Recently I had the privilege of watching a series of videos showing encounters between primary caregivers and their children (aged 0-5 years). These fleeting visual stories were part of each parent and child’s therapeutic journey as they navigated relational and systemic challenges. It took an awesome amount of bravery for these parents to consent to have their videos shown so that we and others might learn more about the difficulties, stressors, challenges, and joys of being a parent-and-child.
We saw fathers and mothers with infants, toddlers, and preschoolers; each pair navigating different kinds of tasks and transitions. Through observations of these we were able to get a sense of the qualities of security, trust, emotional regulation, and adaptability (to name a few) alive in each relationship.
One well known transition to observe is how a child responds when a parent leaves the room or returns to the room after an absence (famously created and utilised as the ‘Strange Situation’ by Mary Ainsworth and colleagues). These micro separations and reunions give us insight into how the child copes without their parent present – do they know their parent will return and appear calm or able to self-entertain? Do they fret or show distress? Do they acknowledge the parent when they come back into the room, do they seek comfort from them or ignore them? These are some of the many observations we can attend to in larger movements/actions and small slower gestures or expressions. And we look to see how the parent ‘reads’ the child’s response, and how they respond in kind.
Another task we might observe is when we provide a child with an activity that is a little beyond their developmental capacity. We note how mum or dad guides and supports the child in attempting the task. We wonder – is the parent engaged, encouraging of the child’s efforts? Do they take over? How does the child respond to the task or the parent’s engagement with them? Does the child stop the play or persevere or become frustrated?
We pay careful attention to the observable behaviours and sensitively infer possible ‘internal’ experiences – thoughts, emotions, and what it might feel like to be in this relationship, at this moment, for both parent and child. This requires empathy and knowledge, experience, and curiosity on behalf of the therapist but also the parents, and the children.
These observations normally occur within a trusted relationship with a therapist, and are engaged over a period of time as they explore different tasks and transitions. There are opportunities for the parents to observe the recordings, and for therapist and parent to talk about what it was like for them and their children in this moment. When mum sighed and looked at the camera, what was happening for her? When dad tried to reach out for his child, calling them over to play and the child stayed still, even looking away, what was that like for him? What might these parents imagine their children were feeling/thinking in those moments and showing through their behaviours?
We wonder with the parents, might there be decades old experiences informing their responses to and interpretations of their children’s mannerisms in those moments? If it was dangerous for you as a child to reveal emotion, how do you then respond to your emotional or blank faced child? We don’t see one another clearly but through a multicoloured and multifocal lens, a cauldron of bubbling past, present, and future.
All of this gives all of us a richer understanding of what strengths and limitations are alive in the parent/child relationship. One practical advantage of observing these interactions is a sensitive recognition that the child is feeling/thinking/doing things too. The child isn’t a blank slate, their experiences matter, right from birth. Infants and children have agency – they’re shaping their relationship along with the parent. Very early on babies have some small control over their embodied experiencing and expressions – this might involve modulating eye contact, body tone or vocalisations. Every parent knows and becomes acutely attuned to the different kinds of cry emitted from their child’s tiny body (for good and ill).
Another advantage of these observations is the opportunities for parents to become alert to how their past and anticipated futures entangle with their shared present moments. Sometimes this is wonderful, bringing the textures and practices of love received as a child to their child now, and sometimes scars make for inflexible and fearful engagements before they’ve even had the chance to dance together as as a family.
Watching these videos however brought something else, loud and large, into my awareness, something that dwarfed the individual parent and child. When, for example, a father lay down on the floor next to his little girl to help her attempt a puzzle, his body curled in toward the girl and the game. She reached her hands out to try putting the pieces in place, figuring out which sides might fit. She’d look at father and he’d chat away offering encouragement and guiding the pieces to the board, his hand with hers. There was father, daughter, puzzle and something more.
Like a third person in the room, the relationship of parent and child was tangible. A choreography of movements, facial expressions, gestures; fluctuating speeds and stillness; tumbling words and exclamations all unfolded in a dance caught so well by the video recordings. A sense of the relationship came alive in the between spaces of father, daughter, and puzzle. Its shape is a curve, its boundaries a soft enclosing, its emotional tones playing out in warm yellows and pale blues. Moments of intensity appeared where shifts happened. For example, when the father saw his daughter fit the piece in place, and she saw her father see it. This brief exchange was like a hot, tiny bounce of love/pride/glee/awe bursting from the shape of the relationship for a second or two before morphing into the next micro-moment of encounter. Of course, that’s how their relationship appeared to me, as I leaned into the space of them in their unique shared moment, now viewed on a zoom screen decades later.
