They say you attract not what you want but who you really are… Could that be it?
It wasn’t until I discovered RIE® that I finally decided to have a child. It was like they say, love at first sight… I started reading Magda Gerber’s books one after the other. I remember handing a copy of Dear Parent by Gerber to my husband and telling him “that’s how I would want to raise a baby. If you are on board, then I think I can do this.” He devoured the book and fell in love with Magda immediately.
So Why RIE®?
I discovered it through educators I trust:
In the world of education, there are different valuable groups of people:
Educators who spend years working with children. Some evolve over time and change the world and some stay faithful to what they are comfortable with.
Researchers and theory students who never work with children as educators. Some collaborate with educators and some focus solely on research.
And there are people who do both. They are experts in normative development, worked with infants and young children for years, and know how to conduct and evaluate research. I found such educators recommending RIE® with confidence, so naturally, I was intrigued…
Respect and the right to self-determination:
Magda Gerber said “Many awful things have been done in the name of love. But nothing awful can be done in the name of respect.” For Magda, to respect is allow people to be who they really are, to respect their right to evolve in their own unique way. She and Emmi Pikler saw babies as people who deserve the same level of courtesy, consent, attention, consideration and autonomy we grant our parents, our bosses, our colleagues at work or any person we look up to.
Most of us wouldn’t just disappear on people we respect in the middle of a conversation. We wouldn’t offer one another to people to hold and take pictures. We wouldn’t tell a friend at dinner that they should finish their plate. We wouldn’t immediately pick up a person who fell in the middle of the street, we’d go at their level, check on them and ask if they need our assistance. We wouldn’t call our parents or grandparents “maniacs” (or other adjectives I don’t care to mention) just because we think it’s funny. Yet many of us do these things with babies.
Gerber was radical in that sense. In a RIE® conference one of the attendees walked up to her and ask her if she can hold her baby. Magda answered her “Does the baby want to be held by me?”
It’s the only approach that was developed specifically for infants in a controlled environment:
Magda Gerber used to be the trainee of Hungarian pediatrician Dr. Emmi Pikler and brought Dr. Pikler’s insights about infant care to LA, USA where she founded RIE® in 1978.
After the devastation of WWII, the Hungarian government invited eminent pediatrician Emmi Pikler to create Loczy, a model residential nursery to provide full-time care to up to 40 abandoned and traumatized children aged 0-3 years old. For three decades Loczy offered a ripe environment for continuous observations and controlled studies that have been carried out in the areas of motor development (Pikler, 1968, 1971, 1972; Pikler & Tardoos, 1969), manipulation (Barkoczi, 1964; Tardos, 1966), and infant interaction (Vincze, 1970). Research studies coming out of Loczy are the only ones that document infants’ self-initiated movements. We know the conditions in which the Pikler developmental milestones charts were produced but other scales like the Bayley’s, the one used by all US pediatricians, don’t really tell us about the conditions under which observed infants achieved their milestones; have they been helped by adults to get into different positions? Most probably.
Other major philosophies like Montessori or Waldorf for example were originally developed for older children (3 year olds and up). And as they got popular, educators attempted to extrapolate their essence to infant education.
I think RIE® educators are elegant lean thinkers:
I see them as anthropologists of babies. They study babies, they don’t make assumptions about them. I remember during my RIE Foundations class, we were asked to observe different babies for 30 minutes at a time and write down every single thing we see. Once I wrote in one of my documentations “the baby started getting frustrated.” Our instructor and her interns commented on my work saying “what exactly did the baby do that made you come to this conclusion? write the baby’s exact actions” They operate differently; they are serious about discovering what the infant in front of them needs. They don’t generalize or make assumptions about babies that are projections of their own childhood wounds. That’s a huge thing for me!
Respect to oneself:
In her book Dear Parent, Gerber tells parents to “respect themselves”. That may sound harsh to some of us. “Respect yourself” in colloquial Egyptian Arabic for instance is usually said to people behaving disrespectfully towards others. But Magda really meant having empathy and regard towards ourselves as parents and caregivers, to make sure our needs are met, to be confident leaders, to have healthy boundaries, and not to martyr ourselves. The design of the Educaring® philosophy takes the needs of the caregiver into account. For example, one of the main pillars of the philosophy is having a safe, warm, and cozy space for the infant where they can be left to explore play objects and entertain themselves while the adult can relax or attend to other tasks.
Less consumerist:
After taking many RIE® classes, it seems to me that in the Educaring® philosophy less is more. Less gadgets, less toys, less “tricks”, less stimulation (than commonly done). A few simple passive play objects from your kitchen or garage can be more than enough to offer a cognitively challenging environment for a baby.
It’s trademarked:
The Educaring™ philosophy which is offered by the RIE® organization is trademarked. No one can speak for the philosophy unless they are a “RIE® associate”, a title that takes years of theoretical and practical study to earn. I have two masters degrees in education, I published my second thesis, I worked for years with young children, I took 3 different RIE® courses including an ongoing one and I’m still not a RIE™ associate. So when you are learning with an associate, you know for sure that they are very experienced educators who know what they are talking about. Wouldn’t we all want advice from very talented and competent people to raise our children, the most important people in our lives?
These are the main reasons why I was attracted to philosophy. In my coming blog posts, I will write about the gems I discovered once I started studying closely with different wonderful RIE associates that made me appreciate the philosophy even more.
