A Thousand Days of Wonder

Description

A father’s intimate look at his daughter’s developing mind from birth to age three

Unlike any other time in our lives, we remember almost nothing from our first three years. As infants, not only are we like the proverbial blank slate but our memories are like teflon: nothing sticks. In this beautifully written account of his daughter’s first three years, Charles Fernyhough combines his vivid observations with a synthesis of developmental theory, re-creating what that time, lost to the memory of adults, is like from a child’s perspective.

In A Thousand Days of Wonder, Fernyhough, a psychologist and novelist, attempts to get inside his daughter’s head as she acquires all the faculties that make us human, including social skills, language, morality, and a sense of self. Written with a father’s tenderness and a novelist’s empathy and style, this unique book taps into a parent’s wonder at the processes of psychological development.”Many psychologists, most notably Jean Piaget, have used their offspring as test subjects, but none has done so with such sweetness as Fernyhough brings to his account of his daughter’s development during the first three years of her life. From her initial appearance on a sonogram, we watch as baby Athena sorts out her sensory input, recognizes her self, learns that other people are more than extensions of her own will, and walks, talks, and remembers. All of this is basic developmental psych, readily available in many forms, including parenting manuals and textbooks. What makes this title outstanding is that it reads like fiction. (In addition to being a psychologist, the author is also a published novelist.) In vignettes about life with Athena, Fernyhough beautifully captures the mix of frustration and poignancy that will seem achingly familiar to all parents of toddlers. This beautiful book is highly recommended.”
-Mary Ann Hughes, formerly Neill P.L., Pullman, WA

“An ambitious and highly intelligent piece of work. If the basis of love is attention, a quality of attention, then Fernyhough has written a 250-page love letter to his daughter. And any parent, particularly one with a young child, will be both moved and enlightened by it.”
–Financial Times

“A cross between a biography of a baby growing into a child, a scientists’s case-study notes and a beautifully written novel.”
–The Guardian [from feature article]

“A triumph of informed imagination and a startling testament of love.”
–Sunday Telegraph

“A book that takes the reader right to the heart of how we become human and how we deal with it.”
–The Scotsman

“But The Baby In The Mirror is also a memoir of sorts, a hymn to a child from a loving father. And that is how it reads.”
–Sunday Herald

“An elegantly written, warm, thoughtful, novelistic account of [Fernyhough’s] first three years with his daughter Athena.”
-Alison Gopnik, author of The Philosophical Baby

“Charles Fernyhough . . . provides an intimate and loving perspective on the emergence of language, consciousness, and autonomy. I have never seen such a beautifully written book on this topic; it is essential reading for both psychologists and new parents.”
-Paul Bloom, professor of psychology at Yale University and author of Descartes’ Baby: How the Science of Child Development Explains What Makes Us Human

“[A Thousand Days of Wonder] is a marvelous addition to the very narrow shelf of books that take a genuinely respectful interest in the developing minds of young children . . . [Fernyhough] combines a researcher’s insights with a parent’s unique empathy to create a moving portrait of human consciousness.”
-Brian Hall, author of Madeleine’s World

“Charles Fernyhough has created . . . an imaginative, accessible account of the stunning possibilities inherent in [a] young child’s developing mind. Parents, teachers, students of early childhood development-indeed, anyone interested in understanding young children’s rapidly emerging mentality and personhood-will find this book profoundly informative, awe-inspiring, and engrossing.”
-Laura E. Berk, distinguished professor of psychology at Illinois State University and author of Awakening Children’s Minds: How Parents and Teachers Can Make a DifferenceCharles Fernyhough studied developmental psychology at Cambridge University and is now a part time lecturer in psychology at Durham University. He lives in County Durham with his wife and two children. He is the author of a novel, The Auctioneer and has published over thirty scientific journal articles and two academic books.

Table of Contents

 

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication

 

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteeen

Sixteen

 

Acknowledgements

Notes

Index

Published by the Penguin Group
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Originally published in the United Kingdom by Granta Books 2008
First published in the United States by Avery 2009

Copyright © 2008 by Charles Fernyhough

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Purchase only authorized editions.

 

Most Avery books are available at special quantity discounts for bulk purchase for sales promotions, premiums, fund-raising, and educational needs. Special books or book excerpts also can be created to fit specific needs. For details, write Penguin Group (USA) Inc. Special Markets, 375 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014.

