Early Childhood: Enriched Environments and Roles of Caring Adults

Abstract

In recent years, with the arrival of the pandemic, children and families have had to reduce their exchange environments. It has been necessary to reconfigure play spaces at home, redefine the roles of adult caregivers, and plan strategies to accompany early childhood without digital screens being the only option to explore and discover the world. The enriched environments are a game and exchange proposal to support the role of the adult who cares for young children. The care systems that are offered are based on stimulating functions and leave aside fundamental actions, such as interacting and perceiving sensitive transformations in the exchange with the little ones. Prioritizing these early interactions favors children’s learning and play if they are supported by social and cultural educational spaces that include the entire community as a basis for meeting and collaborative care.

1. Introduction

Childhood is a particular time in people’s lives and has been going through important changes in their social representations, in their characteristics, in the forms of bonding with people and objects in the environment, and in the spaces destined for their care. In recent years, with the arrival of the pandemic, children and families had to reduce their exchange environments, among other variables, due to the isolation proposed to prevent the spread of the virus. This situation put distance between family and institutional ties and families, leaving them in a situation of certain solitude and individuality within their homes. Although the virtual educational proposals were sustained in this period, each child and adult was physically in a different place without the possibility of bodily contact, essential in these first moments. From there, it has been necessary to reconfigure play spaces at home, redefine the roles of adult caregivers, and plan strategies to accompany early childhood without digital screens being the privileged option to explore and discover the world, and also take care of adults if they are alone or exhausted by the task of raising and educating.

The forms of bonding between children and adults are strongly influenced by the coordinates of time, where adults are performing multiple tasks, in a temporal and spatial configuration that leaves little room for leisure, spontaneity in relationships, bodily availability for an approach, a close and affective exchange, in a world where knowable objects and new technologies abound in everyday spaces and come into direct contact with children and adolescents, often without the mediation of adults.

In this framework, the care systems that are offered are frequently based on stimulating functions (motor, cognitive, and linguistic), and fundamental actions, such as interacting from a place of bodily implications and perceiving sensitive transformations in this dialogue of bodies, are usually left aside, in the exchange with the little ones through multiple sensory modalities. Prioritizing these early interactions promotes children’s learning and play. At this point, proposing enriched environments consists of thinking of coordinates to generate or enhance the game and the exchange of spaces and times to support the role of the adult who cares for young children in the daily interactions of early childhood.

2. Current coordinates to think about early childhood and families in postmodernity

In each space-time, the variables have undergone visible transformations that show the characteristics of the direction of the human era. Geography, architecture, cultural and aesthetic expressions, ways of relating, material and symbolic conditions of our existence change, and homes and educational spaces change. In these configurations, everyday life acquires meanings that materialize in concrete and natural settings for each generation. “The dimensions of space and time have been sustained in that period by the constant pressure of the circulation and accumulation of capital, and have culminated (…) in disconcerting and distressing accesses of space-time compression” [1].

We live in a time that is not chronological, continuous, or without interruptions, but rather an event, of instants [2]. The temporal order acquires special dimensions in our time, constituting an ephemeral, vertiginous time. These times of liquid modernity are characterized by a punctuated or “pointillist” time, marked by ruptures and discontinuities, more prominent for its inconsistency and lack of cohesion than for its cohesive and continuous elements (…) Pointillist time is broken, or more well, pulverized, in a multitude of “eternal instants” -events, incidents, accidents, adventures, episodes-, monads closed on themselves, different morsels (…)” [3]. The current experience of time is fleeting, we feel that it is getting out of hand, divided into a thousand moments.

We move in a fragmented time, characterized by cascades of knowledge. For Harvey, already in the 90s,

“The experience of time has changed, confidence in the association between scientific and moral judgments has disappeared, aesthetics have triumphed over ethics as a fundamental social and intellectual concern, images dominate narratives, transience and fragmentation take precedence over eternal truths and unified politics, and explanations have moved from the realm of material and economic-political foundations to the consideration of autonomous cultural and political practices” [4].

We also notice that we are going through times of confusion and uncertainty, where the appeal of aesthetics (whatever its form) becomes more pronounced. The forms of production after modernity allow us to access a series of goods and services that make our lives comfortable in a different way from that of our ancestors. We access multiple objects quickly, and at home, we have a wide variety of gadgets and devices that make our lives easier and more comfortable. Some arise from the intention of collaborating with the task of caring for and raising young children. We are also governed by the logic of the image, a visual aesthetic that marks its mark on each daily act. “Today we no longer seek our truth within ourselves, opaque to the gaze of others, the search is directed to the media outside before which we feel transparent” [5].

We can think that the connection with the media is responsible for the connective immediacy but also productivity influences the speed of life in our times. We live in rushed times, where the times of childhood are also affected, childhood is reduced, children rush to learn skills for the future, the productive logic of the adult world organizes the day, both at home and in institutions, adults feel that they do not have time, that it is not easy to accompany and respect the times of childhood.

In general terms, homes have changed, as well as the times and spaces where children spend their lives, work/home time, productive and leisure time, shared time, and the objects we use on a day-to-day basis, objects called toys, etc., the sensations and experience of being a boy or a girl in this concrete material and the symbolic world have changed.

We can say that there is a plurality of worlds within postmodernist fiction. It is useful for our analysis to reflect on a certain fragmentation, pluralism, and the authenticity of other voices and other worlds, so that communication can circulate and not only exercise dominance over our ways of seeing. The rise of postmodern thought can be traced back to the communication languages of advanced capitalist societies as a major force of alienation and domination [6].

