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Understanding 4-5-Year-Olds

Understanding 4-5-Year-Olds

Lesley Maroni

Part of the The Tavistock Clinic - Understanding Your Child series

Paperback: £8.99 / $15.95

2007, 234mm x 156mm / 9.25in x 6in, 80pp
ISBN: 978-1-84310-534-3, BIC 2: JMAF

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Introduction

The aim of this short book is to try to imagine the lives of four- to five-year-olds from their perspective as they gradually move away from a passionate attachment to their families and turn towards the wider world of school and life outside the family.

The primary focus of children at this age is on relationships, especially adult relationships. In other words, how do people join up? How did Mummy and Daddy join up? Where do I fit in this? In order to be able to form friendships of her own (I will use "she" and "he" in alternate chapters when referring to children of either gender), the four- to five-year-old has to have moved from the wish to have an exclusive relationship with one parent, in order to make a space for the other parent as part of what now becomes a triangular relationship. It is in this way that a child develops a sense of herself as different from but connected to the parental couple. When in reality there is only one parent, the child simply works harder to incorporate the idea of a third, and will ask numerous questions about the absent parent to try to puzzle things out.

A single mother or a single father can, of course, have the qualities of the other, i.e. a mother can find a firmer, more authoritative voice within her just as a father can show a softer side when necessary. The family consisting of mother and father and children is frequently disrupted nowadays by separation and divorce. There may well be new families formed with a stepparent who brings his or her own children into the mix. New babies can be born, to add half-siblings to what becomes an extended and confusing family system. To take all these different permutations into account would make this into another kind of book entirely, and so I will be using a two-parent family as a model, partly because children themselves have this model in their minds, however different their reality is.

In some ways this age is a precursor of what is to come during the adolescent years, in terms of the struggle to balance the continuing need for parental care and attention with the desire for independence. The four- to five-year-old begins to look outwards as she forms relationships with her peers but she also wants to be able to go back to her mother for reassurance.

One of the most delightful aspects of children in this age group is their endless curiosity about the world and their wish to understand their place in it. This is the time of questions: Where do I come from? Why…? How...? etc., sometimes to the extent of driving parents mad (and testing their own knowledge of the world). "But why is the sky blue?" one four-year-old asked repeatedly over the course of a few months. His mother, after many thoughtful answers, ended up saying in exasperation, "Just because it is, that's why!" He then went on to ask other similar questions, mostly unanswerable, such as "Where is God?"

The child is also beginning to be able to empathize, in other words, to put herself into others' shoes and imagine how they might be feeling. This ability to feel concern for others and care about their feelings is a major milestone in her development. A little girl on hearing that the younger brother of a friend of hers had accidentally locked himself in the bathroom, said, "He must have been really scared that his daddy wouldn't be able to open the door." However, when it comes to siblings, being able to "read" them goes with knowing exactly how to wind them up and what will annoy them the most!

This, of course, is also the age at which the first major transition takes place - when, before, going to nursery school or playgroup was a choice, now going to school becomes a legal requirement. Learning is more formalized, although in most reception classes nowadays there is a good balance between "work" and play. Some children manage their anxiety by being intellectually able when they are not so socially at ease. Other lucky ones flourish in all ways. But most come somewhere in between, sometimes feeling left out and rejected and sometimes being right at the centre of things. Children have to learn to share a teacher's attention; they also learn that they are not the special and only one.

Friendships are becoming more stable, and more based on shared experience. When the rising five-year-old starts proper school, even if this is simply a transition from the nursery part of the school to the reception class, it helps enormously if she has firm friends who will be going on this journey with her. It is important to feel known and accepted by others outside the family. You can often see the delight on a child's face when she locates a friend in the playground, and the despair when the friend is absent.

But all children of this age have one thing in common - a desire to find out about their expanding world.