 

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Fernyhough, Charles, date.
A thousand days of wonder : a scientist’s chronicle of his daughter’s
developing mind / Charles Fernyhough.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.

eISBN : 978-1-101-02930-5

 

 

 

While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

For Squiggle and for Cherry

One

IT’S LIKE THIS

Remembering a Beginning

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I didn’t know where to start, so I asked her.

“Athena?”

She was feeding me coffee dregs from a teaspoon. It was a cold, bright midmorning in June, and the shoppers had abandoned central Sydney to the part-time dads and a few hurrying office girls. We were sitting in a café on the first floor of the Queen Victoria Building, feeling the winter draft from the nearby escalator. She was nearly three.

“Do you remember being a little baby?”

“No.”

“Do you remember anything about being a baby?”

“No.”

She continued scraping the teaspoon around the rim of the empty cup.

“More? More?” she offered. “Shall I feed you?”

I leaned forward obediently. She dug deep with the spoon and scraped another bit of metallic-tasting coffee scum into my mouth.

“When you were a little tiny baby, what was it like?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know yet.”

Yet. Was it all about to come back to her?

“Can you remember some of the things we used to do?”

“Oh, you always say that,” she sighed.

I sat back, a little surprised by my daughter’s tone. As I studied her determined, slightly cross-eyed scouring of my coffee cup, I wondered whether I had really asked this question before. I had probably come up with some that were equally impossible, and possibly equally absurd.

“That’s because I’m interested.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s interesting. Because you’re interesting.”

She clattered the teaspoon into the saucer. “Now you be the clapper and I’ll be the pig!”

“Can you remember?”

“Clap! You have to clap!”

I clapped. Office workers hurried past with plastic-lidded cappuccinos, bemused by the applause from the Old Vienna Coffee House.

“Athena, when you were a little tiny baby, what sort of games did we play?”

“Well,” she replied, with somber certainty. “I think we used to play chaseys.”

“What about before you could run around, when you were still a little tiny baby? Can you remember what it’s like to be a little tiny baby?”

She pulled the straw out of her orange juice and trumpeted at me through it, spattering me with its sticky warmth. I felt a faint, familiar despair.

“Can you remember who looked after you when you were a little baby?”

“Mummy.”

“Who else?”

She looked up at me with the straw still bitten between her teeth. Wisps of blond hair curled into the corners of her eyes. Her blue irises were big and clear. My questions seemed to bounce off her. They were just the latest stuff being shot at her, to be dodged or endured. But I needed her answer. Something extraordinary had happened to our yowling newborn of nearly three years ago, and she was the only true witness to it. I had observed her transformation from the outside, documented her emergence into this flitty center of experience with which I could, with a little prompting or bribery, have a tentative conversation. But she was the only one who had lived through it. I had my notebooks, my jottings and theories, but careful observation would only take me so far. I needed my subject to remember it for herself.

Then she smiled. I like to think she smiled.

“Daddy,” she said.

 

 

 

 

 

Looking back, I realize that I was asking a lot of a child so small. If Athena had been like me, or just about anyone else who has ever been asked the question, she would have been able to recall very little detail about the first two or three years of her life. No matter how you choose to quiz people about it, no one seems to have demonstrably accurate memories of their very early childhood. On the face of it, young children aren’t just a blank slate, a tabula rasa—they’re a nonstick surface. The events of life do not cling to them. There has not, Sigmund Freud once observed, been enough astonishment over this fact.

Psychologists have recently begun to make progress in understanding why memories of our earliest lives do not stay with us into childhood and beyond. One thing we know about memory is that different kinds of information are organized in different ways. Information about facts goes into one system, known as “semantic” memory; information about events that happen to us (our “autobiographical” knowledge) goes into another. At nearly three, Athena was already skilled at handling certain kinds of facts about the world, such as her date of birth, or the fact that the first train stop after the Harbour Bridge was Wynyard. But her capacity to organize her knowledge of things that had happened to her was only just beginning to develop. She was not yet an autobiographer. Her own life story was not, for her, a proper topic of study.