The modern liquid structure of consumerist society and culture is characterized by “an advanced state of deregulation and deroutinization of human behavior in direct relation to the collapse of human bonds, known as individualization” [7]. How to move then in the midst of fragmentation, the liquidity of relationships and the social, cultural, and material elements that cross us? Faced with the tendency toward individuality in the course of people’s lives, is it possible to propose collective proposals that contain us and allow us to reflect on our daily lives, to find other ways of caring for and educating?

We can see that we live in the age of mass television. At present, aesthetics predominates over any other cultural form and supposes a transformation in the habits and attitudes of consumers. The postmodernist current is rooted in everyday life under the premises of capitalism. We can perceive this in the large number of objects that are in our homes and in the constant need to upload images to social networks to be rewarded by followers, and in the advertising invasion that we experience daily. Today there is more concern for surfaces than for roots, for collage than for depth, for superimposed images to the detriment of elaborate surfaces. There is also a sense of time and space that disdains solid artifacts, alluding to the transience of our time, a transience and liquid feel against the weight of the solidity of earlier times. From a materialist point of view, objective conceptions of time and space have necessarily been created through the material practices and processes that serve to reproduce social life, which vary geographically and historically. We will review these categories since each particular mode of production or social formation embodies a set of practices and concepts of time and space” [8].

In this then-fragmented landscape, governed by image, which weakens social ties in the face of individual proposals, dominated by the idea of consumption and crossed by a pandemic situation, is where betting on recovering ties becomes an indispensable task. We require a pause, a time to listen to alterity as an experience and sustaining exchange for children and adults.

2.1 Reflections on everyday space and time

Space and time are basic categories of human existence. They are intimately involved in the processes of production and transformation of social relations. The history of social change is evidenced in part by the history of conceptions of space and time. It is then necessary to reflect on the space experienced, perceived, and imagined in a dialectical relationship within everyday life [9].

If we stop to analyze the spaces and the passage of time today, we notice that the places for children’s games have been significantly reduced. It is rare to find children playing on the sidewalks, and in homes, the distribution of play spaces for children is variable. Childhood usually takes place in institutional spaces, regulated by the logic of teaching and skills for future life. In homes, technological devices coexist with us on a regular basis, and it is common to find the television on, even as “background noise”.

In terms of time, the distribution of tasks revolves around the work of the parents and the care of the children, where on many occasions the time for leisure and sharing has been reduced. There is a “family time” as time for raising children and transmission of knowledge and goods between generations through kinship networks, and this time responds to the demands of an “industrial time that distributes and redistributes the workforce in relation to tasks, according to the powerful rhythms of technological and locational change brought about by the relentless pursuit of capital accumulation” [8].

Looking at our time is complex because it requires a certain distance from our time and from our own representations of life and the current world. To do this, it is necessary to find clues about where we are and broaden our own perspectives. It is necessary to review the symbolic orders of our own spaces and times.

It is possible to glimpse in the internal arrangement of the houses and the external arrangements the relationships with the annual, weekly calendar, and the divisions between day and night, work, rest, activity, leisure, etc. Capital production systems suppose the constant disorganization of temporal and spatial rhythms, times that follow the logic of work and consumption, where “one of the missions of modernism is to produce new meanings for space and time in a world of the ephemeral and fragmented” [9].

2.2 Objects and materiality of space

To refer to the materiality in current life systems, we focus on the spaces of daily life, in which there are many objects, functional and decorative, also intended for children’s play. It is common to see baskets or boxes with stored objects that are usually emptied by the little ones to carry out a quick exploration of them. These toy objects are part of the everyday scene, even with all their regional or social diversity, and they carry the problem of storage and order that is difficult for adults to maintain. In addition, among the objects that are offered to the little ones are the screens, which are already part of the space and participate in the organization of parenting time.

Adults are thus immersed in a vicious circle where ordering, entertaining, and caring for the little ones becomes difficult and laborious. Whether because of the speed of modern life, social and cultural demands, adults in charge of young children find few alternatives to these situations or because of the diverse and simultaneous tasks of the adult world. If we go back a few decades, there was no such number of toy objects for children, and these have arisen from consumerism that sneaks into each advertisement. Is it possible to recover the idea of exploring the world by offering “natural” or everyday objects instead of consumer objects? In a way, the proposal is to give in the sense of donating objects to be explored, instead of acquiring toy objects, especially in the era of the advent of plastic.

It is also possible to review the way they are offered, in small doses, in baskets, or storage boxes within the reach of children, as Montessori proposed more than a century ago. Is it possible to take care of a small child at home and at the same time work from home or do housework? The exhaustion expressed by adults is enormous. And that is why we resort to objects that replace us at certain times, instead of offering objects within a bonding relationship of interest that promotes the discovery (cognitive and affective) of the world.

Both in homes and in institutions for the care of young children, there have been instances that regulate the presence and absence of the significant adult, not always in a respectful manner, although in recent times with greater criteria on the affectivity of babies in the early stages of life. At present, it is necessary to rethink the existence of a certain presence/absence alternation, since the premise is usually to care for and protect the little ones, leaving the development of their personal and social autonomy in the background. Although it is sought to protect children from domestic accidents, children remain under strict control with few possibilities to move, be creative and autonomous and develop a “being alone in the presence of the adult” as Winnicott proposed in the path of mental health [10].

