Group life in babies: wanting to be special and wanting to belong

An ability to deal with interaction involving more than one other person is essential to participating in group life including family life. Increased interest in interaction outside the mother infant dyad has led to studies of peer relationships and the origins of peer group behaviour. In practice peer interactions are studied on a dyadic model,with an implicit assumption that group competencies
can be derived by extrapolation from it. But participating in groups is not explained on the basis of what one can do with one other person. Further, lack of attention to motives for relating to peers makes it difficult to explore how early peer interaction might contribute to mental-emotional well being.

This paper describes a method exploring group behaviour in infants with no adults present. 28 previously unacquainted babies aged 7-10 months were grouped into trios or quartets. In each group three or four babies were placed in immobilised baby walkers such that the babies could just touch each other and videorecorded while the mothers watched through cctv. Recording was stopped if the babies showed distress. Criteria from clinical and research literature was used to establish whether interactions could be described as group behaviour. Taking each group recorded as an individual case, a method of thick description was used to capture the dynamics of each case. Quantitative measures were then applied to investigate and illuminate how mutual attention regulation and complex turntaking was managed by up to four babies at a time. The subtleties and range of social-communicative behaviour cannot be explained on a dyadic model. Focusing here on quartets, and using video illustrations, the babies are shown to take advantage of ways in which
emotional experience can be conveyed through several communicative and sensory systems at once and their ability to move between systems for regulating free floating and focal attention.
Particularly striking is the degree to which babies share their reactions to another baby's behaviour and gain pleasure from exercising their capacities to sustain interactions along emotional themes.

These findings raise questions about how far experiences in infant groups can enhance babies' social competence, robustness and capacity for emotional regulation. Conclusions discuss whether the group processes demonstrated so early are independent of or related to dynamics operating in the family system and how this question could be addressed.