Walking into a RIE workshop for new mothers and infants, you might encounter the following scene:
Five mothers sit quietly observing their infants in the adjacent play area. One baby has discovered a multi-colored ball, filled with just enough air for his palmar grasping skill. Another infant sits quietly, looking pensively at her reflection in the dome of an upside-down aluminum mixing bowl. Two adults sit attentively among the infants. One 8-month-old baby approaches another with outstretched fingers, heading toward an open eye. One of the adults moves closer.
David reaches for Susan’s eyes. Just in time the educarer touches his hand and gently strokes both babies, softly saying, “David, you want to touch Susan’s eyes, but eyes are delicate. We touch faces very gently.”
Resources for Infant Educarers (RIE), founded in 1978, is a non-profit membership organization concerned with improving the care and education of infants. RIE offers parent-infant guidance classes, certification training for professionals, public workshops and conferences, and consultations to infant group care centers. These services all present the RIE approach, a humanistic-therapeutic way of working with infants based on my psychoanalytic training and work as a child therapist. To emphasize how educating and caring for an infant should be inseparable, I coined the words “educarer” and “educaring” to describe RIE’s surprisingly simple and Commonsensical philosophy, which differs so markedly from current trends
We should educate while we care and care while we educate. Most people think of stimulating, exercising and teaching infants as important, glamorous activities. They think of diapering, feeding and bathing as unpleasant or mundane daily chores. RIE, however, suggests that caring activities are the optimal times for interaction, cooperation, intimacy and mutual enjoyment, providing social learning experiences which encourage full participation of the infant and her educarer. “Refueled” by such caring experiences, infants are ready to explore their environment with only minimal intervention by adults. A predictable balance of togetherness and separateness is achieved which benefits both infants and adults.
The RIE philosophy: Observing the infant explorer
Giving the infant time, attention, trust and respect is the foundation of the RIE philosophy. Our goal is an authentic child one who feels secure, autonomous, and competent. Our method, guided by respect for the infant’s competence, is observation. RIE trusts the infant to be an initiator, an explorer and a self-learner. Because of this basic trust, we provide the infant with the minimal help she needs to overcome an impasse and allow the child to enjoy mastery of her own actions.
Educarers are sensitive observers available when direct help is needed, but not intrusive when the infant can solve her own problems. We provide an environment for the child that is physically safe, cognitively challenging and emotionally nurturing. There the child may freely explore and manipulate, fully involved in learning projects of her own design.
We allow infants to do what they are ready and willing to do. We reinforce their self- initiated activities by paying full attention, while being quietly available, and by appreciating and enjoying what the infants actually do. Occasional reflections such as “You touched the ball, and it rolled away” reassure the child of our full attention. Saying “It’s hard to separate the two cups” shows our empathy. A joyful smile when the infant solves a problem conveys our pleasure in his success. As we value inner directedness in a child, we prefer gentle validations to instructions, to criticism, and even to praise.
Contrast with other approaches
This approach contrasts strongly with those used in most infant programs. In programs I have visited, children are taught, encouraged and expected to do what they are basically not ready to do. Too many infants are being propped up when they cannot yet maintain a well-balanced sitting position, or are given a toy which they have neither freely chosen nor can freely manipulate. Similarly, putting infants into devices such as infant seats, walkers, swings, or bouncers restricts them from moving freely. Such devices introduce positions or movements for which the infant is not yet ready,
RIE believes that a child who has always been allowed to move freely develops not only an agile body, but also good judgment about what he can and cannot do. Developing good body image, spatial relations and a sense of balance not only helps the child learn how to move, but also how to fall and how to recover. Children raised this Way hardly ever have any serious accidents.*
In contrast to the “experts”, reinforced by the media, who urge parents to raise “super. babies,” RIE emphasizes the benefits of infants spending peaceful, uninterrupted time following their biological rhythms of falling asleep when sleepy and eating when hungry, rather than having to adjust tog soon to external schedules and unrealistic expectations. We try to reassure parents that infants do do what they can do and should not be expected to do what they are not ready for.
Parents in the RIE program learn how infant and family rhythms develop into predictable routines and how “separate time” and “together time” can be enjoyed. When infants are allowed uninterrupted play time between caregiving activities, parents can have their own time as well. Children who have learned to rely on being stimulated, manipulated and entertained by adults may lose their capacities to be absorbed in independent, exploratory activities. Their parents easily becomes slaves of the nagging child/tired parent syndrome they themselves unwittingly helped to create.
As parents and professional students learn to observe, they realize that being “busy” can keep one from intimacy, from really giving oneself, from paying full attention. They begin to see how many parents work too hard and try too hard–carrying babies around through sleepless nights, buying expensive toys, learning cribs and teaching kits; teaching, programming, and following prescribed curricula and forgetting what is most important–that all those everyday, routine experiences, like feeding, dressing, bathing and diapering have the greatest effect on their baby. We remind parents of the cumulative effect diapering alone– which occurs some 7,000 times in an infant’s life–can have on their child.
RIE principles in group care
We believe that their own home is the natural habitat for the infant. Many infants, however, spend many hours, and sometimes Their whole waking day, in group care. While RIE principles are applicable wherever infants are raised, their use is particularly important in the context of group infant care.
To be very special to the people who care for him or her is the right of each infant. This being special and being important is usually experienced within the child’s own family. It gives the child a sense of self and a sense of belonging. Group care must work especially hard to impart this sense, since even with understanding staff, the child becomes one of many. It is therefore all the more important that during caregiving activities a special relationship develops between the infant and the carer, who would ideally be the same person over time. The idiosyncracies, the unique style and tempo of each infant should be acknowledged and respected. The infant also learns to adapt to the characteristics of his special caregiver. This kind of relationship helps the child develop a sense of his own identity.
Group care can be beneficial when the environment and schedule are:
- set up to serve the child’s needs
- predictable and consistent and
- allow the child to explore and interact with other infants.
These conditions can be met most easily in a small group of 4-6 babies or toddlers. Environment and scheduling combined with special relationships during caring may compensate for the loss of time spent at home.
Professional certification training
In RIE professional certification training classes, educarers develop observational skills, become sensitive to each infant’s needs and personal characteristics, and learn how to convey a feeling of specialness to an infant even though he must share carers.
The three phases of RIE training include comparison of infant development theories, observation of local infant environments, and demonstration of the RIE approach in our parent-infant classes. Our own unique audio-visual library, including films of infants raised at the Loczy Institute, Hungary, and films, slieshows and videotapes made of our own programs, provide additional resources for our RIE interns.
Our students come from diverse disciplines, geographic areas and work settings. They are nurses, physical therapists, psychologists, early childhood educators, social workers, child care workers, family day care providers and administrators. They work with normal, at-risk and handicapped infants and their families.
RIE programs offer professional training, parent-infant guidance classes and community education. Our work is both therapeutic and preventive. We believe that infancy is a crucial time to develop basic patterns of trusting, relating and learning. RIE supports wellness from the very beginning of life. *At the National Methodological Institute for Residential Nurseries, better known as Loczy, in Budapest, Hungary, more than 2,000 infants have been raised with the philosophy described here. In 37 years of raising infants from zero to three, they have had no serious accidents.