In Argentina, there is a great variety of styles in the care of young children, ranging from the demand for personal autonomy to overprotection and the constant presence of hypervigilant caregivers. It is necessary to reflect on the attitude of adults toward children, care, ways to encourage play, and actions that adults favor in children’s lives. Paying attention to our attitudes will allow us to think about childhood in terms of rights and carry out care practices that favor child development.

Among the privileged objects of today are the screens, mobile phones, tablets, and televisions. All of them coexist and pre-exist with today’s children, are part of their natural world and are usually available from an early age. Ana Bloj, a doctor in psychology in Argentina, wonders if perhaps technologies are producers of subjectivity. And he adds that it is often heard that the work of parents and teachers in relation to new technologies is to try to “get them out” of them [11]. The author also states that it is possible to ignore a person and the environment itself to focus on mobile technology, a new way of being connected since this disconnection implies new ways of connecting, different ways of relating to colleagues, to the world, and with parents.

The experience of disconnection due to cell phone use is a different experience. That is to say that the boys are connected, but in a different reality, in a virtual space. There is a generational difference, parents, educators, and adults today did not grow up in the midst of the virtual reality that screens propose, those fictional worlds that are imposed on us from the consumer society as instant paradisiacal spaces, without resistance [12]. In addition, Bloj adds that it is impossible for parents to know how, where, and when to regulate their children’s use of new technologies because that use was not part of their own childhood experiences. But we have, as in any generational difference, other experiences to pass on. The problem is that these other experiences are overshadowed by the brightness and mobile sound of the cell phone, and are difficult to recover as valuable cultural assets for new generations. This is where it makes sense to think about time, shared, offered, and lived.

It is necessary to review cultural spaces, to detect if they have been reduced or modified during the pandemic, if they coexist with virtual spaces, if they replace them, and to what extent they do so, and the possible consequences that this may have on people’s lives, especially in childhood. In order not to generate alarms about the new ways of being connected and linked, but above all to know if the creative experiences lived in each home or early childhood space are sufficient, from the beginning of life in a background of shared pleasure in interaction with others.

Background noise and images are now part of the everyday scene. Let us think that there is, in addition, a difference in terms of the age of the boy, girl, or adolescent. In the early years, it is the closest adults who offer or have a cell phone or screen for the little ones on certain occasions, because they are there as part of the daily scenario, because they “help” or relieve the adult in the task, and have fun for a while. In addition, we are surprised by the speed and dexterity with which children handle technology from an early age and to see the fascination that the flash of images, sounds, and movements with the concomitant arrest of the body produces on their faces. In addition, adults sometimes leave their little ones at the mercy of their mobiles to recover some leisure/rest time after the working day, even considering that they are harmful to the little ones. But we surrender to the need to have our own personal space, without bodily involvement, both during the confinement due to the pandemic and in previous or subsequent work periods.

We can think that this offering of screens to the little ones can be shared between both, they can be “given” to explore and they can be given to the mercy of the child, sometimes without filter, with a significant share of guilt because it is not easy to resolve in that situation or it can be a non-affective involvement situation. Can we think of childhoods without screens? It is not possible to generalize the attitude of the adults involved in each scene, but it is noted that they are part of the daily scenarios of what we call parenting. As Moreno, an Argentine psychoanalyst, affirms,

“Kids today definitely prefer connective presentations. They are able to connect the central threads of the plots they inhabit and respond to them even when they cannot explain them. Perhaps that is why they love and are fascinated by screens. The initial stitches of the child’s subjectivity are conditioned by the fact that he connectively captures the threads of the situations he inhabits, such as family expectations and experiences, even when he does not understand them from a rational, causal or associative point of view. They are open to the content of the representative packages and not necessarily to the representations that from the associative point of view could be considered essential to “understand” [13].

The experiences of children in front of the screen circulate through another scenario, as already mentioned, virtual, often alien to adults. The little ones connect, capture, and capture with their senses in extraordinary ways. In certain situations, screens can offer pleasurable experiences linked to fast and effective sensations that quickly reward the nervous system. What they cannot offer (at least at present) are modulations to the behavior of the little ones, exchanges of rhythms, or gestural or corporal communications; only with their wide variety of sensory modalities do they capture the attention of children who stop their bodies to observe the virtual representations. This can produce fascination instead of propitiating interactions between the subjects. As Bloj states, “we then have a displacement of adults for the exercise of their functions in these scenarios and an advance in the capture of new technologies, especially video games, to seduce them in a new virtual space/scenario” [14].

It is not about rejecting screens and the use of new technologies, after all, adults participate in virtual spaces interacting with other people, recreating times of exchange, sometimes longer and more unique than in face-to-face interaction direct. It is important to recognize that there is an enormous attraction to screens so as not to fight in vain against them, but to place ourselves in a possible place as adults and offer significant experiences in other areas that favor exchange and communication. Be mediators and provide opportunities for intersubjective experiences. The challenge then would be not to relinquish the place of co-star in early childhood development.

María Emilia López, pedagogue and childhood specialist, points out that in our industrialized societies intersubjective spaces have been reduced, that is, interpersonal spaces, mediated by language. It would not be possible or desirable for screens to replace the human voice, embodied, “embodied in another real in simultaneity of presence, cooing and cooing made of voice, contact and breath are replaced by television machines, tenderness displaced by the image -merchandise coming from the screen” [15].

