Toddling to emotional literacy

Life lesson: Canadian education expert Mary Gordon (right) with baby Mary Maughan and Peace Foundation director Marion Hancock. Picture / Martin Sykes

Baby Mary Maughan was the centre of attention yesterday - and not just because it was her first birthday.

Namesake Mary Gordon, the founder of a programme that reduces bullying by teaching children how to put themselves in the minds of others, used baby Mary to show potential teachers at the Kohia Teachers Centre in Epsom, Auckland, yesterday, what babies could teach them.

With the baby facing the teachers, she pulled a T-shirt over its head and on to its arms and body.

The baby was surprisingly unmoved. The watching teachers could see that she was a bit surprised, but unharmed. Then the older Mary tried peekaboo, pulling a shawl across her own face and lifting it to get the baby's attention and trust.

This time it didn't work so well. Try as she might, the older Mary could not get baby Mary to leave the arms of her aunt for more than a few seconds before she started crying.

"Perhaps she doesn't like the Canadian accent," someone quipped.

But the teachers got the message. As their hearts pumped with sympathy for both Marys, they understood what their primary school pupils could learn from a baby.

Mary Gordon's Roots of Empathy programme, now used in 2000 schools in Canada, brings a volunteer parent from each school's local community into a classroom once a month for nine months with a baby who is usually two to four-months-old when the programme starts.

When the baby enters, and again when it leaves the classroom in its parent's arms, every child gets a chance to touch it as they sing a welcoming song.

Then they sit in a circle around the baby on a green blanket as an instructor helps them to learn about how the baby feels, why it cries, and how to hold it and look after it safely. Through learning about the baby's feelings, the children also learn about their own emotions. They learn the words for "lonely", "frustrated", "proud" and so on. They draw pictures and write sentences to illustrate those emotions, both for the baby and in their own lives.

A child who wrote, "I felt proud when I learned to ride a bike", under a drawing of his father helping him to ride, was taking the first steps towards "emotional literacy".

"Understanding the emotion of others is the bridge to literacy," Mary Gordon told the teachers. "We have incredible emotional ineptitude in our society. We have more gratuitous violence."

As the year goes on, the children begin to see the baby as "our baby". They learn how it grows and changes. They learn how its parents - Dad as well as Mum - feel too.

"Very often in years five and six it's the boys who are closest to the green blanket because they are aching for it, aching to be loving, because our culture generally doesn't socialise little boys to be as obviously empathetic," Mary Gordon said.

The New Zealand Peace Foundation is now looking for 10 Auckland schools to start a trial of the programme next year. It also needs somebody to meet the costs of about $150,000.