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(2009). Journal of Infant, Child& Adolescent Psychotherapy, 8:83-85

Reflection

Anni Bergman, Ph.D.

Introduction

In a poem entitled “The End,” A.A Milne writes:

When I was One,

I had just begun.

When I was Two,

I was nearly new.

When I was Three

I was hardly me.

When I was Four,

I was not much more.

When I was Five, I was just alive.

But now I am Six, I'm as clever as clever,

So I think I'll be six now forever and ever.

Growth in this poem is very simple. It proceeds smoothly and independently. There is no mother or father. There is just the baby, growing up in predictable steps. Here, the child, now six, looks back proudly from the pinnacle—the trials of the journey are not worth mentioning. Having arrived, our memories do not do justice to the difficulty of a most complex and potentially problematic human process. Even for the parents just out of the trenches, it quickly comes to feel like a fuss over nothing much, just going through a stage, which may be why it took so long for people to pay serious attention to the scientific study of early childhood d

[This is a summary excerpt from the full text of the journal article. The full text of the document is available to journal subscribers on the publisher's website here.]