Listen to thisYears ago, I shared a platform with Henry Maier at the orthopsychiatry meetings in Detroit. The topic, to the best of my recollection, had something to do with work with severely emotionally disturbed children. I led off with a properly professorial lecture: densely packed and liberally laced with relevant theory and research. Nearing the end of my part and ever sensitive to audience reaction, I turned to my co-panelist hoping to make some eye contact and an appropriate segue to the latter part of the session. There sat Henry, quietly beside me, nearly complete in the act of blowing up a rather large balloon. This unnerved me as I hurried to finish, convinced that the presentation had been so boring as to stimulate the audience to take up various arts and crafts projects. After polite applause, Henry stood up and released the balloon (along with several others as I recall) and with scant benefit of note or text proceeded to age each and every member of the audience in a living/learning exercise on the experience and meaning of play in child development.
This was the first of many of what I came to think of metaphorically as Henry’s “trial balloons”: facts, ideas, theoretical applications, observations, etc., designed to stimulate, provoke, challenge, delight or re-focus. Whether “caught,” “batted away” or even (occasionally) “popped,” those balloons represent for me the great lessons of child development: resiliency, plasticity, interdependence between caregiver and cared-for. All of these (and a great many more) rendered simply, delivered with grace and passion and grasped, ultimately, through a process of mutual engagement.
To say that Henry makes his subject (typically, one or another facet of the child-caregiver experience) “come alive” sounds like a cliché. But it is true. Henry invites us to enter the child’s world (often through the vehicle of play); there to become, to paraphrase Erikson, a “playing child advancing to new stages of mastery” (Erikson, 1950, pp. 194-195). In so doing, we are sometimes asked to “suspend” something: role, belief, bias, etc., but always with the promise of exhilaration along with insight that follows “seeing” our everyday world in new and different ways.
Reference
Erikson, E. (1950). Childhood and society. New York: W.W. Norton.
From: Journal of Child and Youth Care, Vol.8, No.2
