Tag: observe

you dont need to show them

Desere

In my very first post I described the type of teacher I was and how I believed aha moments were pivotal to my classroom environment. It was so important to me not to take away my students’ aha moment and this influenced my style of teaching. I had to build this type of culture of students leading the learning.

I never lectured and I never showed my students how to solve anything.

This may seem like a weird thing for a teacher to say. I promise you, my students learned, a lot.

But the difference with my style of teaching was that they were able to own each aha moment. And there is something to be said about this. When someone shows you something and you replicate it, you may feel good that you can do it too. But when you achieve something on your own there is a whole new sense of worth.

I have seen students rise to the occasion. I have seen how being confident in my students’ abilities led them to actually figure things out without me showing them how. All I had to do was let go of this need that I had. A need to show them. A need to ensure they do it right.

I heard this with teachers all the time. If I don’t give them the formula how will they know how to solve the problem? or If I don’t show them an example how will they know what to do?

I understood. You don’t want your students to fail. You want them to do it right, to complete their homework, to pass the test, to move on to the next teacher without making you look bad. You want them to succeed in life.

So it is hard to sit back and wait. It is hard to let someone do the learning, to do the heavy lifting, other than you. Especially when you think it is your job to show them how to do everything.

It was hard for me at first too. I remember when I was working under my mentor teacher, I kept wondering what was the point to this style of teaching. How could it be worth it for some concepts which could have been learned in 5 minutes to actually take hours to learn? I’ll never forget the pythagorean theorem lesson.

How long does it take to draw this on the board, have students copy it down, and explain you simply plug in whatever numbers you have to solve for the unknown side? About 5 minutes. I remember my teacher in high school showing me this and then giving several example problems of doing just that. I remember being able to do the same at home and thinking I was a genius because I totally understood the pythagorean theorem.

But with my style of teaching, with my mentor’s style of teaching, this theorem took an entire 1.5 hour lesson. Without me describing every detail of that lesson right now, basically the curriculum uses a game and probability to guide students to develop this equation on their own. Yes, they literally come up with the pythagorean theorem by the end of the lesson. And yes it takes 1.5 hours, sometimes longer. But at the end students really understood why this equation looks the way it does. They understand why we square the sides and why it equals c squared. There is an entire progression to their understanding. And only at the end do we say, “oh actually the equation you just came up with, well a man a really long time ago named Pythagoras found it first so now we name it after him.” Every time I taught this lesson (or any lesson) my students were not only so proud of themselves, they enjoyed it! The best part, they remembered what they learned months later because of this deeper understanding.

But it’s hard to let go. It takes so much longer. It takes patience. It takes more work on your part than you think because you are sitting back and watching kids fail over and over without ‘saving’ them. You are thinking about how to guide them without doing it for them. But I promise you this way works. My students always got there in the end. They did because everything they have ever learned and seen and done in their entire lives is a part of them and has given them the tools they need to build off their own understanding. Sometimes they needed help, of course. But that’s when I used questioning to help, to guide them, instead of giving them direct answers.

Anyway, I’m telling you this because I want to continuously shed light on the type of teacher I was, which has played a HUGE role in the type of mother I am and the style of parenting I believe in.

As parents, we tend to think our job is to show our children how to do everything.  It was just like hearing the teachers, but now I hear it with parents. She will never know what to do if I don’t show her first. or I need to show him how to do it. 

First of all let go of that. Who cares?

Who cares if your child will use the little watering can as a drum for the next few years? Why does it matter for your one year old to know how to put the cymbals together to make a noise, or to pick up the crayon and draw something on a piece of paper?

I know you don’t want your kids to fail. You put things in their hands and do things for them. It is out of love and I understand this need as a mom, and as a teacher.

But it is a disservice.

Your child is not learning when you do things for them. They are not achieving anything, their brains aren’t growing, and they are not owning the aha.

If it’s a matter of saving time, when would you like to save the time? Is it worth it to save time now, when they are young, by showing them how to do things, only to be stuck years later with someone who can’t figure things out on their own? Someone who can’t persist through their own struggles? I mean it was like when I was teaching. The first 3-4 months were just setting up the classroom environment, setting up my students to rely on themselves and their groups instead of me. It was taking the time, excrutiatingly, to push students further and further so they see that they don’t actually need me to do everything for them. It was sitting with each group, one at a time, literally showing them how to work in a group and how to share ideas. It was setting up this foundation which took so much time and effort in the beginning of the year, so that by the end I was able to sit back and enjoy the learning happening all around me, often without me.