We don’t generally see relationships. We see parent and child, we see individual behaviours that reveal a give and take, a to and fro between them. These ways of being with one another may be typical and patterned or unusual and new. We notice a mother when she looks down at her hands and shakes her head muttering ‘he won’t do it’; we notice an increase in chaotic behaviours as a son throws toys onto the ground resisting the mother’s call to tidy up with a resounding ‘no!’. These individual things are observable, and we can infer possible interpretations from them, and then test these hunches by exploring them with the parent, or by noticing gathering more information, for example, discovering that the child plays and tidies up over time and in different relationships.
Generally, we might ‘see’ the individuals within the relationship but not the relationship itself. Yet many of us may well sense the relationship. Like the dour mood or crackling atmosphere alive in a room post or during an argument. As we watch these encounters, we may experience a volatile tug between mother and son, a push and pull, a relationship extended and taut. This is not based on an individual experience but a profoundly relational one. There can be no sense of a push or pull without two people present, that tautness doesn’t reside in one person alone because it is about and present when being with a particular other.
We may feel a rolling empathy for mum’s tired frustration or helplessness as it mixes with her son’s increasing upset when he’s asked to do something he doesn’t want to but inside our embodied and imaginal worlds this experience plays out as a dynamic flow of mother and son together. We sense into their shared spaces with our bodies, as our bodies give us clues. We may feel heat or cold flush through our chest; maybe a sharp intake of breath and a pause. We notice ourselves leaning forward, our necks rigid or hands balled. We imagine sharp flashes of light or static white noise. Our observer experiences will move rapidly between empathies and curiosities for parent or child in each moment. And yet…the sum of the experiences for us as observers is relational. This reflects the ways that the choreographies of mother and child experiencing are relational too. What we and they are left with is a sense of how mother is for child and child is for mother, how they as a unit struggle and triumph, question and consolidate, stray and glue.
From this felt sensing of a relationship, it’s possible to visualise it. To imagine, describe and show what that relationship might look-act-feel-speak like now, or in the past, or in an anticipated or hoped for future. When this is offered to a parent and child, it can bring the parent’s attention to the co-created qualities of the relationship. We can feel into the mutual flows, be they a familiar loving waltz, a chaotic whirl, or a curling into balls at the far sides of the room.
Being able to see the relationship as a third being allows for the possibility of relational agency. This relational being is imbued with emotions, sensations, actions, memories, textures, sounds, thoughts, and desires. If the relationship is taut, how might this soften for them both? How might we ease the experiencing of mother-and-child when they’re together so that their tautness becomes flexibility, and softness becomes looseness? How do we support them in navigating the tensions, adapting and benefiting from the complex riches available across the tight/soft spectrum of being together. If the relationship was loving but is now troubled by the need for limits, overlaid with unrealistic expectations about what is possible, how might we bring boundaries that are developmentally appropriate as well as a sense of trust in the durability of the relationship to parent and child?
None of these questions is answered definitively or easily, the struggle doesn’t magically disappear. The parent/child relationship, each unique ‘us’, is alive and developing. For women, we combine our growth as mothers (referred to as ‘matrescence’ by medical anthropologist Dana Raphael in the 1970s) at the same time as our children grow. Our relationship is never static as it’s constantly navigating change and challenge. Think of the levels of complexity here, the more-than the sum of its parts vitality of two growing human beings in flux, and that relationship responsive also to the many other relationships alive for each parent and child.
I recently published an article tracking my original research on the mother/child ‘us’ and developing it in line with a new approach to inquiry. I have included a link to the article and near the end of it there's a video that speaks to the feelings alive in the relationship at that time.
When I worked on this article, over a year ago, I was acutely aware of the shape of my relationship with my son and how radically it had changed. He was in his mid-teens, the cuddly-chatty-chortling years were only alive in memory, and those memories were cruelly losing some of their nuance, humour and texture. There was also a robust sense of rightness around his growing independence, his developing personal inner and outer worlds but this was threaded through with a deep sadness, a sense of missing him. Enveloping all of this was our changing ‘us’.
I think of these years during the mid to late teens as our wilderness years – we’re stretched stingingly thin, but still strong. A gift of this time is a recognition that our relationship is and will not be domesticated; it’s a prowling, lurking, lunging, longing, laughing, loving, and losing thing. Any fantasy of stability and picket-white-fences is a source of bittersweet mirth - for me at least. It never was and never will be a small creature in a quaint cottage. In fairness, it would be boring if it was. The video speaks to this in a way, for those interested. The clip, like the infant/parent videos I was blessed to watch, captures a moment in time already utterly different more than a year on.
I invite you to imagine a small recording of you and your child now, no matter the relationship’s age. Have a play with sensing into and then seeing what the ‘us’ might look like for you. And maybe ask that ‘us’ how it feels and thinks, what it knows and doesn’t, what it longs for and what it loves.
This post is written by Dr Ariel Moy. She is passionate about developing mother/child relationships, she has a private practice as a creative arts therapist, is a Professional member of ANZACATA and is an academic teacher, researcher and doctoral supervisor at The MIECAT Institute in Melbourne, Australia.
Comments