Saturday May 10, 2008
The Guardian
http://lifeandhealth.guardian.co.uk/family/story/0,,2279130,00.html
Every breath she takes
Psychologist Charles Fernyhough turned every moment of the first three years of his
daughter's life into a research project. Viv Groskop asks him what he found out
'It's good so far. It's interesting," says Athena, eight, of her experience of trying to
read the 273-page book about the first three years of her life. She shakes her blonde
pigtails from side to side. "It's good knowing about what I was like when I was little. I
remember going to school and going out with Daddy and going on lots of trips."
This is Athena's verdict on The Baby in the Mirror: A Child's World from Birth to Three, a
cross between a biography of a baby growing into a child, a scientist's case-study notes
and a beautifully written novel. The author is Athena's father, Charles Fernyhough, 40,
who lives just outside Durham with his wife, Lizzie Meins, 41. Athena's brother Isaac is
four. Both parents are developmental psychologists and lecturers at Durham University.
Athena's arrival was always going to be interesting, to put it politely: both parents
specialise in infants up to the age of two and are used to scrutinising them. But if their
situation is unusual, their home life could not be more ordinary. The rambling house is
reassuringly lived-in, with sweeping views across the countryside. Athena good-naturedly
bosses Isaac around as he tries to build a complicated train track arrangement. She
eventually gets bored and heads for the piano to pick out the tune of a song she is
writing for a friend.
This relaxed family atmosphere comes across in Fernyhough's book. Putting his professional
experience aside, he finds himself in awe of the process of becoming a parent and
documents the experience as if he were describing the minutiae of life on another planet.
He thinks himself into the experience of a new-born baby, likening it to that of a student
after an all-night bender: "You've made this great friend - you call her Ma - and she's as
out of it as you are. You're going home to crash for about three days. You lost your coat
somewhere and you're freezing. But what a rave, what a light-show. What a night."
The absence of material on this age group fascinates Fernyhough. Brian Hall's Madeleine's
World (1998) attempted a similar trick with the author's three-year-old daughter, and the
cognitive scientist Paul Bloom used his own children as case studies in his study
Descartes' Baby (2005). But there has been little else. In fiction, children appear
regularly, but few toddlers and babies. In general, we shy away from describing this phase
of life. Possibly we fear it because it is so unknown and lost to our own memories, says
Fernyhough: "I wanted to ask, what is it like to be a small child? It must be a strange
place to be."
Fernyhough was a stay-at-home father for the first seven years of Athena's life. From her
first weeks in the womb to her third birthday, he catalogued in minute detail everything
that happened to his daughter. He took hundreds of hours of video footage, thousands of
photographs and dozens of books' worth of notes, detailing everything Athena said and did.
The result is extraordinary, partly because of the elegant explanations of how his
everyday observations dovetail with scientific theory.
His insights are funny, clever and recognisable to any parent. In the weeks after birth,
he realises that his baby daughter has identified her parents as "Breast" and
"Not-Breast". He marvels at her ability to make the expression "laggy loo" into an entire
language for several months. Once she really can speak, she is charming: "When I were a
little baby, it were very sunny," she says, aged three, trying to think up something daddy
can write about her memories of babyhood. ("That's what Daddy does," her father explains.
"He tries to understand how little children think. That's his job.")
As well as being a psychologist, Fernyhough is also a gifted wrAuctioneer, was described in the Daily Telegraph as "the debut of a considerable talent",
and he is at work on a second. There are many passages in The Baby in the Mirror that have
the quality of fiction, as Fernyhough tries to imagine his daughter's world and what must
be going on inside her head. His lyrical description of Athena's experience has a
peculiarly familiar, universal quality to it, almost as if he is trying to recreate his
own babyhood. He uses his insights as a psychologist, parent and author to build up a
picture of a world we rarely read about - a time of life we have all experienced but which
few of us retain in our memories.
Fernyhough is expert at putting these private moments of everyday life into an accessible
scientific context. At one point, Fernyhough is explaining the concept of "private speech"
- the process of speaking our thoughts aloud. This is his main area of academic research.
He breaks off and discreetly indicates his son, mouthing, "This is what Isaac is doing
now." Isaac is oblivious, rattling through Incy Wincy Spider repeatedly to himself. So
this is what it is like to see a child as science in action.
Fernyhough continues: "One school of thought says that private speech is about learning to
think and that we have a stream of inner thought that is an internalised version of social
speech. The other interpretation is that it has no function at all and is only happening
because the child is trying to communicate but doesn't know how to." His own research is
pointing in the direction of the conclusion that private speech is how our earliest
thought patterns are formed. Basically, it's how we learn to think. "This is why parents
shouldn't worry if a child talks to himself - in fact, they should encourage it. That's
how children learn to think. We tell stories about ourselves and that is where the self
comes from. That's probably the only piece of parenting advice I would be prepared to
give," he laughs, slightly embarrassed. He prefers analysis and observation to advice.
His study of his own children has made him question some of his research in another pet
area - theory of mind. "This is all about children's understanding of other people's
mental states - what others think, believe and desire." It is generally held that children
develop "theory of mind" - the ability to understand that other people have different
thoughts to them - from the age of four. "But I've now seen that when you're very close to
a child you begin to see evidence of this much earlier. One day, when Athena was two, we
wanted to have a tea party with her dolls. I went looking for one of them in the study -
where I thought he was. She pointed to another room and said, 'In there.' She couldn't
possibly have done that unless she had a theory of mind. In order to know that I wanted
Jake, she had to understand what I was thinking."
