Your Toddler's Emerging Self

Gestural exchanges

Your little girl has become an amazing "doer" during this stage of her development. She's not yet experiencing her intentions in thoughts or words, but when she experiences sensations that could be translated as "My tummy is rumbling and I'm hungry!" those feelings trigger a desire to take action. She may do such things as run to the kitchen, or go to you and tug on your sleeve and whine. She may be experiencing different emotions at the same time, feeling both hungry and annoyed. As she connects these feelings with a particular action pattern, she will go on to engage you in a complex series of interactions to get what she wants.

Your child will also experience a feeling of satisfaction when you empathically respond to her signals. The concerned look on your face and such words as "Oh, come show me what you want" will help reduce her anxiety. Once she obtains her cup of milk from you, you can give her the additional satisfaction of holding her on your lap as she drinks it. Your little toddler is now capable of experiencing a variety of feelings, including needs, wishes, and expectations and is also learning how to satisfy these yearnings. A need or wish leads to an expectation, then to satisfaction, and then finally to further expectations that needs will continue to be met in the future. When your child wants to be hugged by Daddy, she'll count on receiving that hug. When she's hungry, she will assume that Mommy will help her find some food.

In all these gestural exchanges, you can see evidence of your toddler's emerging sense of self. Remember, our sense of who we are is based on our inner wishes, desires, or intentions. We experience these as a variety of textured inner feelings that we eventually identify as "me." As a problem-solving toddler, a child is no longer just separate pieces of purposeful behavior, or even the sum of her separate actions. She's starting to weave together these pieces of experience into larger patterns of "me" and "you." The child now has a me which knows that if she's hungry, she can get some milk. When she wants to be hugged, she can go find you. During these months, Mommy and Daddy gradually come to be seen as people who not only supply milk or hugs, but who also warn "No! No!" and set limits on her behavior each time she's about to put herself in danger. As your child participates in many different types of emotionally meaningful action patterns with you, she is developing a far more complicated picture of who and what she is and who and what you are.

Back when your child was 8 months old, she certainly experienced sensations and desires (wanting to be fed when she was hungry, for example), but she didn't yet have the ability to integrate these pieces of experience into a pattern. Even at 12 months, she still experienced her emotions in a fragmented way. Her angry self and her contented self weren't two parts of the same whole. To a large extent, those aspects of her personality had not yet come together and therefore were split off from each other. When you got her angry, she may have seen you as an irritant; when you cuddled, she knew you as a source of love and comfort. What she did not yet fully realize was that you and she were the same persons in both situations.

As your toddler becomes adept at organizing and sequencing her feelings and behaviors in a purposeful way, she can merge isolated fragments of emotion, intention, and motivation into a more unified sense of a whole personality. By a year and a half, she has experienced numerous occasions with you in which she became angry, impatient, and finally happy again all in the same episode, and she is also beginning to figure out patterns. Both these developments help her form a fuller, less piecemeal sense of who she and you are. Now, when she enlists your help in finding a cup of milk, she comes to realize that both her anger in feeling hungry and her eventual happiness when she succeeds in getting her tummy filled are parts of herself.

By the time she is around 18 months old, your child realizes that the angry "me" and the loving "me" are both the same person. She has a dawning awareness that the people she trusts can also make her angry. If all goes well, her sense of caring for herself and others will permeate her sense of self and will modulate her rage even when she's frustrated and enormously angry.

This emerging sense of self, made up of a variety of intentions and feelings, is what philosophers and theologians work to define in discussions of will, free choice, and related topics. It is also a key difference between computers and human beings. A computer has no wishes, intentions, or feelings, and therefore no sense of self. Although its electronic circuitry can solve some problems infinitely faster than our brains' neuronal connections, a computer doesn't have the intentions or emotions to tell it what problems to solve. We must program it with our wishes.

In forming a sense of self, your toddler now senses that she is the sum of all her various pieces of behavior and not merely a collection of isolated responses. She is coming to have certain consistent expectations about the core emotional themes of life. If a new person should enter the room showing a facial expression that looks menacing or scary, your child will feel a sense of danger. If another person in the same room is smiling and has a reassuring look about him, she'll probably feel safe and secure in his presence. Your toddler will feel a sense of acceptance and approval if you nod approvingly at her. Every time you shake your head "No, no!" or wear a frown on your face, she'll feel a keen sense of disapproval.

Your child is starting to recognize all the gestural behaviors that signal approval or disapproval, safety or danger, acceptance or rejection, and humiliation or respect because she has become a pattern recognizer. Her own expectations of how other people will react to her contribute to her sense of herself. If every time she attempts to do something new she is embarrassed or teased, she comes to expect that life will be humiliating. Similarly, if every time she is needy or sad she is ignored by her caregivers, she will come to expect that abandonment is her due.

These emotional expectations, which we all struggle with as adults, gradually become part of our sense of self. It is remarkable that this process is well under way when we are less than two years old. Of course, it continues to evolve during the course of our lives. When we see an adult in therapy who is depressed because he fears that if he makes his needs known, his children or spouse will leave him, we suspect that this pattern of expecting abandonment may have been set up long ago, when he was just a toddler. During these critical months of early toddlerhood, children piece together a notion of themselves as being fundamentally lovable or deserving of rejection, safe or endangered, respected or humiliated.

These expectations are the beginning of character formation. Your child isn't thinking this through verbally, but is experiencing these expectations emotionally. Even as adults, words only secondarily label what we're already feeling at a visceral level. For example, when we go into a new social situation we may enter feeling excited and confident, or we may be trembling with nervousness, expecting to be humiliated. These underlying expectations about ourselves are forming before we can use words with any fluency and are well along when we are between the ages of 18 and 24 months.

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