Young children's sense of identity
A
A. Rather than appearing all at once, a young child's sense of who they are takes shape little by little. It is helpful to picture this development as the slow surfacing of two rather different strands: the self experienced as an actor, and the self experienced as something one observes. It was Anders Holmgaard who first drew this distinction, in 1888, and thinkers of his own generation, Viktor Reinholt among them, soon joined the discussion. In the years since, researchers in psychology have gone on extending the framework.
B
B. For Holmgaard, the earliest stage in coming to understand oneself is a child's dawning realisation that he or she exists at all. He termed this strand 'the acting self', and identified within it several components, chiefly a sense of one's own agency, meaning the capacity to bring things about, together with a sense of being separate from everyone else. Such qualities surface bit by bit as babies investigate their surroundings and deal with those who care for them. Reinholt, writing in 1901, argued that this acting self was above all a matter of wielding power. The very first instances, he suggested, lie in a baby's efforts to master physical things, toys, say, or its own limbs, and only afterwards come efforts to steer how other people behave. An infant discovers, for example, that a cry or a smile will bring some response from those nearby.
C
C. Infants glean a further, potent lesson about their own impact whenever someone imitates them. In those first months especially, a great many parents devote considerable time to echoing the sounds and faces their baby produces. Mirrors, too, hold a strong appeal for the very young, since whatever movement appears in the glass answers directly to a movement of their own. None of this means that a baby takes the reflection to be a picture of itself, that comes later. What Sable and Renqvist (1980) propose is that as infants come to grasp that the mirrored movement depends on their own, they arrive at a firmer sense of standing apart from others, for they alone are able to alter what the glass shows.
D
D. Children's grasp of themselves as doers goes on maturing as they try to work alongside others in play. According to Kessler (1985), it is precisely within these everyday dealings and exchanges that a child's self-understanding comes into being. Hard evidence about the acting self in the very young, however, remains thin on the ground, and the obstacle is language: even supposing that small infants can turn their experience over in their minds, they are plainly unable to put this side of the self into words directly.
E
E. After a child has reached a degree of self-awareness, he or she starts slotting into an entire run of categories, and it is these, taken together, that do so much to mark the child out distinctly as 'themselves'. Holmgaard called this second stage on the way to a rounded sense of self 'the observed self'. Many regard it as the strand most shaped by social forces, built as it is out of social roles, being a pupil, a brother, a colleague, along with traits whose meaning depends on measuring oneself against others or dealing with them, such as reliability, shyness or skill at sport.
F
F. Reinholt, with others, pointed to a tight link between how people understand their own identity and how those around them understand it. In his view, individuals assemble their sense of who they are out of the responses others make to them, and out of the picture they imagine others hold of them. It was for this reason that he named the observed self the 'mirrored self', since we end up seeing ourselves as we are reflected back in other people. Oswin Brandt (1930) pressed the point still harder, treating the self and the social world as knit together beyond separation: 'The self is, at bottom, a social structure, and it emerges from social experience; a self arising outside social experience is impossible to imagine.'
G
G. A key milestone, in the view of Sable and Renqvist, arrives once children can identify themselves by sight alone, with no need to see movement that matches their own. This ability tends to appear at about the age of two. To test it, the two researchers (1980) placed a smear of red powder on the noses of youngsters as they played before a mirror, then kept count of how frequently each child reached for its nose. Their thinking was that a child who already knew its usual appearance would be struck by the odd red spot and set about touching it. Children between fifteen and eighteen months, by contrast, proved largely incapable of recognising themselves once cues like movement were taken away.
H
H. The most vivid signs of self-awareness of all, perhaps, show up in the outbursts of temper that peak between eighteen months and three years. Tracking small clusters of three or four children over time, Halvorsen (1973) recorded that the sheer force of the frustration and anger in their quarrels climbed steeply between the first and second birthdays. Frequently what the children were fighting over was a toy that not one of them had touched either before or after the tussle; they appeared to be contesting who owned it rather than actually wanting to play. This bond between a child's sense of 'self' and the idea of possession stands out as a marked feature of Western childhood, even if it may register less strongly elsewhere.
