Babies' People Sense

07/01/2010

To be accountable we must render an account: Not what was said, but what was meant. Not the fact, but what was felt. What was known, even while unnamed.
Amanda Gorman, 2020 National Youth Poet Laureate

In her just released book, Mind in the Making: The Seven Essential Life Skills Every Child Needs, Ellen Galinsky talked about "amazing babies." She gave an example of how babies have people sense: "they focus on people's intentions rather than seeing what people do as random movements in space." By six months, they can tell the difference between people who are helpful and those who are not.

To illustrate this, Galinsky described the results of a study done at Yale University in which babies are shown a puppet show where a round circle with big eyes tries to reach the top of a hill and is helped up to the top by a square but pushed down by a triangle. After a baby viewed the show, a tray with the square and the triangle was placed in front of him or her to see which one she or he reaches for. Would the six-month-old reach for the helpful shape or the unhelpful shape, or would there be no pattern. Here was what the researchers reported:

"We found impressively that almost one hundred percent of the babies in a number of different studies preferred the more helpful character."

The Seven Essential Skills Every Child Needs

Ellen Galinsky has captured relevant early childhood research and spelled out for parents and teachers the practical applications for raising well-rounded children who will reach their full potential in Mind in the Making: The Seven Essential Life Skills Every Child Needs. She groups this research into seven "essential life skills":

Focus and self control
Perspective taking
Communicating
Making connections
Critical thinking
Taking on challenges
Self-directed, engaged learning

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