You and I and Him and Me

So many parents do it nowadays that it sounds almost normal. Instead of a mother saying to her child, "When you've finished your food, we'll read a story, then you'll go to bed and I'll finish my work," she says, "When James has finished his food then James and Mummy are going to read a story and then, after that, James is going to go to bed and Mummy's going to finish her work."

Why do parents address their children in the third person? And why are more and more parents doing it?

My concern is that this way of speaking to children objectifies them and objectifies their relationship with their parents. It encourages them to think of themselves as separate human beings and this might be a very good thing for children to do: it might encourage them to take more responsibility for themselves; it might encourage them to understand their parents as separate people with lives of their own. This might be all very well except that sometimes parents are speaking, not to stroppy adolescents refusing to grow up, but to very small children.

The process by which a child separates from its parents is extremely delicate. It's a process which has crucial neurological effects: the brain develops out of an attuned, attentive parental relationship in which the child is gently and regularly mirrored back to itself until it internalises this mirroring process and can think about itself without needing another person to be physically present any longer. Verbal and non-verbal language is at the heart of this process and so the words we use and their nuances really do matter.

Separating from parents is also a process which has crucial psychological effects: premature separation causes a child to develop what Winnicott calls a ‘false self' as a way of coping. That false self may look very responsible and very self-reliant but it's only protecting the (as yet) unformed, inchoate, underlying ‘real self'. At some point in the future the false self usually collapses and all hell breaks loose because what's underneath is still so vulnerable, so barely formed.

Talking to a small child in the third person may be a very good thing to do. It may be a way of encouraging James to start telling a story about himself and other people, a way of developing a narrative sense of himself. But I wonder whether it also subtly speeds up his sense of separateness. This might suit the working habits of hard-pressed professionals who want their child to see the world through adult eyes as quickly and as independently as possible. Before long - hey presto! - James even starts referring to himself as ‘James'.

Independence and autonomy might be appropriate aims for all children eventually but when children become independent too soon.... The danger is that ‘James and Mummy' promotes a premature sense of separation and independence whereas ‘you and I' suggests a more amorphous relationship, still partly merged, still mutually dependent; a relationship in which a child's sense of itself as a separate person is emerging gradually and safely, with neural pathways beginning to connect, with an authentic, confident self beginning to develop.