming more skilled, more heart-based and less judgmental, we become a Gift to those around us: a non-techno-gift which undergoes periodic upgrades. How cool is that!

The Default Setting is downloaded effortlessly 
It turns out it is very cool if you happen to be a child in the company of such a ‘Gift to the Planet’. Unlike other mammals which come onto the planet with almost all of their brains hardwired, human babies come onto the planet with approximately 15% of their brain wired up and the remaining 85% to be wired up. While we have known for decades that most of that wiring-up of the brain (learning) will happen before the child’s seventh birthday, it is only with better research tools with which to study the brain that we are growing in our understanding of just ‘how’ of this wiring up happens. The infant’s brain utilises just two bands of brainwave frequency until six years old: first delta until two years of age and then both delta and theta. Delta and theta are ‘hypnogogic’ states, meaning they are pure down-load states, and they are fast. According to Dr Bruce Lipton, in his presentation “Nature, Nurture and the Power of Love”, they process information at four billion bits each second. They miss nothing.

The computer is not the programmes it downloads
This ‘supreme computer’ is designed to download two programmes: the programme of what humans do in this society - the culture - so that the infant will be able to survive and operate in it, and the programme of the geographical place that the stork delivers the baby to so the child can survive and operate in it - the earth environment. Think about it: if by some cosmic accident a Bedouin baby started running the programmes ‘New Zealand Culture’ and ‘The Temperate Land at Taupo’ that would be of no use whatsoever. The Bedouin baby would not survive, he or she would need to have downloaded two very different programmes to survive in the desert (the earth environment) with people who see the world differently and who speak a different language (the culture). Fortunately, human design is so foolproof that there are no cosmic accidents of this nature. All babies download everything in their presence. They miss not one bit of information while downloading, meaning they download who you are - not who you would like to think you are. They down load all of you, conscious and subconscious, all of who you are in your default settings, into their computer as their default setting it goes. It’s kind-of-like plugging your iPod into your computer and watching the transfer of files. Frightening stuff. And if that doesn’t scare you, you haven’t understood what I have said, or you are already a Saint. Bless you.

Time for your individual and for a national stocktake
Why is this elegant foolproof downloading system important to us in New Zealand at this time? Well, parents learn how to parent from the way they were parented, by way of the cultural downloading process described above. Children download their ‘parenting default setting’ from those caring for them, before they are six. All well and good if the files being transferred aren’t corrupted, but New Zealand is the bottom of the OECD countries for child abuse, neglect and fatalities. Obviously, some of those files being transferred at the speed of light are not good for infants. Sure, we are probably not comparing apples with apples in that it is unlikely every country’s reporting procedures are equivalent, but all is not well for children in Godzone. I had a ‘maximum wake-up call’ when I went to the Pikler Institute in Budapest in 2004.

If I were to draw a continuum with one end representing The-Supreme-Respect-for-Children-Position and the opposite end representing The-Maximum-Disrespect-for-Children-Resulting-in-Death-Position, and if I asked you to place yourself on that continuum, you would probably want to place yourself down at the Supreme-Respect end. Me too. But the wake-up call for me was that I couldn’t. Even when we think we are doing the best, we are actually nearer to the middle of the continuum. Nearer the middle is the default setting for the ‘best’ position in our culture. 

Change is easy
The good news is that default settings can be changed in your Heart-Brain Computer. Beliefs are the programmes of your heart-brain-human-computer, and while you can ‘get inside the system’ and discover the beliefs and change them - there is an easier way. You can change what you do. Here is an example: You can replace one of your corrupted files with the belief, “A baby is a free and equal human being.” Accordingly, you start changing what you do so that you behave as though the baby is a free and equal human being. The easiest way to work out how to do this is ask yourself, “As a free and equal human being, would I like it if this were done to me?”