How then to think about the role of the adult, in the face of such an offer of continuous, asynchronous stimuli and with the potential to capture the attention of boys and girls? Redefining a place for adults, from a container asymmetry that does not block or leave without borders the actions of childhood is the current challenge. Rethinking the places of authority in times of reparation and historical vulnerability is a complex and arduous task that requires a lot of personal and social reflection. For Lutereau, an Argentine psychoanalyst,

“Authority today is not tied to the knowledge that a child may suppose the adult possesses. Children no longer believe that adults know a lot, nor are they afraid that they will get angry. Because they are the ones who teach parents to solve problems – in this aspect, technology has played a fundamental engine of change – in the same way that students are no longer ashamed of not knowing (…) It does not mean that the authority has disappeared and, therefore, that there are no limits. In any case, limits cannot be imposed today in the same way as before” [12].

The displacement of adults is not reduced to a matter of authority against children and adolescents, it is a complex problem that overwhelms us and exceeds us as individual subjects. What is at stake is the level of participation, a certain asymmetry that guides and protects, and the revision of the ways of imposing authority from a few decades ago, to generate situations of mutual respect and emotional support for the new generations. That is to say, another place, new to the extent that it opens up to the novelty of childhood, but also that gives meaning to certain gestures of care in which their participation is essential.

In any case, adults can participate in this strong interest of children and adolescents in virtual content, dialoguing, questioning, putting into words, opening up to participation, and pulling toward reality. “This would open a path that could perhaps lead to a rapprochement between generations. But they are just hypotheses to continue thinking among all” [16].

It is necessary to recover shared spaces where it is possible to dialogue, play, offer experiences with objects, allow exploration, transform space, etc., as a path toward exploration, creation, fiction, and narration—that intermediate zone where play and creative experience exist, as Winnicott [10] proposed. Both to offer spaces of resistance against the experience in front of the screens, and proposals to stimulate certain functions with objects, reducing the child to an apprentice who reacts to the flow of information that is offered.

So, we notice that having available materials and objects and the use of new technologies do not always generate an experience, they do not necessarily go through our subjectivity. Currently, there are cascades of stimuli and this does not guarantee that there is a subjective appropriation of them, including the experience in front of the screens, but not only these, but all experiences with objects in the real world. In these times, it is difficult for us to produce a common sense, a certain bodily distance from the adult, which, although it allows us to explore objects, to know their physical characteristics, is not enough to enter the middle ground, a space generated between the internal world and the external world with the adult during the first interactions.

Reflecting on the subject, María Emilia López tells us:

“If in exchange for the human voice, the tenderness, the conversation and the cognitive possibilities offered by books, games with music, body cooing to babies, exploration and investigation in the game itself, several hours a day of connection to the television or the computer screen, with the children still and hypnotized by the image, the expectation of enrichment from parenting vanishes. If the proposed activities always focus on instructions with results predetermined by the adult, the spontaneity so typical of early childhood is buried, and this loss brings negative consequences for the symbolic and cultural development of children” [14].

When speaking of “experience” in the sense of what moves us, María Emilia López proposes offering materials, offering stimuli; but he also adds that the mediating role of the adult is indispensable in the construction of shared events. The author affirms that “there is no possibility of imaginary construction without the other human who helps to organize experiences, who names, who accompanies, who offers the cultural richness that precedes the child and, above all, who favors the creation of time and space. Experiencing something more than the actions of survival or everyday life” [17].

3. Encounters and disagreements between adults and new generations

In this section, the proposal is to review some conditions for communication and interaction in early childhood, especially the first year of life, from conceptualizations that allow recovering the leading role in the exchange between the new generations and the adults in charge of their care and education.

Thanks to the contribution of psychology and other disciplines that include a corporeal vision of development, we know the existence of certain fundamental functions of the adult and the child that are vital for the construction of the psyche. At first, the support capacity of the young child, a body wrap that offers a relationship of proximity, continuity, and security for the little ones at an early age [18]. And then, the first affective exchanges, the playful activities between the baby and the adult, the joint gaze and the attention shared by both interlocutors and other founding functions of this stage. The joint gaze is understood as bodily intentionality, as a triangulation between the child’s gaze, the adult’s face and mimicry, and the object to be explored; the little one reads, intuits in the gestures of the adult, and even questions him to know his intentions about that imagined, performed, or desired action on the object. It is in these interactions in which both direct their gaze toward a common fact, and somehow communicate their intentions through this gesture, that is to say, that a bodily, gestural, affective dialogue takes place, in an affective exchange between child and adult.

The subjectivation process then occurs within this interactive, participatory dynamic of construction of meanings between both subjects of the relationship. The little one, with the help of the adult, participates in the experience of giving meaning to his experiences, supported by the attitudes, gestures, and corporal expression of the adults.

For the Uruguayan psychoanalyst Víctor Guerra, the subjectivation process also refers to “the construction of the self from the body-mind association, with the passage from a sensory function to a representational one, and the need to link the drive and sexuality to one desiring another who can also open it to others” [19], that is, to thirdness, as Winnicott proposed in the construction of the real [10].

In short, we could explain the process of subjectivation as the process through which the baby could build his own perspective together with that of the other based on the ego support offered by the adult. With this, Guerra prioritizes the nature of the process, in that active exchange between the two where the child is being built as a subject and has an adult who allows him to open a space for the baby to show “his perspective, his way” to explore “objects with their time and rhythm” [20]. This process would be possible, thanks to the availability of the adult, giving rise to the Winnicottian concept of a mother (as a function) sufficient, neither good nor perfect, but capable of putting herself in the baby’s place in the early stages and be open to their expressions [21].