Both Charles and Lizzie are now re-evaluating how scientific methods work. Maybe children
are more at ease in the company of their parents, they now think - something that could be
impossible to replicate in scientific tests.
It is because of the fallibility of our scientific knowledge about the state of babyhood
that the two see their academic skills as being quite separate to their aptitude as
parents. They insist that they are just as clueless as the rest of us. "We're completely
in the dark," Fernyhough says. "I don't want to make a claim about what makes a 'good
parent' until I've seen reliable evidence - and I can't get that on the basis of two
children."
He is particularly sniffy about parenting manuals - the ones that pretend to know all the
answers. "When you have someone coming along and solving sleep problems with very specific
advice ... I would be very sceptical about that because I am very aware of the lack of
science. Dr X's sleep plan has not been scientifically tested. There are a lot of problems
with behaviour genetics but I trust that a lot more than I trust parenting advice."
The one person he is perhaps leastTearaways. But even her common sense has its flaws: "Byron makes a great story," says
Fernyhough with a wry smile. "'Here's a child who behaves badly. But let's look at the
parents' behaviour ...' It's misleading to say that is always the case, though."
His own book is certainly not a child-rearing manual. The thought of it makes him shudder:
"The Baby in the Mirror is not a parenting book, not least because I have no idea what
makes a good parent," he writes on his blog (theladybirdpapers.blogspot.com). "I know what
makes an abusive one, or a loving one, and I have a pretty good idea about what kinds of
stimulation of children's minds can be beneficial at different ages. But to suppose that
knowledge of the science is a foundation for training perfect parents is, to my mind, a
dangerous way to go."
Fernyhough, who is a self-effacing, tall man with the air of a poet, is nothing if not
thorough and obviously put himself through some intellectual hoops over Athena's inclusion
in the book in the first place. "I wanted to treat the child as a phenomenon, as an
amazing natural wonder - and to let that child speak for herself. But I was concerned that
it would put her too much in the public gaze. She might turn round one day and say, 'I
wish you hadn't done that.' So I have talked to her at every stage. She likes the idea of
having a record of her life. I can't say she has given her full approval because she may
change her mind - especially when she's a teenager. But I hope she will recognise that it
was done out of love and out of wonder."
He needn't have worried: any parent's description of their small child is much less
personal than they imagine - and any parent reading this book will, as I did, constantly
superimpose memories of their own children on to the "baby in the mirror". This is a
memoir containing all those little details you forget in the haze of early parenting - the
first yawn, the first stretch, the first dribble.
At six weeks, Fernyhough realises that his daughter has learned to blink. At four months,
she can follow the line of another person's gaze and see what they are looking at. At 10
months, she can clap on command. She starts frowning and her father realises she has begun
thinking - and, he guesses, remembering. She can now say "bah". At 17 months she can name
several animals. At two she says, "I write a book like Daddy." Athena acts as an
everychild in that sense: you have an idea of her as an individual, but it is only a vague
sense and not remotely intrusive. This is essential: the book would feel voyeuristic and
exploitative otherwise.
Fernyhough has invaded his own privacy, though, to poignant effect. The book is as much
about his discovery of himself as a parent as it is about Athena's development. Fernyhough
is open about his shortcomings as a father: "I still feel a bit in the dark about what
parenting is. I often felt that I was stuck at home and not necessarily the best person to
do it. But I am sure that it is in keeping with the experience of being a stay-at-home
parent. There is a part in the book where I say, 'How can I love her and just want her to
shut up?'"
Of fatherhood, he says: "It is such a great change that it is impossible to imagine. It
has brought so much wonder and happiness into my life and now I can't imagine life without
them. As a young man I didn't like children very much" - at this point, Athena jumps on
him, hard - "And I still don't," he laughs, teasing her. "I really don't see myself as a
family man. I hope that people don't get the impression that this has been a rosy voyage
of discovery. The disruption to your sleep is extraordinary. Isaac has only been sleeping
properly for the past year." His son smiles as widely as is possible when you have a mouth
full of grapes.
Near the end of the book there is a moving chapter about Lizzie's second pregnancy: they
told Athena, then nearly three, that she would be having a brother or sister. Then came a
miscarriage. Fernyhough explores his feelings about whethertelling Athena. "Miscarriage is an undiscovered grief at the heart of many people's lives.
It was a real shock to know how to deal with it emotionally. If you are grieving for a
parent, there are ways to respond, it's a more examined grief. Grief over a child that
isn't born ... Well, some people would argue that it is not grief at all."
He did not intend to make a big statement about miscarriage and grief, he adds: "I just
wanted to say that children are very complex at that age and their emotional lives are
very complex."
He is not sure whether Athena understood or shared their grief. "There's one way this
process could have a negative outcome and that is if it makes her remember things she
would rather have forgotten," he says, seriously. "I am not a Freudian. There is a lot of
research that some things are best forgotten."
At least whatever Athena wants to remember will all be there in black and white - an
extraordinary record surely we would all love to have of the part of our lives hardly any
of us recall.
· The Baby in the Mirror: A Child's World from Birth to Three by Charles Fernyhough is
published by Granta at £12.99. To order a copy for £11.99 with free UK p&p go to
guardian.co.uk/bookshop or call 0870 836 0875
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Received on Sat May 10 02:12 PDT 2008
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