As I was going through my annual exercise of removing my tired annuals from their beds, I was struck once again by how their flourishing directly reflected the development of their attachment roots. I was particularly struck by the thriving specimens in a new bed that I had specially prepared for my dearly beloved but wrongly named impatience. These particular plants had raised the bar significantly in terms of what I now believed their true potential to be. Their vital connection was their nurturing attachments to mother earth.
Complex things are difficult to understand without a guiding metaphor. The favoured metaphor of the predominant learning paradigm is that of sculpting – the shaping of a desirable personality by removing undesired behaviour. The chisel in this case would be consequences. The other common metaphor still permeating today's thinking is that of a 'blank slate' where life is a skill to be learned and personality is the outcome of what has been written on that slate through experience.
These non-living metaphors are in stark contrast to the gardening metaphors which have always figured prominently in all truly developmental approaches. The idea of being rooted through attachment, of flourishing being a function of rootedness, of seasons, of winter coming before spring, of rest being necessary for growth and renewal, of pruning, all stem (pun not intended) from the gardening metaphor. They also assume a life force as the most powerful factor in the equation. Also with this metaphor comes the realizations that attachment does not deter individuation but rather delivers it, that one can never be too attached, only too superficially or insecurely attached, and that what matters most tends to be hidden from common view.
Sometimes in science, and this is especially true with the study of how children change over time, the very same facts can be perceived quite differently when interpreted through a differing metaphors, leading to vastly divergent understandings and practices.
The gardening metaphor is embedded in all my courses, but is particularly fleshed out in the Vital Connection and Helping Children Grow Up. The gardening metaphor is also implicit in Transplanting Children. Transplanting always involves both separation and re-attaching – intricate and vulnerable processes even in plants. Root shock is not uncommon. And grafting, the most evolved art of gardening, has certain time-honoured principles meant to render the new connections vital and nurturing. The transplanting metaphor is helpful in thinking about the many challenges of attachment-rearranging that children face in our society – the most obvious of which are fostering and adoption, but also to step-parenting, the loss of a parent, and so on. Making sense of attachment is to effectively navigating all these experiences.
My hope for all my students in all my courses is always that the gardening analogy becomes deeply integrated into their dance with the children they are responsible for. I can no longer imagine another way of being with children.
