Children Love People: Interpersonal Behavior in Early Childhood

2018/12/07

One of my few special skills seems to be the ability to quickly become friends with children. When I play with children at a nursery school, I am told that I have no presence at all. That might not be a compliment, but that's fine. Using that skill, I joined the children at the nursery school and continued my observations. I compiled those findings into several English papers, and then rewrote the content into a more readable format for this book. I also included records of individual children that could not be included in the papers.

We have all gone through infancy and early childhood, yet we have almost no memory of that time. Biologically speaking, why does childhood exist in the first place? Reading this book might reveal some answers. I also intended to present hints for thinking about the characteristics of humans as living creatures.

Humans have various experiences from the moment they are born, but from around one and a half years of age, they begin to understand their own existence and form relationships with others. I recorded the daily lives of children at that age in a nursery school. How well was I able to describe their lives? Of course, it is only a small part of the whole. However, if such records accumulate, psychology might get a little closer to the world of children that literature and poetry have depicted.

I have included columns to explain the technical terms that appear in the text. This is because I hope that parents and childcare professionals will also pick up the book. You could even use it in a way where following the columns serves as an introduction to developmental psychology. In the first part of the book, I summarized the theories of developmental psychology (Michael Lewis), clinical psychology (Yoshiko Niwa), and pedagogy (Minoru Murai). These constitute the theoretical section, learning from our predecessors.

It has been 40 years since I left the Hill of Mita, but things I learned and thought about at Mita appear throughout the book, and I am grateful for the opportunity to introduce it in this magazine. The editor of this book is Madoka Komuro, a Keio University alumni, and it was completed thanks to her support. Now, how do you find the capabilities of a Mita graduate?

Children Love People: Interpersonal Behavior in Early Childhood

Kiyobumi Kawakami (Author)

University of Tokyo Press

208 pages, 2,300 yen (excluding tax)

*Affiliations and titles are as of the time of publication.