Furthermore, part of respectful parenting is treating your kids like you would adults who you respect and care for. Would you buy someone a gift, open it for them, and show them what to do? I mean, that’s crazy and demeaning. I can’t imagine doing that for my husband or my mother or anyone. So why do we do this with our own children?

Let them do whatever they want to do with whatever object they have in their hands. (as long as it is safe of course) Let them explore. Let them be young and creative.

You are worried they will never figure something out, but children’s minds are inherently explorative. They are constantly learning everything around them. Their brains are working and growing at max capacity. It has to be for them to learn to crawl and walk and talk and eat and everything. So just naturally they will try everything until something works. When we enjoy the process rather than the product, we enjoy watching our little ones figure things out rather than showing them what to do each time.

Earlier I mentioned that teachers feel like their job is to show students how to do everything. But shouldn’t it be more than that? I could care less if students remembered the binomial theorem or even the formula for area and volume. We have computers for that who can do it better and faster than us anyway. Instead I always felt like if I could send out to the world people who knew how to work together and problem solve, who knew what to do in challenging situations, and who knew that where there is struggle there is also strength, then I would be a successful teacher.

I knew that the trivial mathematical stuff didn’t matter, but the characteristics they were building in my class did.

Shouldn’t it be the same as a parent? Do we really care about showing our children every thing that crosses their path? Do we need to stress ourself out to make sure they do everything “the right way”? Or should we instead be striving to raise resourceful, persistent, confident, cooperative, aware human beings?

Let’s focus on who they are. Let’s trust them. Let’s do less so they do more. 

don’t assume

Desere1 Comment

As parents we make a lot of assumptions on behalf of our children. We assume that they’re tired. We assume that they’re bored. We assume that they’re angry. We assume that they’re scared.

When we are at a play date and see someone take our child’s toy, we assume our child is upset. When we see our child fall, we assume our child is hurt.

But young children run on instinct and are driven to explore. They are directed by an internal motivation to play, and through that play learn instinct and experimentation. They are impulsive and can’t always be rationalized with. They feel … strongly. All of these reasons are why we cannot assume things about them.

Let’s look at some specific examples.

when they play

Parents constantly assume their kids are bored. This is one of the biggest criticisms I hear about RIE parenting, that doing baby-led play instead of playing with our children leaves them bored. This is completely untrue. Babies and young children don’t get bored. They could be pausing to think about what they just touched or did, they could be deciding where next to go, they could simply be taking in a reflection they see from the window. Bored… they are not. And if they are bored, it is a consequence of being constantly entertained without the freedom of uninhibited play. Don’t worry this is easy to fix, just let them be bored.

As for child-led play, we also cannot assume they want to do something with a certain toy. That’s the whole point of this type of play, is letting them play and learn while we observe. They might pick up something simply for the look of it, but if we join in assuming they want to play with that toy, we are officially directing their play. It is no longer theirs. This is why Magda Gerber urges caregivers to step back, let your child do the playing and you will be amazed at the things they come up with. But this means getting rid of biases and assumptions of what ‘play’ is.

when they steal

One child is holding a toy. Another kid comes and takes the toy away. The “stealing” kid’s mother comes over, yanks the toy from their hand, gives it back to the first kid, all while saying something like “no don’t do that, you have to share, that is not nice, if you don’t share we are leaving.” How many of you have seen something like this?

Why are we assuming that young children are bothered by toys being taken? Moreover why are we assuming our child needs us to fix the situation?

If your child is the victim, let them be. Let them learn resourcefulness. Kids live in the moment. They will either try to get their toy back or move on. They may even go find a replacement toy. How cool is that!? They might go find something else to play with because they understand someone has their original item of interest. And why take that aha away from them? Why save them? If they are upset, that’s because they just learned they can’t always have everything they want. That’s an important message in life.

If your child is the stealer, then so be it. They saw something that seemed interesting and went after it. As long as they took it respectfully, which they often do if given the chance, then why stop them? I feel like it is more out of fear that we step in. We are afraid the other kid is upset. We are afraid someone will judge our child for being a bully.  We are afraid someone will judge us for not doing something. But this isn’t about you, the adult, who has life experiences that taught you about repercussions and complex emotions. It’s about the child. Janet Lansbury eloquently writes, “Children this age don’t understand the concepts of “sharing” or “ownership”, and when we try to teach them those things, we tend to discourage play and learning”.

