The need for new experiences

Mia Kellmer Pringle

New experiences are a prerequisite for mental growth as essential to the mind's development as food is for the body’s. From birth onwards, tasks appropriate to each particular stage of growth are presented to the child, and their mastery provides in turn the stepping stone towards more difficult achievements: for example, from having learned to grasp and hold an object, he proceeds to learn to feed himself. If denied the opportunity of new experiences, no learning can take place. For example, in a non-speaking environment, the child will not acquire speech even though his hearing and speech organs are quite normal.

The small child has a strong urge to explore, and everything that goes on around him becomes an absorbing new experience as soon as he is able to perceive it; so is every one of his earliest accomplishments, be it the ability to move his limbs at will or to examine the texture, taste and shape of materials and objects. Similarly, learning to crawl, walk, run and climb are new experiences in themselves, in addition to opening up an increasingly wider world for first-hand exploration. Later still, the challenge will be the mastery of reading, riding a bicycle or climbing a mountain. All these, and many more, provide new fields to be conquered, making life for the normal active child a series of rewarding adventures.

Once interest in novelty appears, then it becomes increasingly important as a source of motivation for further exploration and thus for learning. In Piaget’s words, “the more an infant has seen and heard, the more he wants to see and hear”. At the same time, there can be too much or too little stimulation or “input–; the former gives rise to withdrawal and fear, the latter to boredom and apathy. It is one of the skills of child-rearing to be able to judge accurately the optimal level which will foster the cognitive development of a particular child at any particular stage of his growth.

New experiences enable the child to learn one of the most important, because basic, lessons of early life: learning how to learn; and learning that mastery brings joy and a sense of achievement. This is demonstrated by the exultant cry of “I can do it myself”, which also illustrates the link between emotion and learning, between cognitive and affective experiences. Competence brings its own reward while the mother’s or other adults” pleasure in the child's newly acquired skill further reinforces his willingness to seek new fields to conquer.

In contrast, the child whose exploratory activities are disapproved of, discouraged or punished “whether this is because they disorganise a tidy, smooth-running, adult-centred household, or because the potential hazards worry an anxious mother, or because in over-crowded conditions a harassed, over-burdened mother cannot provide either the time or space “such a child will develop quite another attitude to learning: its likely features will be passivity, fearfulness, frustration or irritability, and there will be little joy or satisfaction.

In this way, educability “a child's responsiveness to all the growth tasks to which education, in the very widest sense of the term, exposes him “depends not only on his inborn capacity, but on environmental opportunity and encouragement. The emotional and cultural climate of the home, as well as parental involvement and aspirations, can foster, limit or even impair intellectual growth. Potentialities for learning may be developed to the full, be disorganised or remain unrealised according to the nature of the child's environment.

Just as an appropriate diet is essential for normal physical growth, so it is for mental development. The most vital ingredients of this diet are play and language. Through them, the child explores the world and learns to cope with it; this is as true for the objective outside world as it is for the subjective internal world of thoughts and feelings. Thus too are motor skills, perception and concepts developed.

This feature: Excerpt from Pringle, M.K. (1975). The needs of children. London: Hutchinson, pp.42-43