Babies in Groups: Expanding Imaginations

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Research has shown that young babies - well before they form their first bond to a caring adult - enjoy participating in groups and group processes. Babies in Groups examines the consequences of these findings for science, for early education practice and policy, and for adult psychotherapy. The authors report research showing the extensive capacity of preverbal infants for group-communication in all-baby trios and quartets, backed by findings about primate sociability, the social brain, cultural histories, and human evolution. These studies open up new ways of imagining human development as fundamentally group-based.

In addition, the authors explore the changes that a group-based vision of infancy could bring to early child education and care. They also show 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.

Finally, the book’s appendix summarises the main forms of evidence which falsify claims that science has proven that an inborn gift for dyadic ’intersubjectivity, ’ or for one-to-one infant-adult attachments, founds human social development.

Ben S. Bradley, Emeritus Professor, School of Psychology, Charles Sturt University, Jane Selby, Clinical Psychologist, Affiliate, Charles Sturt University, Matthew Stapleton, CEO, Centre Support

Ben Bradley was educated at Oxford and Edinburgh, where, with Colwyn Trevarthen, he began his pioneering research on infancy. He later emigrated to Australia, where he is Professor Emeritus at Charles Sturt University. He wrote the widely-translated Visions of Infancy (1989), Psychology and Experience (2005), and, recently, Darwin’s Psychology (2020). Research highlights include proving young infants participate in social groups; how synchronicity links to social organisation; the value of theatre-based engagement for youth at risk; and that Darwin’s Origin of Species explains natural selection as an effect of other causes, not a cause in its own right.

Jane Selby studied babies for her Masters at St. Andrews, Scotland, an interest that continued as National Research Fellow at La Trobe University, Australia, after gaining a PhD from the Child Care and Development Group, Cambridge University for her study of ’Feminine Identity and Contradiction’. Since 1986 she has built clinical psychology practices in the UK and Australia, conducted research with Australian indigenous groups as Senior Research Fellow at James Cook University, and with youth ’at risk’ in New South Wales. Whilst lecturing at Charles Sturt University, she set up an infant laboratory with Ben Bradley in 1998.

With a background in design and a passion for improving the education of young people, Matthew Stapleton has worked in adult education and early childhood services for the past 15 years. Since 2008, he has been CEO of Centre Support, a company which provides simple but comprehensive tools to help staff and managers comply with all requirements and implement the best possible practices in Long Day Care centres - now having 80% of Australian Long Day Care centres as customers. He runs two high-quality centres of his own. His paper on ’risky play’ recently appeared in Contemporary Issues in Early Education.