Stop trying to fix it.

when they fall

I see this all the time, a small child falls and the parent rushes over in a panic. The parent fusses as the child learns the power they now have over their caregiver.

I get it, when my son falls my heart stops. It’s indescribable the fear I feel in that moment, wondering if he is all right. Most of the time… he is. I am constantly amazed at how non-fragile babies and kids are.

The problem when we do this is we assume they are in pain and and they feed off this assumption. When we rush over, we are sending several messages to our kid. We are telling them falling or getting hurt is the worst thing that could happen and that they need us. We create a dependency on ourselves to save them from what they are feeling.

I find however, simply stating what you observe is the best thing to do. It helps them make sense of what just happened, and build resiliency. My son often hits his head and I tell him that. I don’t say “poor baby are you ok oh my gosh.” I also don’t try to make him forget with “you’re ok, it’s fine, nothing happened.” I walk over normally, ensure my face is in a natural state, and tell him “you hit your head, I saw that.”

Then I read the situation. If he is still crying hysterically I tell him I am going to pick him up, and I hold him. More often, he calms down and looks at me. Sometimes he looks at where he hit his head, sometimes he puts his hand on his head where he got hurt. He is making sense of what just happened, and I am helping him do it without being his “hero” who saves him from the situation.

This is hard to do, of course, because like I said my heart literally stops when he appears to get hurt. But then, I realize my assumptions that he is hurt are often wrong and seeing him continue to play seconds later makes me confident of this method.

when they “talk”

Often when a toddler says something, we assume to know what they are referring to so we can respond. I mean what else can we do when our toddler is speaking to us using one word sentences? We look at their body language and their tone and deduce the meaning of their message.

What I’ve learned however is sometimes the best thing you can do is, again, say what you observe.

A boy in my RIE class oftentimes points up at the snack table on top of the cabinet and says “nak”. He usually does this before snack time starts. At first his mom would say “you are hungry and ready for snack” or “you want snack”. But he would just keep saying “nak”. Our teacher told the mom that maybe he isn’t hungry. Instead of assuming he is hungry, just say “you see the snack table.” The mom did, the boy lit up and walked away.

You see sometimes they just want to feel heard, feel understood. And acknowledging them this way does so without unknown assumptions. No deniability, as my teacher says. By simply stating what we see there is no denying what we are saying out loud to be true or false, as the case with the boy who wasn’t hungry but just saying he sees the snack table.

Another example that happened in my class was a boy kept saying “daddy.” So the mom tried to rationally let him know daddy is home and they will see him when they get home. The boy persisted. All throughout class, “daddy”, “daddy”, “DADDY”.

The teacher turned to the boy and said “you are saying daddy, you really want daddy.” The boy looked at her, then went on to play.

 

So what’s my point with all this? What are we to do? We are humans who assume. Assumptions help us navigate our world. But too often babies and young children are treated as objects because we assume things for them. They are people, through and through. Assumptions about them simply underestimate their abilities.

I had a teacher in high school who used to tell us “to assume is to make an ass out of you and me.” Maybe inappropriate to be telling this to high school students, but the message stuck.

So stop assuming. Just be there, acknowledge, and trust.

relaxing play date

Desere

My last RIE class reaffirmed why I love this parenting philosophy so much.

When I walked in there was just one boy there already with his mom. I sat down with Franky on my lap and waited until he was ready to leave me. I waited until I could feel him leaning out of my lap. But he didn’t. A few minutes went by, five, then ten minutes, and my son sat on me, completely content.

When he was finally ready to leave, he didn’t go to the toys like every other class, he kept going to the other boy sitting on his mom.
My son was craving a social interaction, a connection with someone, not something.

The other boy, however, was simply craving time on his mom.

I learned that this boy goes to day care a few days a week, because the mom works part time. This is one of the few times during the week he probably gets his moms’ 100% undivided attention. So he was soaking it up.

And the best part about RIE class is that this boy could stay on his mom for as long as he wanted. He could hug her for the entire 1.5 hours of class. Because RIE class gives the space for kids to just be.

Just like my son could sit on me for longer than he normally does.

It’s important to allow the space for babies to warm up in their own way and to decide for themselves to be independent of us as their caregiver. There are so many times where we are the ones that put our kids down and leave them. How often do we leave them to use the restroom or prepare dinner? And how often do we give them the opportunity to leave us?

Later, a third boy came with his mom.
And that was it for today’s class, just three boys.

When the third came he began playing with the toys and my son went over to play with him.

