The dearth of parental understanding of children’s behavior became ever more obvious in our study. Too few adults are aware of the impact of daily and hourly subjective experiences upon their infants and young children. Not enough children are helped or encouraged to describe their thoughts and feelings to their parents and to know they will be listene d to. In general, adults are usually too preoccupied to consider the impact of the plethora of emotional and cognitive experiences in the young; it is as if children other than their own are colorless and their personalities too undeveloped to have any but short-term meaning. Many parents do not or cannot afford the time to think about what the young may be experiencing from day-to-day and hour-to-hour. Most fathers, far more than mothers, are at a loss as to how to describe their children; they can say how the children are doing in school, what physical illnesses they have had, and what entertainment they require. These are easy to report. Both parents are usually ready to describe advances in their children’s physical abilities and aptitudes for language, but when asked about emotions they had observed in their children, although most were ready to report examples of what made their children happy (receiving gifts, eating ice cream, watching television) or unhappy (deprivation, punishment), they usually assumed that more subtle emotions such as longing, thoughtfulness, sadness, loneliness, or worry were rarely present in their children’s first years. Adults may start families gladly, but with little idea of how to recognize and respond to experiences to come even in the immediate future, and usually they are unprepared to respond to common difficulties arising during early childhood. Usually, there are few opportunities for them to learn ahead of time about the emotional and cognitive needs of their young. The gaps in that learning have lain in a general disregard of children's affective experiences, especially those that arise during the second year of life, popularly identified as “the terrible twos,” a designation that represents parental frustration about how to respond to the young child’s rising declarations of independence. Much has to be learned by those in charge of the young about the immense possibilities for growth or growth failure observable in cognition, instinctual development, and object relatedness in early childhood. Until the past several decades, the first two to three years of life have been subject to few observations outside the home unless the child has attended a nursery school or pre-school in which the faculty is composed of competent observers and communicators.