This capacity of the adult to allow himself to be transformed by the gesture of the child is the foundation of the intersubjective process and requires a certain availability, both of presence, level of attention, and participation, as well as possibilities of involvement that the caregiver has. With this idea, let us review whether in the daily times of people’s lives (perceived as fleeting, as mentioned above) it is possible to generate spaces and times for this encounter. This malleability of the adult, essential for the expression of childhood experiences, “implies a slow step in the construction of their psychic life, through a body language that integrates step by step the value of words and metaphors” [20]. This slowness is due to the necessary continuity and frequency in the contact that allows a subjective event to be recorded.

The author uses the term “silent colloquy of glances,” similar to the tonic emotional dialogue proposed by Julián de Ajuriaguerra [22]. This is the metaphor of a dialogue (perhaps silent in terms of words) but significant, impregnated with meanings, encounters, and mutual transformations. He adds that “the beginning of contact and human subjectivation refers to an encounter that starts from the body, from sensory experience and opens up to music, to a rhythm, to a drawing, to a game. Significant signs that open the way to the emergence of the word” [23].

This step from sensory to representational functioning allows us to go from sensations to words, but not just any word, but the word that, impregnated with sensoriality and charged with emotions, allows us to go from the “blind instinct” to the drive. It is about building a continent, “a house” that houses the polychrome set of experiences that we call subjectivity… [24]. Let us go back to the idea of wrapping or containing the child’s body during early body support. But also the need to rethink the offer of stimulating objects to children to recover the rich multisensory flow offered by the bodily exchange, contact, support, and affective dialogue as a source of pleasure and communication.

Also, in the process of discovering how babies are interested in understanding and understanding the intentionality of the actions of others, the concept of intersubjectivity emerges.

For Martínez, a doctor in psychology in our country, “Colwyn Trevarthen” attributes the concepts of primary and secondary intersubjectivity, qualifying them as “two different ways in which babies intersubjectively engage with their parental figures” [25]. Trevarthen used the term “primary intersubjectivity to describe the temporally and emotionally regulated exchanges observed in early dyadic interactions between mother and child between 2 and 9 months” [26]. There are also other indicators or manifestations of primary intersubjectivity, such as neonatal imitation, proto-conversations, and interactive synchrony, functions that originate in the early communicative exchange with the significant other.

He also uses the term secondary intersubjectivity “to describe those situations in which the baby is able to combine two types of acts, praxis - pointing, showing, giving, offering, taking an object, consecutive manipulation, in interaction with his mother, praxic imitation, regulating the action on the object, resisting, touching the object, extending the hand- and the interpersonal ones -smiling, vocalizing, looking at the other’s face, extending the arms towards the adult, touching the other, vocal imitation- (…). This type of exchange or psychological contact arises between 9 and 12 months” [25]. These gestures, signs, and exchanges given to another constitute an early communicative repertoire (preverbal) that occurs between the child and the adult.

Many authors propose the concept of intersubjectivity as a fundamental aspect in the construction of the child’s psyche. Even with different theoretical positions, they invite us to think of the baby as an active subject, a co-star in his process of subjectivation. Today there is scientific evidence of the influence of the environment on the baby, for example, from epigenetics, and we also know that it is a spiral process of mutual transformation. The conceptualizations of the interactive possibilities of babies and the evidence of the first ludic exchanges are fundamental. For example, see refs. [18, 26, 27, 28].

For Guerra, intersubjectivity would function as a “universal language” that is expressed at the beginning of life through non-verbal communication codes that include, in addition to verbal content, message, envelopes, prosody, rhythm, tone of the voice, the face and the gaze as a mirror, imitation and empathy. And he says: “All the semiology of human gestures that comes into play when there is the possibility of gradually discovering the desires inside the human being” [29]. This multidimensional, bodily, and affective communication is at the base of intersubjectivity, it is not limited to verbal exchange, but to tonic and affective modulations and adjustments between the baby and the caregiver. Intersubjectivity constitutes “the experience of sharing emotional states with others” [29]. Recovering corporality in the first affective exchanges between a baby and the adult caregiver is a priority, then, redefining times and spaces that enable these dialogic instances in development.

Raising the idea of the construction of subjectivity and intersubjectivity is essential to support interactive processes between infants, young children, and adults in the early stages of life. Our lifestyle can lead us to physically distance ourselves from children, or to the aforementioned difficulty of alternating moments of presence and absence based on shared pleasure, in a process of building the inner and outer world of the little ones. Recovering these conceptualizations can guide us toward favorable attitudes in adult caregivers and their affective and temporal needs for this to happen.

The availability, the affective charge, and the exchange that can occur from the introduction of the world in that small dyadic or triadic world is a founding fact in childhood experiences. Every object that appears in a child’s life is placed there by their referring adults. It is not a question of minimizing the presence of objects, but of offering them in a link that links each subject from the beginning with the human world that receives it. Neither gives prominence to replace the presence and interactive participation of the adult nor exacerbates their physical characteristics (color, size, and name) to the detriment of the experience that occurs in the act of exploring or playing to produce a transformation at a symbolic level.