• Would I like to be picked up physically without any warning?
• Would I like to be picked up from behind without knowing it was coming?
• Would I like to be passed around to people I didn’t know?
• Would I like to go to sleep in one place and wake up in another place not known to me? 
• Would I like it if people laughed at me and called me a sook when I was crying?
• Would I like it if people told me to settle down when I was excited about something?
• Would I like to be ignored when I was communicating with someone?
• Would I like to be exiled (up the other end of the house or being put into time out) when I was in emotional turmoil?
• Would I like it if someone made me say I was sorry when I was not sorry?
• Would I like it if they made me kiss the person I wasn’t sorry with?
• Would I like to be put into a restraining device that I couldn’t get out of when I wanted to?
• Would I like to be stuck in a position so that I couldn’t move - like being ‘plonked’ to sit?
• Would I like it if I were hungry and I wasn’t allowed to eat?
• Would I like it if I weren’t hungry and I had to eat?
• Would I like to be made to eat everything on my plate?
• Would I like it if someone wouldn’t let me go to bed when I wanted to?
• Would I like it if someone made me go to bed when I didn’t want to?
• Would I like to be tied into bed so that I could not move?
• Would I like to be talked about, in front of me, as if I didn’t exist? 
• Would I like to be told what to do?
• Would I like to be told to do it NOW? ...

The list is endless, and a free and equal human being in a healthy relationship will not answer yes to any of the above questions. Not one. Knowing this requires us to change what we do.

Relationship is what every baby is designed to download
“But what if the baby doesn’t know what’s good for it,” you ask? Spot the error in that sentence. Go on, go back and read that sentence again. A baby is not an ‘it’. ‘It’ is the pronoun used for things and it tells us a lot about our cultural default setting that we can refer to a baby as ‘it’ without cringing.

Back to the question: if you have asked that question, it means that your place on the continuum is being made conscious to you, your resistance to treating babies as free and equal human beings lets you know where your default setting is set. Great. That means it is now up in your consciousness, “Up and on it’s way out,” as my friend Kimberley would say. And this has been the journey for me since my visits to Budapest in 2004 and 2006. The way they do things at the Emmi Pikler Institute brought up into my consciousness my default settings - many of which were disrespectful. I am a product of my culture and I was ignorant of own lack of respect, particularly for infants.

Dr Pikler dismissed the first complement of nurses employed for her nursery-home because they too were ignorant. They were medically trained, and their ‘culture’ was around germs and hospital corners, not about the critical factor in growing healthy human beings, the sanctity of the relationship. To replace the trained nurses, Dr Pikler chose untrained women who liked children, and began her own specially tailored training with this axiom: “I have no doubt that you love and care for the babies. I will show you how.” It’s as if she knew that the act of doing things differently bypasses any of the ‘corrupted cultural files’ about children. Doing things differently is ‘Respect In Action’. In turn, respect in action is what the child downloads as their default setting for care, relationship, partnership and the respectful, safe use of power. 

Partnership equals cooperation
In any partnership neither partner is expected to be a mind reader, so instead, humans ‘ask’ for their needs to be met. Babies do not use words to ask, but they do know how to ask, it is coded into them genetically. Babies give us cues so we can partner them and meet their needs. Australian Priscilla Dunstan has shown us how to ‘read’ some of the universal baby clues so we can get off to a flying-partnership-start. Babies give us cues when they need our input, but in a child-unfriendly culture like ours, we don’t interpret the cues as requests to get legitimate needs met, we interpret them as demands. A child friendly culture wouldn’t talk about ‘demand feeding’ because it isn’t ‘demand’ feeding. It is a respectful request from the baby, who will have to ‘speak louder’ if we are deaf to her requests. What else can she do?

It’s how you make me feel that will install my default setting
Here are a few simple things we can do, things that feel respectful. Although each of these suggestions refers to the infant, each suggestion works for every age: for toddlers, middle childhood, teens, partners, parents, colleagues, people with very special needs, and even for elders who have started checking out of this plane.

Tell your infant everything you are going to do - before you do it.
That way there are no surprises. That way they know what is coming, and when they can anticipate what’s coming they can participate in the partnership with you.

