Hair Clip

Tess has never needed to wear hair clips to keep hair out of her eyes, which was fortunate, because she not only ripped them out of her hair, but also took them out of every other little girl's hair. Around Christmas time, I bought this decorative clip and tried it in Tess's hair. She pulled it out immediately. Then she started noticing that I would clip my hair back from time to time. She found this clip about a week ago, and I put it in her hair and picked her up to show her what it looked like in the mirror. She was intrigued, but pulled it out. Then the next day, she brought me the clip and wanted me to put it in her hair again. When I did, she patted it happily and looked at her reflection in the mirror. Then she left it in for about an hour, and would occasionally pat it and smile. Since then, she has wanted me to put the clip in her hair when she came across it in the house.

It makes me wonder if this event is related to how I've been feeling like Tess is going through a major growth change. I feel like some change happened with how she sees herself. Maybe she understood the idea of pretty--or if not pretty in the way I think of pretty, then at least the idea that wearing decorative items is something to do because others will see them on you.

I've been reading The Interpersonal World of the Infant by Daniel N. Stern. Here's an excerpt from the book jacket:

Unlike those who view early development as a gradual process of separation and individuation, Stern argues that infants differentiate themselves almost from birth and then progress through increasingly complex modes of relatedness.

He talks about 4 major stages of senses of self. The stages break down roughly like this:

• Birth to 2-3 months: Sense of an emergent self
• 2-3 months to 7-9 months: Sense of a core self
• 7-9 months to around 15 months: Sense of a subjective self
• 15 months: Sense of a verbal self

The early date would be when that new sense of self is emerging and the age range between the two dates would represent the formative phase of that stage. So for example, though a sense of subjective self emerges at 7-9 months (around the time the infant can move themselves), the infant would be forming their sense of subjective self for the next 6 months or so.

During the formative phase of the subjective self, an infant discovers that "he or she has a mind and that other people have minds as well." This leads to the "momentous realization that inner subjective experiences, the "subject matter" of the mind, are potentially shareable with someone else." Something I think these pictures represent:
"Mom, you eat my food."
And the result when I let her feed me.
During this time, the infant forms a working theory that Stern says is something like this: "what is going on in my mind may be similar enough to what is going on in your mind that we can somehow communicate this (without words) and thereby experience intersubjectivity."

So as I've been reading this book, it makes me wonder if I'm watching the slow shift between the last two stages Stern lays out. He says this about the new capacities available in the second year of life:

Toward the middle of the second year (at around 15 to 18 months), children begin to imagine or represent things in their minds in such a way that signs and symbols are now in use. Symbolic play and language now become possible. Children can conceive of and then refer to themselves as external or objective entities. They can communicate about things and persons who are no longer present.

So I wonder if the hair clip shows some part of that development of herself as an objective entity.

She also likes to pick a body part, especially the nose, and touch the body part of everyone in the room. I've wondered if that's about some kind of growing awareness of the fact that the same word can symbolically represent a bunch of different things.




In any case, I feel like the nature of how I relate to Tess is changing, and I'm really enjoying it.