Babies in Groups : Expanding Imaginations

Abstract

Babies in Groups examines the consequences for science, for childcare policy, and for adult psychotherapy, of findings that young babies capably enjoy participating in groups. The authors’ research on preverbal infants’ capacities for group-communication in all-baby trios and quartets opens up new ways of imagining human development as fundamentally group-based. Babies in Groups highlights the changes a group-based vision of infancy brings to early child education and care by documenting the transformative consequences of introducing group-based practices into a high-quality childcare service in rural Australia. The book also examines the ways in which the belief that one-to-one infant-adult ‘attachments’ grounds human development unnecessarily narrows understanding of human potential, and slants scientific research. This examination culminates by showing how ignoring group contexts in many clinical traditions can distort descriptions of what happens in therapy, producing such unintended consequences as ‘mother-blaming’ for the future problems an infant may experience as she or he grows up.