Ask your baby for their cooperation
“I want to put this sleeve on. Will you give me your hand?” and very lightly tap your baby’s hand with your finger so that she has another clue from you - and then wait while she processes your request. “I am going to take your hand and pop it in this sleeve” - and wait before you do it. It won’t be too many weeks before the baby puts her hand into yours.

When we are requested to help with the dishes (for example), none of us leaps up immediately, clicks our heels and picks up the teatowel. We are more likely to say something like, “Sure, I’ll just finish this email then I’ll be there.” Why do we expect more of infants and toddlers? Could it be that the belief in our cultural default setting is that infants and toddlers are not quite human?

Acknowledge your infant’s unfolding will and autonomy
Offering your child a choice acknowledges her as a free and equal human being who is learning to choose on her way to full autonomy and self discipline:

“Would you like to have the red T shirt or the striped one?”
“Would you like to climb into the chair by yourself or would you like me to lift you?”
“You look like you have finished your food. Are you finished? Fine, I will take the plate.”
“I would like to blow your nose for you. Let me know when you are ready.” 

The Gesture
There is a gesture of invitation, which works at the physiological level. You turn you hands palm upward It alters the body’s electromagnetic frequency and every child can read the message transmitted in that frequency: it asks the invited would they like to partner you. If this sounds too good to be true, it is better than that. When you make this gesture to an infant or toddler from your place of invitation you will be amazed at the response. What has become obvious for me is that infants are wired for an equal partnership, and the first stage that they can manage in the partnership dance is responding to the invitation. It is the invitation which sets the two-way nature of the partnership, the two way interaction of two equal wills lays the foundation on which to build all future relationships. All of them.

I have come to believe that one of the reasons our culture thinks so poorly about infants’ capabilities is that we don’t invite them to be partners, so they have no way they can prove to us how capable they are. Instead, we treat them as helpless, and so they download helplessness by default. Learned helplessness becomes their default setting. It cannot be otherwise. 

If you are reading this it is more than likely you are one of the growing number of grown-ups who is part of the evolution of consciousness around babies and children. Every one of your respectful interactions changes things for our children for the better.                                                                                                                                                                                           


                                                                                                                                           Pennie Brownlee

The meaning of Life
Literacy and numeracy: two words that have acquired magical properties in many people’s minds. If we can concentrate on literacy and numeracy and lift our national standards so that no child is left behind all will be well. All will be well with what? All will be well with our economy, our GDP, our growth rate, our balance of payments? Or all will be well with our children? It seems to me highly unlikely that the zenith of human education is to be groomed as an economic unit in a mercantile system.

I wish for you...
When holding a new baby and gazing in awe of the potential of this new life, it is doubtful that parents, grandparents or fairy godmothers murmur into the baby’s ear, “I wish for you to be a great reader and good with numbers”. A politician or ministerial advisor maybe, but no-one who had the child’s best interests at heart. “May you know love, happiness and friendship,” is the silent heart-felt wish for each new baby.

Have Ph.D., am suicidal
Love, happiness and friendship are the zenith of human existence. While I am certainly not advocating illiteracy, there are people all over the globe who have love, happiness and friendship and can neither read nor write nor do long division. Conversely, there are people who can do calculus blindfold and read in four languages, and yet still they long for love, happiness and friendship. The correlation between lack of love, happiness and friendship (particularly in the first years) with poor physical health, poor mental health, social dislocation, scholastic underachievement and prison terms has long been understood. An economic advisor with a long-term-big-picture-view would see the potential to save money by altering the focus of the education system, particularly in the early years, starting with parent education.* 

First things first
Literacy has two meanings and one is ‘competence or knowledge in a specified area’. The baby who arrives on this planet has an overwhelming need to grow competence and knowing in the specific area of getting along with people. Humans are social beings, hard wired with the responses which set them up with the potential to achieve ‘competence and knowledge in the specified area’ of human relations - but whether they do or not depends on the big people around them, as we will see. The apprenticeship is served with the mother (and father) and is dependent on how well the mother can grow a peaceful partnership with the child. The mother serves as ‘the trainer wheels of nurture’ until the baby is able to regulate her own physiological systems independently. (If it cannot be the mother because the child is in care, the child must have one trusted caregiver who substitutes for the ‘regular trainer wheels of nurture’.) This partnership is the foundation of the most important literacy of all - people-literacy, or social skills.