Perhaps that was because handling information about your own life requires something more than the retention of impersonal, objective bits of knowledge. To say that you possess semantic knowledge of, say, the capital city of a particular country, it is enough simply to know the fact: you don’t need to recall the specific instant when that information became known to you. But when it comes to the details of our own lives, that personal, subjective quality is the essence of what we remember. It was not that Athena found it impossible to process facts about her own past. She had prodigious memory for various kinds of autobiographical information, such as promises we had made her in weak moments, or the clothes she had been wearing when she visited a certain place. But she couldn’t re-create the visit itself; she couldn’t put herself at the center of the recollection. In fact, memory researchers are now suggesting that this special, subjective aspect of memory may not start to develop until halfway through the third year of life. If this is true, then it would explain why our earliest years are a blank for most of us. In infancy, we are absent from our memories. We can live, but we cannot yet relive.

 

 

 

 

 

What are you writing?” she asked.

I looked up from the crowded pages of my notebook. I’d been unaware that, once again, my observations of the thing had distracted me from the thing itself.

“I’m writing down what you say. I’ve been writing down all these notes since you were a baby.”

“Why?” she said, looking faintly shocked.

“Because that’s what Daddy does. He tries to understand how little children think. That’s his job.”

She laughed at that. Daddies stared at blank pieces of paper all day and then went for long walks, talking to themselves. That surely couldn’t bring you to an understanding of anything.

“You know what?” she said, obligingly. “When I were a little baby, it were very sunny.”

I nodded, trying to coax the thought into the open. I suspected that this summery recollection had something to do with the previous year’s family holiday, but it may only have been the afterglow of the home movies we had recently been watching. Athena’s grip on the memory was unsure, and I could understand why. If she had only begun to center herself in her memories at two and a half, then fivesixths of her life was forgotten. How did it feel, to have so much of your past immediately lost to you? Was life still a blooming, buzzing confusion, a movie in which she had only just begun to star? What was it like for her?

I had a particular interest in that question. I had studied children’s development in the abstract, from a safe academic distance, for all my years as a graduate student and then part-time university lecturer. I had seen how much profound change happens in the first three years of life, in just about every aspect of a human being’s psychology. Within a few years of her birth, a newborn baby has to build a mind out of chaos, gain control of her own actions, acquire the ability to talk about her experiences, and get a sense of herself as the sentient being at the center of those experiences. Even though she is born with certain complex and finely specialized talents, they would seem to equip her only lightly for the tasks ahead. Developmental psychologists have some of the biggest questions of all to grapple with: how a human being acquires both a private and a public self, whether language is a learnable skill or something reserved for those who have been biologically chosen, how the colors of consciousness can take root in a brain that starts out as raw, proliferating matter. Look closely enough at a developing mind, I would tell my students, and you can learn everything you need to know about being human.

Now these questions were coming alive for me in the most immediate way. With Athena’s arrival, the phenomenon that had so fascinated me from a distance had installed itself, delightfully, right in front of my eyes. Among all the other emotions of those heady days of new parenthood, I felt something like the surprise you feel when your new next-door neighbor turns out to be your boss, and you see your precious work-home balance disappearing along with your nude sun-bathing. Athena made demands on my professional responsibilities as well as my parental ones. She brought my work home with her. For the last three years I had observed this miracle in close-up, watching the momentous transformations of toddlerhood happen to my own precious firstborn. In those brief thousand days, our yowling neonate had turned into a person: social, moral, intelligent, articulate. I might not have been fully aware of when it happened, but somewhere along the line I had watched a consciousness emerge.

With each new milestone in Athena’s development, I mused about how the theories I had studied matched up with the realities I was witnessing. But I also found myself constantly wondering about the other, subjective side of the objective story. I wanted to understand what it was like to inhabit a mind that was a different thing every day, whose understanding of itself was changing so rapidly. I could find few insider testimonies to guide me through this period of life, either in the scientific writings I was familiar with, or in grown-up literature, where the experiences of the under-threes have hardly found a voice at all. For all the richness of their depictions of adult subjectivity, their willingness to eavesdrop on different forms of experience, novelists and poets have shown little interest in the unremembered atmospheres of toddlerhood. That neglect was startling, when all our scientific probings of the infant mind were showing that it was an interesting place to be.

