We often forget that our infants teach us to parent. When significant neurological vulnerabilities of an infant interfere with the normal parent-infant feedback system, even the most capable parent is unable to effectively assess the edge of the child’s competence and guide their child. When the wrong signals are sent by the infant, parents simply adjust to accommodate the demands of those signals instead of entering into a true guide-apprentice relationship. There is enormous difficulty for many parents of children with developmental disabilities when these early mental discoveries do not occur.
Without the opportunity to learn from increasingly demanding relationships, children perceive their world as pervasively threatening. Their innate drive for curiosity and greater understanding is buried. New problems and settings are experienced as too difficult, new information as discrepant and beyond one’s zone of competence. Children perceive themselves as incompetent and fragile. They become avoidant and rapidly learn to withdraw from any problems and situations they find new or different, as well as those persons who are associated with them.
Parental disabilities, crises, environmental catastrophes or their own deprivation of experience may incapacitate adult guides and leave children without the assurance of a low intensity environment. When children perceive they are operating under pressure for rapid solutions, expectations for correct answers, or high consequences for failure, the growth potential of the brain is immediately shut down. The child’s brain shifts into “survival” mode and either attempts to avoid the situation or uses whatever mental resources currently available to impose a solution, no matter how bad the fit.
Even when supplied with memories of successful guided participation, the breakdown of the process may lead parents to become fearful of introducing change – of upsetting the careful balance they have constructed in their daily lives. For many parents it can be difficult to contemplate an existence outside of a survival mode, where they focus on day-to-day functioning and putting out fires.
How is the Guided Participation Relationship restored?