The mother (or whoever performs the care function) is bodily and affectively involved in the exchange to try to decipher and share her baby’s emotional states, for which she experiences a libidinal encounter, based on the pleasure of the exchange. This encounter has a sexual dimension with all its phantasmatic unconsciousness and makes possible the separation of the self. It is an experience of separation and of feeling accompanied by another. For Guerra, the intersubjectivity derived from cognitive psychology must dialogue with the theory of drives, calling it “interpulsionality” [19].

It is also suggested that the task of those who surround the little ones and their first links (we could think of educators, therapists, caregivers, and people from the immediate environment) should not impose our own music, but identify and tune the instrument that they must play to reproduce your own music.

It is important to highlight the role of initial support and also of a joint rhythmic exchange, early social play, shared attention directed toward a common event, body and gestural dialogue, and the narration of the first affective exchanges between the baby and the adult significantly. These are the elements of the process of subjectivation in the first year of life. An “adult malleability during play” [30] is also necessary. This refers to a malleable, accessible, available environment, as the basis of symbolization processes, ideas that are based on Winnicott’s premises [18], as long as the mother or whoever fulfills that function allows herself to be transformed by the child, thus creating the fantasy of action in the outside world. We could say that without psychic and bodily malleability, the creation of the transition space would not take place [30].

In this same sense, the term “interludicity” arises to explain the action of the child, co-creator with the adult, as he seeks “to find in the other a playful malleability that also allows him to co-construct his psychic life: express his desires, integrate the experiences of the mind and body, explore and tolerate their adaptation to reality, and elaborate potentially distressing situations” [31]. These first games between the baby and the adult are loaded with multimodal elements (voices, sounds, contacts, waiting, rhythms, synchronicities, smiles, also misunderstandings, etc.) that occur between the child and the adult and introduce them to the dynamics of communication. It is a pre-verbal dialogue and a prelude to verbal dialogue, loaded with musical, sound, temporal, rhythmic, affective, and interactive elements, the basis of affective exchange and basic security.

4. Build and enrich children’s environments

Now we can raise the need to review family spaces and institutional spaces that collaborate with the first interpersonal context of the little ones, and public spaces that could make possible on a large scale the inclusion of shared instances of babies, small children, and adults in the environments. These environments empower and make room for the need to weave support networks for adult caregivers.

There are several functions to review as potential spaces to strengthen daily and institutional practices. Here I will list some possible ones.

The first refers to recovering the bodily proximity of the first times in the lives of babies without objects that hinder this early contact, publicized as necessary or indispensable objects for a good upbringing. In other words, to recover the body as a space for contact and early communication, as a source of experiences of envelopment and emotional support that provide security and pleasure in the early stages. To do this, adults must recover their own bodily experiences, to understand that the early interactive process is full of multimodal sensations, not just language and visual stimulation.

Another aspect to take into account is the times of shared experiences, not only of the individual subject who discovers the world but also of the adult who reveals the world in small doses. An adult who offers, makes available, and is bodily involved in the relationship, but without losing his dynamic spaces, so as not to exhaust the caregiver and raze his own subjectivity in search of an idealized childhood. Let us think of the failures that Winnicott talks about [18], of doing enough, of questioning the good of motherhood and fatherhood, and focus on the adjective sufficient, that reaches, that lays the foundation for development, instead of masking an adult attitude of total presence, which only leaves powerless when exhaustion reaches a physical, emotional, and mental limit. Find quality time, at a leisurely pace necessary to get in touch with the rhythm of babies and toddlers, in the midst of the accelerated time that productive life offers us today.

Also the idea of resignifying the spaces and times that collaborate in the construction of the body as a psychic and corporal knot, in the performance of daily functions, such as feeding, bathing, hygiene, children’s sleep and a time of interludicity. developed in the previous section. This playful adult attitude towards play and early interactions.

In these moments of adult-child exchange, the independence of the little ones is often demanded instead of opening up to contact and communication. These situations have the children’s bodies as protagonists of the scene, and the attitudes of the adults are varied, they allow themselves to be relieved by the presence of the screens, and they limit themselves to caring without getting bodily or spontaneously involved. For Calmels, an Argentine psychomotricity professional, the embodying function of adults is “a construction product of the (asymmetric) relationship established between the adult and the child. The child is embodied by another that fulfills this function, this link is the foundation of the gesture of various bodily manifestations, such as the look, the listening, the contact, the expressive gestures, the face, the voice, the praxis, the attitude posture, tastes, awareness of pain and pleasure, etc.” [32]. The adult collaborates in the construction of the body of the other, offers border, contact, proximity, security, and in vital functions, such as eating, sleeping, and cleaning, regulates and supports the forms of coping of the own body. We understand the body as a construction that is assembled in the bond with others, in an asymmetric relationship, of care, where the child is loved, imagined, and named before being able to love, imagine and name and assume his own body functions.

Adults fulfill this embodying function, although sometimes upbringing or education is understood as a mere application of stimuli. It is necessary to be alert about these and their “stimulating effects,” intentional or not, but present in the environment of the little ones. Calmels states that “deficiencies do not exist for lack of stimuli, but for the absence of stimulating links [33].

The bet is to value human exchange as a source of pleasant, rich, and diversified experience, in the family context, but also to have support networks to carry out this task in the company of other caregivers who contribute their experiences. In this way, we highlight the role of the other, adult, caregiver as a mediator, who offers, donates objects and meanings to be taken by newcomers. It gets involved, shares meanings, and bathes the baby or young child in language, respectfully accompanies bodily processes in early childhood as a basis for mental health.