It’s a pretty big job
Children are not designed to start reading and writing before they can get along with their own kind. Nature is not that silly, so the child is genetically programmed for people-literacy first. Just as with any other literacy, becoming literate in social skills takes time, and the right time is during the first six years. It is the emotional anchor established in the partnership with the mother and family that is the foundation for learning all the other skills required to be certified as literate in people skills. And there is plenty to learn. When people literacy is taken seriously and supported each child will 

•   learn how to be empathetic to the feelings of others
•   learn how to grow, exercise and manage their will
•   learn how to ask for their needs to be met
•   learn how to say no and to stand up for their own needs and rights
•   learn how to negotiate
•   learn how to manage and express their feelings safely
•   learn the difference between using power or force with others
•   learn how to stay in their power in conflict situations and never resort to using force
•   learn conflict resolution skills
•   learn the speech patterns which are non-violent and lead to solutions
•   learn the social conventions we call manners

Monkey see, monkey do
Many of us grew up in the company of adults who themselves had few of these skills so there wasn’t a chance we could download these skills effortlessly during those first years when ‘sponge learning’ was our speciality. Because our children under six years old are ‘sponge learners’ the curriculum will always be secondary. Children do not download the curriculum, they download who we are; both who we are consciously and who we are below the level of our own awareness. They ‘soak in’ what we say, what we expect, how we behave, our prejudices, our biases, our loves, our dislikes... In turn, they play out the behaviour they have downloaded from those around them, and many of us have been alarmed to see ‘our-less-than-elegant-selves’ turn up in children’s play. 

It’s all about me
Read over the above list again and you, like me, might see that there are things there that you haven’t perfected yet. The question for me is, what are the chances of children becoming people-literate, with honours, in my presence? Can I do all of the above list, elegantly? And if not, am I prepared to become aware of any short-comings and work on them? Working with integrity at improving my people-literacy (including healing the hurts of my heart) will be my biggest contribution to children’s people-literacy, and in turn, to their chances of love, happiness and friendship.

Can all children be wrong?
So where does that leave us over the planning for people-literacy that the box-tickers and the measurers are so fond of? Consult the children. They are the experts at devising the living short term plan, the living long term plan, and a living curriculum which develops all of their potential in those critical years. All over the world, in every culture, in every age, and without any adult input, all children know what to do. They play. Play is genetically encoded into mammals as the way to grow the skills needed for surviving and thriving. Both ‘mammal’ physical play, and human imaginative play are genetically encoded into human children as their way to learn people-literacy. When children play together they create a ‘laboratory’ where they not only get to try out their people-skills, practice and perfect them, they get to respond to their encoded human play-patterns. Acting on these patterns provides the physical workout that grows their brains, imaginations, intellects (head), intelligence (heart), creativity, problem solving - and their skills for being a friend. As the Dalai Lama has said, “Friendship is the highest form of love”.

Shift focus
When children can follow their urge to play with friends, the dynamics between children create a very rich mix in their ‘play laboratory’. There you will find joy, delight, success, collaboration, harmony, exhilaration, love and happiness. You will also find despair, separation, exclusion, envy, failure, conflict, discord and unhappiness. How will children learn to manage the less-than-elegant situations, and the very strong feelings that are part of the less-than-elegant situations? That depends on you and the kind of support your offer children as they learn to manage the inelegant single-handedly. As a first principle, you will not solve it for them. If adults always leap in and sort out children’s problems they rob children of the chance to accomplish the more complex skills of people-literacy at the time when it is easiest to learn.** In the same way that learning a language is easy while children are in their ‘sponge learning’ stage, learning the language of people-literacy is easy in the early years.

