A couple of weeks ago in class, a few of the moms were sharing their birth experiences. One mom described how different her second birth felt: she was finally able to listen to her body in a way she hadn’t been able to the first time. And she connected that shift to something she’d been quietly doing for years in class: sitting with her child when he was in pain, or frustration, or sadness. Not fixing it. Not rushing past it. Just being there.
She said it was an aha moment: what she’d been doing was essentially letting her child be in his body and be in his feelings. And somewhere along the way, she’d started to do the same for herself.
What we’re practicing in class, and what this work asks us to practice, is something quietly radical. We’re learning to be with. To witness without fixing. To trust that a child who is allowed to move through a feeling will come out the other side of it more fully themselves.
There’s that small moment in Seeing Infants with New Eyes when Magda says, so plainly, that parents often tell a child “you’re OK.” But maybe they’re not OK.
And that’s okay. That’s life.
The impulse comes…I think from love, of course. It comes from hope… from the deeply human discomfort of watching someone we care about struggle without being able to take it away. And sometimes it comes from a kind of inherited habit: we have all been told “you’re OK” when we weren’t.
Feelings are feelings. And one of the most profound things we offer children in this work is the simple, radical experience of being met. Of having someone sit with them in the hard thing, and not flinch, and not try to make it stop.
RIE gives us the permission to not be okay.
The aha this Mom found settled something in my heart a little. You see, since last year’s RIE Conference… when we had the extraordinary privilege of hearing from a panel of Grown Up RIE Babies (young adults who were raised in this approach from infancy)…I have been trying to put a word to what made them distinctive as a group, and I couldn’t quite land on it.
I think I’m getting closer: they are comfortable in their own skin. They know how to feel their feelings without their feelings feeling them. They have a relationship with who they are that is, in my experience, genuinely rare.
Now maybe that’s a projection on my part: an idea of who they are and how they feel. And even if I’m right, maybe it’s not always true. But I believe it’s what we’re reaching for, in class, in the small moments: when we wait, when we witness, when we resist the pull to say “you’re OK” and instead just stay.
The children raised in this approach are, I believe, building something durable: a relationship with themselves that will outlast anything we explicitly teach them.