Body care (understood as a dedication to hugs, caresses, and words) are apparently natural instances that require much review and reflection on the part of the educator or caregiver and a careful accompaniment” [34]. This is a valid contribution for both family groups and early childhood institutions. And it is necessary to review the ways in which we carry it out, to put in tension the knowledge reproduced in an uncritical way that does not generate subjectivizing situations. To do this, reflection and “doing with others” are a source of exchange and production of new knowledge that creates new ways of caring.

The possibility of opening accompaniment networks in the face of the individuality of the subjects is raised here. Although there are unique ways of being a mother, father, caregiver, or educator; there is a need to review old precepts and the new ideals that underlie the cataract of images of happiness that are projected on social networks. Generate listening spaces, where being one is possible, in a group that supports the idea of humanity for both new members and adult caregivers. These spaces, experiential workshops, meetings, rounds of exchange, nurseries, libraries for babies, toy libraries, and meeting instances, can be generated from the public, health, educational, or social sphere, from private or semi-private proposals and constitute a source of exchange extremely rich. It is a privileged way of weaving support networks for caregivers of young children and parents.

For Maria Emilia Lopez,

“Traditionally, where there were children there were social networks. The children invite to community life; (…) Gathering around the human cub guaranteed the continuity of cultural gestures transmitted generationally. The encounter with others facilitates in itself the emergence of the game, the entertainment, the fun, the conversation, the flow of the word, and the narration. But social spaces move away from community practices” [35].

The enrichment of children’s spaces also includes attending to the availability of adults, since as adults we put aside the richness of the languages we have to express ourselves. Addressing this aspect includes reflection, games, and workshops that allow us to open ourselves to a free and creative corporality, and also containment during the child-rearing process, sharing experiences as axes of revision and transformation of practices and knowledge.

For López, the care of babies and young children requires “learning to read to children” as a complex task, “it is about reading between the lines, reading between gestures, reading timestamps, or reading without words. The task of interpreting their feelings and their needs, their ways of thinking, requires particular sensitivity and availability, in addition to certain specific knowledge about child development” [36]. This task also includes unlearning certain knowledge and retracing the path of certain teaching to enter into shared reciprocity that gives rise to the new.

This availability involves us and moves us; it is attention directed toward the other that makes us resonate and enter into an emotional, tonic, and affective dialogue; and it is a bodily activity (muscular, tonic, affective, and cognitive) that offers support to the activity of the little boy. And it constitutes an important demand of the adults who care, hence the need to have social spaces that strengthen and support those who care, that overcome individualism as a common way of doing and communicating. López proposes “Betting on a richer cultural development for early childhood also implies an endowment of social, affective, and cultural resources in the mediators” [37]. It refers to parents, relatives, educators, librarians, and social agents who participate in the process of raising and being hospitable to young children.

The author proposes to speak of “didactics of tenderness,” as a metaphor, which implies “an integral intervention” that “is hospitable to the baby and the small child and their family in a physically and mentally supportive creative space, with affective availability and in good conditions they are generated for cognitive development” [38]. This idea allows us to think of the child as a bonding subject, and not just a learning subject who is “taught” certain skills. This subtle but enormous difference places the child in an active place, in relation to another theme that offers and chooses elements of the world to share with newcomers: “For children, tenderness is something that is received (…). It is something that is only learned to do from second-hand, tender if it has received tenderness” [39]. Let us think of the exchange in the key of intersubjectivity, of sharing the experience of discovering the world with another who welcomes, allows himself to be malleable, gives meaning, and stops the gesture while waiting for the expressiveness of the baby. Tenderness here does not refer only to caresses but to a hospitable affective exchange of the other.

Those who go through motherhood, fatherhood, or the process of raising a child, find themselves crossed by the ideal of being “good parents,” longing for times of happiness without conflicts or anguish. The anguish of fatherhood is intrinsic to that role. For Lutereau, “Many times we think that we have to do everything quickly, like when we are at work. As if living with the family were just another job. And we think that children’s play is something they do alone, that they should put aside to come and be with us” [40]. This aspect, of personal reflection on one’s own role, can occur in therapeutic spaces, but they must also be accessible in collective, educational spaces, generated from various social spheres, and that allows us to think of ourselves as subjects of training in relation to other subjects and with forms diverse and respectful care alternatives.

Another fundamental aspect to think about environments rich in experiences and creativity are playful environments. Shared spaces and times, both family and social, where the fictional experience of acting and interacting with others can take place. For Lutereau “long before being neurologically ready, even before pronouncing a word, the human being is ready to play” [41]. Speaking of play in early childhood, he adds that “all the early games consist of the art of manifesting the alternation between what appears and disappears, such as the little sheet, the little face in the hands, the hide-and-seek, among others, as well as what disappears, what is imagined, puts our utilitarian life in parentheses, so that the only time that matters is that of the complicity of the search” [41]. There is a playful attitude shared between adults and children that offers the possibility of recreating a fun and innovative way of being together.

Playing is doing, stated Winnicott [10]. We could say that playing is also undoing time and space, reinventing it, transforming it, letting adult logic explore the unknown, apprehending it, dominating it, and conquering it over and over again. For this reason, it is essential to propose a time of observation, carefully observe the children’s play and let the children explore, suspending the knowledge about what a child should do, but giving rise to unproductive times where they explore without knowing very well what to do. Just observe. This would allow us to make more adjusted interventions in the game, prepare better spaces and relevant objects and promote the game with an empathetic and open attitude as it is presented to us at each stage.