Everything was so relaxed and so mellow. It was so refreshing.

I realized that this is the only time in the week  that I can have a play date where the moms are not distracted. There is no noise and chaos from kids screaming and running around, while moms sit around and chat about this and that.

When I go to those types of play dates, I feel like us moms are there for each other, not our kids. Which is valid. Being a stay-at-home mom is tough because often you spend most of your day without speaking to another adult. No conversation can mess with you. And so having a play date with the true intention of having other adults to talk to is completely understandable.

But I don’t like it. I don’t like it because my son’s needs get ignored. I don’t like entering those play dates and putting my son down so I can catch up with my mommy friends. I don’t like watching other kids clinging on their moms, craving a connection, but being pushed to “go play with the other kids so mommy can talk”. I never feel relaxed at these events.

I like RIE class because there is a predictability each week. The predictability is in the time and space we are providing for our babies, and for ourselves.

We always sit against the wall and observe. The room is always set up with the same wooden, silicone, and plastics toys. Our kids are always the ones that get to choose when to leave us to play. And they are always given the freedom to explore, or not.

I love being able to let go of preconceived ideas of what our kids should do or how they should play.

We get to let go because we know it’s a safe space. There are two teachers and several moms observing and providing minimal intervention if necessary.

We get to slow down.

Consequently, our kids get to slow down too.

Our kids get to take in every adult’s face. They get to climb, and fall. They get to play with open ended objects. They get to explore wood and metal. They get to go outside.

They also get to sit on us whenever they want, for as long as they want.

RIE class is the most relaxing of play dates I’ve ever had.

the 3 R’s of rie

Desere1 Comment

Recently I described one of the biggest tenets of RIE, baby-led play. In other words, letting your baby lead their own play time with yourself as an observer. This is true not only when you are home, just you and your child, but also when you are at play groups with many other babies around. Therefore, part of baby-led play includes the idea of waiting before intervening. It’s a simple idea, but one that is incredibly hard to master for most people.

I described about the first RIE class I took, and how the instructor was modeling ways to intervene with her hand. Babies like to touch one another, and that is not necessarily a bad thing. But since our number one priority should always be safety, sometimes babies touch roughly and we do need to intervene.

The hard part is then deciding, when to intervene and when to let babies explore in their own way?

When should I allow them to place their hand on another baby and when do I need to protect the other baby’s face? When do I let babies explore their surrounding and when do I support their body from falling? This is when my teacher told me there is something in RIE when observing known as the 3 R’s.

  • reflect

  • respect

  • respond

The first rule is reflect. As an observer, you should be constantly taking in the situation around your child. Look around and see what exactly your child is looking at, what are they interested in, what is the other baby doing, etc.

  • During one class I went to, my son was playing with a small white ball and mostly holding it in his mouth. Another baby came over and was looking at the ball too. He reached over and carefully took the ball from my son. His fingers were curled so perfectly, he was only touching the ball and not my son’s mouth. Almost as if he knew he just wanted the ball, and not to hurt my son’s face! Really waiting and observing allowed all the moms and I to see how gently this boy acted. And why would we stop him? He didn’t hurt my son. He didn’t scratch his face. My son was not disturbed by the ball being taken. Remember, babies don’t normally care if toys get taken from them. It seems ‘wrong’ to us as adults, but this truly is how babies play.
  • In another class, a boy was pointing to different parts of my son’s face with his index finger. The teacher was close by, but she didn’t intervene because she was watching the boy and how gently he was placing his finger on my son’s face. My son didn’t really react, he simply stared into the face of the boy. As long as he was being gentle, there was really no reason to stop him. The boy was interested in my son’s face, as babies often are.

The next step to remember is respect. This should be easy, since it’s basically the #1 rule of RIE. Respect your child, they know what they are doing. Trust them to know their own body and own limits. If babies don’t like something, they will say so long before they are able to talk. They will cry, or move away. You might find, however, that in most situations they will be undisturbed. Also respect babies to resolve conflicts on their own.

