Does the Adult Open or Close the Child’s Path to Independence?

Abstract

A loving and capable adult is the center of a child’s existence. Deprivation of or defective communication and joint actions with adults can certainly have detrimental consequences for children’s health (mental and physical) and psychological development [1]. It is well known that anomalies and developmental delays in children who have no organic impairment of the nervous system are based on certain difficulties and problems in their relationships with adults who are significant to them [2]. This position has received so much confirmation in life and experimental work, has so taken possession of scientific and everyday pedagogical consciousness, that the “child–adult” relationship has come to be seen as a kind of psychological panacea. The universally recognized idea of the leading role of an adult in the mental development of a child began to be vaguely replaced by the idea of self-sufficiency of the adult, in the discourse of many teachers and in the practice of many parents and teachers; there was a logical substitution of the thesis that “collaboration with an adult is a necessary condition for child development” with the thesis (never formulated openly) that “an adult is the sufficient condition for the child’s psychological well-being” (at least in the classroom). We emphasize once again: this logical (and practical) substitution is not completely conscious. No teacher (at least from the several hundred we surveyed) and the rare parent will maintain that the most loving, delicate, sensitive adult, the most skillful, pedagogically gifted educator, can provide a child with the fullest conditions for development and improvement. The objections refer to friends, peers, younger people . . . But this is at the level of verbal consciousness. And in practice? The practice of modern preschool upbringing is based on the idea of play as the leading activity of preschoolers. The development of the form of play