Literacy. Big deal.
Literacy is a big deal. Competence and knowledge in specified areas gives children the edge when it comes to living, loving, studying, working and playing. Who wouldn’t want that? But instead of the huge push for the abstract-symbolic-metaphoric literacies of reading and numeracy, let’s start at the beginning with people-literacy and set our children up for love, happiness and friendship first. These are the skills for creating heaven on earth.

People literacy first, what's second?
The second big literacy children crave in those first six years is eco-literacy. And surprise! Surprise! Eco-literacy dovetails perfectly with children’s drive for people-literacy. Children simply need to play outside to have the chance to grow in competence and knowledge about this earth which is their home. If we are serious about eco-literacy we’ll need to get serious about what constitutes ‘outside’ at our place: on the grass (not on rubber matting), in the garden (not in a wasteland devoid of flowers and shrubs), in the trees (not on plastic and tubular steel), in the bush, on the beach... But that’s another story.

* Check out this TED talk with Art Rolnick for an economic focus on the value of early education and parent education to a nation's monetary health. 
•• Of course, you will not allow them to harm each other.  

After a gestation period that makes the elephant's 22 month gestation look like a nano-second, I have managed to birth a website. I've been thinking about gestation periods for a good while now - both the 40 week gestation period for the human baby (which I poetically refer to as 'getting cooked on the inside'), and the year long gestation period after the birth, or 'getting cooked on the outside". Ashley Montague labelled this period 'exterogestation'.

We make a grave mistake if we think babies are fully up and running when they are born. They are born at 40 weeks, not because they are 'fully cooked' but because at 40 weeks (give or take) they can survive outside the womb without medical assistance. As Donald Winnicott said, "There is no such thing as a baby. There is a baby and someone." There are no prizes for guessing who that someone is, but there are situations beyond our control when the mother is not there for the baby, and then it is 'another someone' who steps up as 'the trainer wheels of relationship' for the baby. 

The baby's little systems are not grown to the point where she can self-regulate them, so nature has designed her to be supported by the 'trainer wheels of nurture' until she can balance all of her own systems. The Brainwave Trust tells us that will take three years, that is two more years on top of the crucial year of exterogestation.

What does that mean for the baby, the mother and for society. Well, it 's not a popular thing to say out loud, but actually, the baby needs the mother - and the mother needs support. When our society can support the mother (and the father) to 'be the trainer wheels of nurture' for the baby everyone wins. New Zealand is not Sweden and we do not support parents to bring up our citizens in their vulnerable years, although the state is prepared to pay to have other people look after them.

The statistics for infants going into care when they are still in their exterogestation period in this country are alarming. More alarming when you realise these babies are going to people whose preservice training may have had a paper on the special needs of infants and toddlers, but many training providers qualify teachers without any training for our babies and toddlers, and the evidence is everywhere: 

• The ministry will licence a room for up to 20 babies which is an indication they have not considered the research on stress and group size, cortisol and brain development. Ministerial advisors who knew about children's development and the way it is affected by stress would not condone those numbers.
  
• Many centres fill their rooms to their licensed maximum which is an indication owners and managers have no knowledge of the research around cortisol and brain damage, and the effects on learning. They would not crowd babies if they knew what it did to the babies.
  
• There are many centres who still refuse to provide primary care for their babies and toddlers (and other children) which is an indication they do not understand their role as substitute 'nurture trainer wheels'... and on and on.*

Parents and teachers are going to have to work together on this big question, a question which will have reverberations throughout individual lives for the rest of their lives, and will affect society for at least one generation to come:
How can we support the mother, the family and the baby so that the baby is not the casualty of a political-economic expedient?
That's a question suitable for gestation, and it is going to take all of us to birth a decent answer around that one! Let's hope and pray that the answer is not a long time coming.

Reading: "Raising Babies: Should Under Threes Go to Nursery?" Steve Biddulph
                 "Why Love Matters: How Affection Shapes a Baby's Brain" Sue Gerhardt