Beyond the ordinary pleasures of fatherhood, my time at home with Athena promised to give me that insider’s view into a small child’s mind. With a little imaginative projection, I had the chance to put some subjective detail into the scientific background. Was there anything comparable to being a newborn baby, an infant on the threshold of language, a fiercely self-sufficient toddler? Would careful observation and questioning, enriched by the insights thrown up by new research, give me some clues as to how those experiences could be described? What do young children understand of their own consciousness, of their capacity to be there at the center of these colorful, chaotic experiences? How do you make sense of yourself, when that self has no continuity in time? These were some of the questions that had drawn me to the subject in the first place, and now fatherhood was giving me a chance to ask them all over again. The answers, if I got any, would not make me any better at parenting Athena, but they might make her a little less of a mystery.

The day after our visit to the Old Vienna Coffee House, I was going through some of the videos of Athena as a baby. I had been transferring our home movies to the computer, and we had been watching them in the mornings, when she crashed down the stairs in her pajamas, puffy-faced and euphoric from sleep. To the child who sat down with me to watch these video extracts, the baby on the screen did not even trigger the memory boost of self-recognition. I, too, could hardly recognize my daughter in the moon-faced two-month-old who now gazed out from my laptop. For the last three years she had been overwriting herself too effectively, shredding the evidence of her former self as she went along. We were going to need all of my notebooks and these hours of video footage if we were ever going to understand this strange infant, lost in time.

She came in and climbed up onto my knee. On the screen was herself at nine and a half weeks. In the video clip she was sitting on my knee in a floral sleepsuit, propped up by my hands, working her tongue while I tickled her nose and cheeks and scurried my fingers around her bald head. I had zoomed in so that her face filled the screen. Athena’s nearly-three-year-old self looked at her nine-and-a-half-week-old self, and her nine-and-a-half-week-old self looked back. The picture zoomed in even closer, so close that the autofocus was tricked and the image blurred, then clarified again. The now-Athena was captivated. The then-Athena opened her eyes wide and pulled up the sides of her mouth in a grin. I slowed the playback and let the camera zoom in on each eye in turn, on her flaring nose, her beaked, translucent mouth, the soft curve of her cheek, the miniature ivory-work of one ear. We moved over her baby-self from the shortest distance the focus would allow, as though filming a giant Buddha from a helicopter. Finally the camera settled on her left eye and zoomed in as close as it could. There was a single perfect crease above her eyelid. Her eyelashes were long and fine. Her iris was a dark circle, almost filled by the blacker pupil. Then, for me at least, a strange moment of recognition. It was as though I had stopped looking through a window and had started looking into it, into the mirror of it, to see the details of the room reflected there. Within the shiny blackness of her pupil was another, human roundness, a reflected silhouette. I saw myself looking in on her, caught in the mirror of her cornea: the eye in her eye, her constant observer.

Two

PRECONCEPTIONS

Life Before Birth

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

If I wanted a starting point, I could do worse than begin on Day One: that Sunday morning in the hospital delivery room when the clock started ticking on her life. Ten twenty-five on a hot, overcast July morning. The Archers radio omnibus nearly half an hour old. Her fate set, according to some ancient notion of how the gods of the week would shape her personality. Bonny and blithe and good and gay. And a birthday, too: an annual appointment, to be celebrated by friends and family for the rest of her life. That first gulp of air was supposed to be the ignition spark that primed her soul. A slew of gifts and flowers and pink-hued cards would soon be making the same point: she started here.

If you trusted the received wisdom about psychological development, you would have concluded that this was where mind, as well as soul, began its work. When I studied the subject at university, the textbooks began with happy scenes in the maternity ward and ended with adolescence, the stage at which, according to giants of the discipline like Jean Piaget, the individual becomes a paid-up member of Homo sapiens. In terms of setting the parameters for development, those limits were misplaced at both ends of the scale. Today’s psychologists continue their studies of mental and behavioral change long after their subjects have reached adulthood, and building a mind is acknowledged to be a lifetime’s work. Attitudes have also changed toward the study of development at the near end of the life span. A brain doesn’t spring miraculously into existence on the day its owner happens to take a first breath of air. Athena’s birth may have started something for me, but it didn’t really start anything for Athena that wasn’t already going. Her nervous system was up and running, priming her musculature for action, long before it had any work to do out here in the light. With the new imaging techniques at their disposal, psychologists can study a fetus’s behavior in almost as much detail as they can a newborn baby’s. The drama of life in the womb is no longer played out behind a closed door: nowadays it can be scrutinized almost as closely as any other part of our lives. If development is a task we are busy with throughout our entire lifetime, its starting point ought to be conception, not birth.