  • A little girl was laying on the carpet and a boy came over and began crawling on top of her. She seemed completely undisturbed. He eventually crawled away but later came back and was about to crawl on top of her again. The girl’s mom stayed at a distance, because she respected the girl to set her own boundary. This time, the little girl sat up and moved back. She was now saying, I don’t like this very much, and moved away herself.
  • My son had a toy and another boy came and took the toy from his hands. This upset Franky, so the teacher said “Frank you had that, and now E has it. You seem upset. You are resourceful, you can find something else to play with.” My son seemed to hear her words because he instantly went to another object, picked it up, and seemed incredibly content with his new toy. Both boys were happy, and my son learned that he has the power to get something else to play with if he wants.
    • Compare this to a playdate where my son had something and a girl took this toy from him. The girl’s mom told her daughter that she shouldn’t have taken it from Frank. She instantly brought another toy and dropped it in front of my son, telling him he could play with that instead. I didn’t intervene but inside I was angry at the dismissed opportunity for my son to either retrieve the same item back from the little girl or resourcefully get something else.

The last step is to respond. Respond to the situation that you are observing with the most minimal intervention that you can. We do not want to ‘fix’ anything, but we are there to protect and guide. It’s about responding not reacting.

  • In class, a boy came over and touched my son’s face pretty violently. The boy’s mom came over right away and simply put her hand in front of my son’s face. She said “I’m going to protect Frank’s face.” She didn’t say this out of anger, she simply stated what she was doing. It was such a respectful interaction. There was no shaming, no accusing of the boy for hurting my son, no yanking his arm out of the way. Minimal intervention. Her response was proactive, “I’m going to protect Franky’s face” instead of “don’t hurt his face”.
  • My son pulled himself up halfway on an outdoor sandbox and stood like this for a long time. Five minutes, ten minutes… at what point should I step in and help him down? Is he stuck, or is he just enjoying standing up the way he is? Reflect: His knees began buckling. Maybe he was tired and wanted to sit down. His face however suggested he was completely fine, with no sign of struggle or fear. Respect: I know Franky likes standing at home all the time, and I trust his ability to use his legs this way. I have seen him stand for long periods and then sit when he is ready. Hmm… but his knees don’t usually buckle. Respond: “I am going to move closer to you”. With my teacher’s guidance, I placed my hand under my son’s chest. Minimal intervention. I am letting him know, I am here, I support you, and if you need to sit down you must still let go yourself.  My son sat back and gave me a smile.

My RIE teacher mentioned that the best part of the 3 R’s is that they force you to slow down. When something is going on, stop to reflect the situation, respect your child, and respond appropriately. This way you are not reacting emotionally, or projecting your own feelings onto your child. (like when a child ‘steals’ a toy and we as the adults are horrified)

It’s this idea of observing in the sense of getting to know who our kid is, how does he move one leg over the other, what type of choices does he make when he is left to make them on his own, how does he resolve issues with others?

Observation without concept, without any agenda, without any preconceived ideas of what should or should not be. This is what the 3R’s let us do. 

baby-led play

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When I became a mom, I was overwhelmed with the idea of play time. Making sure my son was entertained, as well as developing certain skills, was exhausting. All day long I would pick up toys and show my son how they worked, hence playing with him. I would build towers and show him how to push them down, push buttons and sing along for him, and stack rings in the correct order. I would place my son down with his toys and if he didn’t start playing right away I would bring the toys closer. I would go to events like baby story time at the library, picking my son up and down to the music like all the other moms. I figured as my son grows, becomes more aware and more mobile, then play time will get easier.

It didn’t.

I was still playing with all of his toys and still feeling more exhausted every day. Something didn’t feel right. It felt incredibly forced, like I was being pressured to play with him because I thought that was how we were supposed to play with babies. 

And the problem definitely was not that we didn’t have enough things, because we did. We had all kinds of toys.

Toys that light up and play music

Toys that develop hand-eye coordination 

Toys great for imaginative play

Interactive toys with smart stages that grow with baby

I could go on… but you get the point. 

When I began learning about respectful parenting, I realized how I could let go of this idea I was stubbornly holding on to, the idea of playing with baby. I was looking at it all wrong.

This is when I got my aha moment, baby-led play.

You see, babies are motivated by all sorts of things that we don’t always understand. Simply placing your baby (on their back) in an area full of safe things is enough to get them going. Your baby will start playing with something, maybe not right away, but they will. Why force it?

As long as babies have our attention and are in a safe environment, they will play. This is because babies learn about their world through play, it’s in their nature. It’s about trusting and respecting your baby to lead their play time.

I trust my son to play with something for as long as he wants. I trust his choices. If he goes to one object and decides to leave it after less than a minute, who am I to bring it back to him and tell him to play longer? If he picks up a ball and plays with it for an hour (as he often does whenever we go to RIE class) before exploring the other objects, again why stop him? He must really like that ball!