Playing with children is discovering other logics of doing and knowing, without imposing our own, it is waiting, stripping ourselves of certain certainties, stopping and making room for the new. Currently “few parents really know what their children like to play, much less allow themselves to be tempted to enter that territory where time is wasted” [42]. For Lutereau “Raising a child is not knowing what to do, but enduring times of maladjustment that growth implies” [43]. And it proposes to adults the task of carefully and disinterestedly observing the playful activity of children, without pretending to dominate it but rather to understand and accompany the processes in children.

It is also possible to recover the traditional games in the transgenerational dialogue to inhabit that space and gain ground in the virtual space [43]. Let us think about these and other possible responses and trials in the face of the advancement of new technologies within the home, of exchange spaces and in the ways of caring for and raising a young child. It is important to value the use of new technologies, as part of our daily reality, and if necessary, giving them a place, but not everything. It is proposed to bet on the power of childhood and “invent ways of being together, of producing dialogic situations, of generosity and listening, and, in these spaces, generate an own experience around the artistic objects of cultural assets” [44]. It is about producing and creating new cultural goods, and not just transmission or teaching.

Together with López, we can propose the idea of carrying out a cultural intervention, that is, promoting “access to play, art, reading, speech and narration as community events, in addition to expanding the universe of family practices that spontaneously accompany boys and girls from their arrival. For her, children are those who are learning to express themselves, those who seek to understand the world and need a loving and dialogical environment to enter the culture and build their own psyche [45]. But at the same time, he points out that they are also the least visible in society. Let us think about the spaces we pass through every day: how many of them are prepared to receive young children, and how many do not include them yet?

Within these proposals, it is possible to think of other objects, such as puppets, mediator dolls, and recreational spaces that house and contain characters that express emotions and share collective meanings. Elena Sana Cruz, renowned Argentine puppeteer, talks about playful objects. These are mediating resources between the individual and the collective, emotions and words, the inner world and artistic expressions. For the author, they are “intermediary objects and embodied metaphors that allow, in short times, to generate enormous spaces. They are not just pleasant objects to attract attention: they are bridges to reach the other, affective and effective scaffolding (…). Playful objects can arise in many ways. Some for a specific need to say or show something in particular; others because someone needs to speak and so that they can scaffold their expressive capacity” [46].

“The insertion of dolls as transitional objects in different contexts allows resuming communications interrupted by pain and traumatic situations” [47]. He defines the puppet as a doll to play with, an intermediary object to connect with someone, a cultural artifact, created with a purpose where the natural object acquires meaning, and a theatrical character [47]. That is to say, with it you can act, exchange with others, weave stories, put together sequences, represent, in the here and now, not to entertain but to create.

Understanding upbringing in all its modalities and the links between children and adults as “a high-density cultural background in the lives of children and families” [48], requires reflecting on parenting practices and the forms of accompaniment that are offered by the family, community, and social spheres. So the bet here is the construction of daily or institutional spaces, in the public and private spheres that bring the cultural baggage closer to families, to recover reading practices, narrations, music and bodily expressiveness, and play as transversal to any proposal where the commitment of the entire community makes it possible. The recognition of the playful attitude of the adult, its malleability, and its permeability to the actions of the little ones, are the gateway to the creative, cultural, fictional world and to language.

Proposing a proposal for the rights of early childhood, which expands the cultural offer and the spaces it offers for exploration, the creation of the little ones, and also for the exchange with significant adults and between family groups, is a huge and complex task. And it is a challenge to our current society. It is necessary to promote and guarantee the cultural rights of children in environments enriched by subjectivizing practices, in spaces that contain them and also their affective ties.

5. Conclusions

It is difficult to conclude the debate when we are traversed by this particular time and space. But it is necessary to point out some ideas to broaden our perspective and not to propose certainties but rather possible paths that allow us to transform our practices.

It is important to accompany children and the adults who care for them on the road to autonomy, offering exchange spaces to those responsible for generating a secure base for early childhood, with elements ranging from corporality, affectivity, proximity, and the early wrapping, the exchange between children and adults, and valuable cultural assets for our community.

Also care for and support the function of accompaniment of the child’s body process, as a guarantee of the present and future mental health of our society. Support and promote the availability of those who care for young children with the creation of networks and meeting and exchange spaces. Promote affective and bodily contact in the early stages of life. Allow the origin of fiction, play, creativity, expression, and cultural interventions in their broad manifestations. It is necessary to claim the significant role of the adult to gain ground in new technologies and allow the experience to be an inexhaustible source of creativity and solidarity.

In addition to acting and interacting in the midst of uncertainty to walk toward new terrain, populated by words, metaphors, throbbing bodies, and human subjects emotionally capable of accommodating their various ways of being and relating. These new ways of acting together with children cannot occur in the individuality of each educational space or family. They must be based on a network of multicultural spaces, a network that forms a community and that listens and offers other ways of being and communicating with early childhood. It is about accompanying adults and children in their subjectivation process. Forming a community means working with others and designing spaces where words and imagination circulate, where adults feel accompanied in the face of the overflow produced by raising, educating and accompanying children in their growth process.

I borrow the words of María Emilia López to conclude:

“Producing community around babies and young children through books, songs, stories, games, is a form of emotional, cultural, and poetic care. Who cares for the one who raises, protects humanity” [49].