Conditions of Joint Attention: Connecting
Because the practical demands of parenting often dwarf the bigger picture, it can be useful to keep a parenting journal that ties practice to goal, stimulating an awareness of how your parenting style and behavior impact your child's long-term development. As you record your own personal responses to the questions raised in this article and others, you'll eventually find that you've written your own book on parenting.
Question:
In what ways do you engage your child in activities and interests that are important to you? How do you initiate and maintain the connection?
Context:
In her book, Apprenticeship in Thinking: Cognitive Development in Social Context (1990), Barbara Rogoff spends a fair amount of time going over the concept of joint attention, particularly in the parent-child relationship. A lot of people might refer to this as "connecting" with a child, but I think there's something about the word "connecting" that makes the process seem magical and beyond the control of an individual. Establishing joint attention, on the other hand, is an effortful process--not in the sense that it is difficult to do, or even that it has to be done consciously, but in the sense that it is a process in which two people choose to engage.
Establishing joint attention is something that even newborns participate in. A baby who stares into his mother's eyes and later learns to follow the direction of her glance is engaging in just that. As the child develops he learns to respond with increasing proficiency to her physical and verbal cues even as his mother learns to respond to the cues he provides. This state of intersubjectivity can be vital in terms of the child's development. Studies of language acquisition, for example, show that a child's language development is enhanced when his mother labels an object that the he has expressed an immediate interest in as opposed to when she redirects his attention to label a new and unrelated item.
Aside from the fact that I think it's interesting to watch my daughter respond to various things in her environment, I also use these periods of observation as a way to pick up on the kinds of things that are important and interesting to her. If, for example, she's absorbed in a dinosaur puzzle, I'll teach her the words for the different kinds of dinosaurs or get out a book on dinosaurs to see if we can match the pieces to the pictures. That way, I'm sharing in her interests (dinosaurs, problem solving) and she's sharing in mine (literacy, books). Alternatively, I could sing a song about dinosaurs or choreograph a dance that represents each dinosaur's particular style of movement or even count the dinosaurs in her puzzle.
Latest Articles