A Fateful Encounter After Child Neglect ②

That day, seeing how quickly my daughter was growing, I realized my perspective had been wrong and began to think, "I want to change something." That was when I had a fateful encounter.
Having realized my own way of being by watching my daughter grow, I was searching for information with a desire to change something. That was when I found a midwife's YouTube channel. At the time, it didn't have many subscribers and the videos weren't flashy at all, but I was shocked by the content she was talking about.

"There is a precise order to a baby's development. If you skip steps, it can affect their future."
"Babies instinctively begin to practice on their own. Do not miss those signals."
"Let's make good use of the instincts humans possess to encourage movement."

Until then, I had only been looking at benchmarks of "what they can do" based on their age in months or years. But that midwife taught me the perspective that growth is not a "result," but a "process." That became the foundation of my parenting today.
Because of my job, I had been conducting educational programs for working adults, so I realized that the essence of that educational philosophy was the same.
For adults, it is important to "support them by looking at where they are now, not at the goal." I realized that the exact same perspective is necessary for babies and children.
It is not about the final result, but about grasping what the child can and cannot do right now. It is about firmly understanding their current position in the learning process and providing learning that matches that situation.

From then on, I started visiting the midwife every month, and I began to observe my daughter's growth more deeply. Once I understood that there was a "reason" or "purpose" behind every hug and every roll, I became incredibly fond of my daughter's casual gestures and movements. By realizing, "Oh, she's practicing this movement now," or "This will lead to that movement next," parenting suddenly became fun and meaningful.

I had also read many parenting books before. I thought I knew that there was an order, such as "crawling comes after rolling over" and "standing while holding onto things comes after crawling." However, what the midwife taught me was that there are many small steps in the "process" of going from, for example, crawling to creeping. It means that during the growth process, there are many small exercises that babies naturally engage in, such as wiggling their hips or lying on their side to get into a position where they are lying on one side of their body.

These movements all have meaning, and if you skip the process, it can create imbalances in muscle strength, sense of balance, and how the body is used. It is said that there are not a few cases where things like "poor posture," "lack of concentration," or "difficulty standing on one leg" as an adult are actually caused by skipping developmental stages in infancy.

Through this encounter, a value took root in me that "parenting is also not about the result, but about the accumulation of observation and the process of this very moment." Since then, my consciousness has changed from "evaluating" my daughter to "observing" her. And instead of judging what she can or cannot do based on her age in months, I have come to think about what stage she is at now and what she should be encouraged to develop.
I have come to learn that this applies not only to physical development but also to the growth of the heart and social skills, and that these also have stages of growth.

I don't believe there is only one answer to parenting. But having the axis of "looking at the growth stages" provides support for judgment when you are lost.
I would like to share what I have actually experienced regarding parenting methods that utilize these "mechanisms of growth" and "human instinctive mechanisms."

Thank you for reading until the end.
I hope to continue enjoying parenting with all of you as much as possible.

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