Naturalistic Observation

Naturalistic Observation

The infant is a 15 months old, female child and the caregiver is a 28 years old, female adult. I visited their house around 6 p.m. This part of observation was completed using Facetime while I watched from another room. The child and the caregiver stayed in the living room where there was a playing area with toys and a blanket on the floor. There were another 54-year-old adult in the kitchen.

The toddler looks bright and happy because she smiles a lot with whatever she is playing with as well as when she interacts with her caregiver. The child is able to stand up without support and walk mostly with steady steps, although sometimes her body swings a little bit due to lack of balance. For a 15-months-old baby, we expect her to stand alone and develop some level of posture and movement control of her body (Siegler). When the caregiver starts playing the music, the toddler switches her body posture and spins unsteadily following the flow of the music. She mimics the caregiver and can follow simple instructions such as putting her hands up in the air or clapping her hands while making some sounds out of her mouth.

The toddler still babbles for majority of the time, however, her babbling includes some real words, mostly nouns, such as mama, papa, ball, cow etc. When the caregiver asks “how does cat sound like”, the toddler mimics the sound correctly. She can also say few simple verbs, for example, when she finishes drinking the milk, she will say “wash” while she passes the milk bottle to her caregiver. Observing this, it is likely that the child has learned some knowledge that we wash something after we finish using it. This can be due to statistical learning, for example, watching her caregiver washing the milk bottle every time after the child finishes drinking. The child may also be able to learn to close the door after getting in or out of the house after seeing her caregivers do so every time. If infants can recognize linguistic regularities using statistical learning, they may also be able to recognize visual feature combinations, such as doing one thing after another, using statistically learning (Fiser &Aslin, 2002). However, caregivers’ verbal instructions may also have helped infants learn what to do. Nevertheless, statistical learning appears to me to be a generalized learning mechanism that not only applies to language acquisition.

At one point, a pendant detaches from her bag and falls onto the floor, the toddler squats down and picks up the pendant. After she stands up with the pendant, her two hands, one holding the bag and the other holding the pendant, work together by striking the bag using the pendant. After a few times of experiment, the toddler fails to put the pendant back on. She looks up to the caregiver and makes the sound of “uh uh uh”, asking for the caregiver’s help. The caregiver grabs her hands and shows her how to manage her fingers to put it back on successfully. This reminds me the concept of zone of proximal development and the experiment of baby crawling downhill. The child gains an idea of what she can do and cannot do after the experiments. She has learned that assembling the pendant is something that’s beyond her capability so she actively reaches for help. We can expect that the child, receiving the benefit of scaffolding, will master the task after many times of practices and eventually be able to complete the task on her own at a later stage(McLeod, 2012).  

It appears wired to me because the child does not show any sign of separation anxiety when her caregiver leaves the house. Instead, the child turns her attention away from the toys, gives a big smile, waves her hands and says “bye-bye” when the caregiver stands at the door. Separation anxiety usually starts around 9 month and peaks in babies aged 12 -18 months (Siegler). This child doesn’t look upset or worried though she is within the peak range. This can be due to that the child is fascinated with her toys. She doesn’t feel unsecure may be because she notices the presence of another adult in the dinning room.

Another interesting moment is when the child trips, falls down and cries out loudly. When the caregiver sees that, she does not immediately run to the child to get her up. Instead, the caregiver stays calm, mildly comforts the child “no big deal” and encourages her to get up herself. After seeing the caregiver’s reaction and listening to her words, the child seems to recover from her painful experience and sad emotions a little bit. You can see that she withdraws from a strikingly loud cry out to just whimpers and slowly gets up from the floor. Normally from my early life experience in Chinese families, typical adults would rush to grab the child from the floor and comfort her/him by saying “bad chair or bad whatever trips the child”. Sometimes, you won’t really see the child stop crying. Instead, the child is going to cry even louder because she/he thinks that you are aside with her/him, suggesting that the chair is so bad which dramatizes the whole situation. After seeing what happens between this child and the caregiver, I feel like that this is a more appropriate way to respond to such situation. Calmer reaction from the caregiver can result a calmer response of the child which resolves the whole situation easily.

Structured Observation (completed in person)

        While I was present to her, I ignore her and start watching TV. The child grabs a toy and comes to me with her hands up, trying to catch my attention. She grunts as if trying to talk to me while she shows her toy in front of my face. She makes physical contact with me when she tries to put the toy in my hands, informing me to hold it. When she is eating strawberries, I tell her that I want one too by asking her if I can have one. She laughs while holding the strawberry and comes close to me. At the moment that she hands out the strawberry and I lean forward to eat it with my mouth open, she suddenly withdraws her hands and smiles at me as if she has played a prank on me. This reminds me that babies are innately attracted to social interactions according to social interactionist theory (Siegler). The child attains interests in the objects and people that relate to him in the environment. She learns to talk and communicate with people, trying to play or make friends with them. She also learns by mimicking actions produced by people around her because in my opinion, a child is not able to produce that kind of play herself (trick me by withdrawing her hands when I try to eat the strawberry).