It might sound like fanciful thinking to say that we can go back even further than that. As far as genetic makeup is concerned, your fate as an individual is set when your parents’ DNA goes into the lottery spinner of human sexual reproduction. But it is not just the genes you inherit from your parents that affect how you turn out. Even before the reassortment of chromosomes that makes for a viable embryo, Mum and Dad will have started influencing their future progeny in all sorts of ways. Parents have expectations of their children, formed long before the children are even conceived. Our daughter’s life had begun some time before her little heart started beating as a four-week-old embryo; it started as soon as we decided to stop using contraception, and thus began the painstaking process of instilling the lives of our future offspring with all the dreams and aspirations we’d failed to reach in our own. They were, quite literally, preconceptions. We start creating our children long before we give birth to them. Even before they are a twinkle in our eye, they are on their way.

One of the most important ways in which these expectations are manifested is in the way people think and talk about their unborn children. Parents have psychological baggage from their own upbringing that will influence how they approach being parents themselves. A mother might remember her own mother as being cool and aloof, or as providing contradictory and frightening signals about how she should behave. More happily, she might recall her own mother as being emotionally available, loving, and supportive. Studies have shown that if you recall having had a secure emotional relationship with your own mother, it is highly likely that your child will have a similar relationship with you. Although we are still some way from explaining precisely how these patterns of love and mistrust cycle across the generations, it seems to have something to do with how parents-to-be conceive of their fetuses-in-progress. In one study, psychologists simply invited mothers and fathers in the third trimester of pregnancy to describe how they thought their baby would turn out at six months of age. The researchers weren’t so interested in whether the predictions were accurate as in whether they were made at all. Talking about your prenate as a real person, long before you have made its physical acquaintance, suggests that you have already started to take that person seriously. As predicted, parents who gave richer projections of their babies’ personalities were more likely, when observed in interaction with them at six months, to treat their infants as independent beings, with minds of their own.

In our case, it might have come down to something as simple as giving our unborn baby a name. Perhaps the surest way of showing that we conceived of her as an entity separate from us was the fact that we gave that entity a label. Athena, as a term of reference for this little being, came relatively late. In the womb she was Tiger, a name that had stuck after my wife’s twelve-week scan, when Lizzie and I saw her fetal shadow kicking in an arc of static and blackness, and we learned from one of our free government baby brochures that she was now the size of a tiger prawn. Tiger. In the womb she growled and prowled. She was going to come out with a leap and a bound, like Tigger in Disney’s Winnie the Pooh, and bat life across the room like a ball of wool. You could see her struggling to get out, making squirming landscapes with elbows and knees, animating Lizzie’s tautened abdomen with the same strong-limbed writhings that would keep us awake at night for weeks after her birth. She was flexing her muscles, and to our minds she was also showing off a personality. Our preconceptions may have been running wild, but we had some notion of who she would be, long before she could really prove it for herself.

Unsurprisingly, those preconceptions affected how we responded to her. We had an idea of her, and we acted on that idea. We spoke to her, read to her, reassured her, encouraged her in her cramped task of brain-building. We felt pangs of guilt that we could not do anything to relieve her hiccups. We wondered, sometimes, whether anyone was listening, whether there was anything in her budding nervous system that might have been receptive to the incantations we murmured over her: healthy baby, happy baby, clever baby . . . all the things we wanted her to be, all the fates we could bring about if we only prayed hard enough. If our lessons of love were going to make any difference, our floating child would need to be able to hear them. As to whether she would remember them for the future, we would have to wait to find out.

 

 

 

 

 

US

Additional information

Dimensions	0.7100 × 5.5800 × 8.2400 in
Imprint	Avery
ISBN-13	09781583333976
ISBN-10	1583333975
Author	Charles Fernyhough
Audience	General / adult
BISAC	PSY039000, PSY004000
Subjects	adolescence, PSY039000, child psychology, raising boys, psychology book, baby books first year, child development books, books for 14 year old boys, books for 13 year old boys, books for 14 year old girls, books for 13 year old girls, relationship books, positive discipline, positive parenting, Child Development, baby gifts, parenting, young adult books, breastfeeding, mental health books, psychology books, Babies, PSY004000, sleep, Human nature, parenting books, toddler, family, relationships, psychology, mental health, baby