I respect my son’s ability to play with a toy however he wants. When I got the Fisher-Price stacking tower for my son, my whole family and I would show him how to put the rings in order on the tower. What did my son want to do? He wanted to first eat the rings. When he was more mobile, he wanted to throw the rings across the floor to watch them roll away. I used to show him again and again how to place them on the tower. I think back on this and wonder how I could be so selfish. My son was amazed at the ability of the rings to roll away, and I was trying to take that away from him. Why? To build him hand-eye coordination according to the label on the box? The thing is, he was building hand-eye coordination in his own beautiful way.

When I taught high school math, I spent most of the time as a facilitator in my classroom. This meant stepping back, waiting, and observing my students working in their groups. I would never lead them in solving a problem. It was not about projecting my own agenda or ideas, it was about building off their ideas.

Sometimes this meant solving problems took longer. Actually… it often took longer. But when problems were solved, my students were able to truly own the moment. This is part of student-led teaching. And the result was resourceful and self aware students. Because I trusted my students to be able to learn with me facilitating rather than lecturing, they were encouraged to try new things and persevere.

Sometimes they didn’t quite answer the problem. And when I first trained to be a teacher this bothered me. But my mentor made me realize that ultimately the point of being a math teacher is not to get students to solve problems using preconceived equations. The point is to give students the tools to problem solve through several types of situations, to try out their ideas, possibly fail, and keep trying out more ideas. This is what will prepare them for life beyond school. This is better than teaching the pythagorean theorem and students asking me, “when will I ever need to know this?”

So my students didn’t always finish a problem. But there was so much math happening and so many ideas tried, that they were learning every step of the way.

I like to relate my teaching to my parenting style because baby-led play is very similar to student led teaching. I can sit back and let go, while my son discovers his toys in his own time and his own way. And the outcome is similar to that of my students. Since adopting RIE at home, my son has a longer attention span and much more perseverance. Even though I exchanged many of his toys for simpler items like bowls, tubes, containers, and rings, he will play for longer periods of time. And like my students, I don’t care if he doesn’t play with something correctly (like I mentioned above with his stacking tower). I don’t even care if he ‘finishes’ playing with a toy.

We do less, so that our kids do more. I mentioned this idea when introducing how I feed my son and how I change his diaper. With teaching, I did less so my students were doing the heavy lifting. Consequently, they were the ones learning. Play time is the same. I trust my son and he feels trusted to do what he wants and to figure toys out on his own.

The best part is that I now feel so relaxed!

  • I don’t wave toys in front of him.
  • I don’t check Pinterest for activity ideas
  • I don’t take him to several classes during the week to entertain him
  • I don’t worry about songs to sing or making him clap his hands

I just let go.

At this point you may wonder what is so wrong with playing with a baby. When we wave a toy and they happily crawl over, that can’t be a bad thing? My mom often questioned me about this, saying that my son seems so happy when she plays with him and shows him toys. He is enjoying it!

Well, of course he is. Babies will enjoy when you play with them. The problem is that they will begin to rely on this stimulation. This will grow into a habit of needing someone (or something) else to entertain them. This is also a distraction, and we should never mistake distraction for enjoyment.

Moreover, when we do this, we are ignoring the ideas that our children are trying to form on their own. We might think they are bored, but they may be about to come up with something. This is like sitting down to write a blog. I can feel all these ideas coming up, but then my husband walks in and begins talking to me, or the doorbell rings. I lose my train of thought. As an adult, I have the ability to block out external distractors (doorbell or phone), and the capacity to often get back to my ideas. Babies aren’t like that. They are run by their emotion and the stimuli will take over. Therefore as the parent we need to provide the space to nurture their ideas.

The last and probably most important part about baby-led play is that being forced to be an observer lets me learn about my baby. Every day I observe him and take in all his wonder. I try to see the world through his eyes and learn who he is as a person, what his personality is like.

And I have learned that, ironically, he too is an observer. When I set him down in a new place, he likes to wait and see what is happening before jumping in. He likes to people watch, and baby watch.

He likes to find one object that is fascinating to him for whatever reason at the time, and hold on to it for a while before exploring more. He likes to test objects out by banging them on hard surfaces to see what they are made of and what sound they make.

He likes lids, anything with a lid to open and close.

He likes scooting forward in a superman pose, using his toes to propel him forward, and holding something small in his hand.

He likes the way the sun goes through the shutters in his bedroom in the morning, and the pattern it makes on the wall.

Because of baby-led play, I am learning who my son is. And at 9 1/2 months old, he is incredible.