Kowakare: A New Perspective on the Development of Early Mother–Offspring Relationship

The mother–offspring relationship has components of both positivity and negativity. Kowakare is a new concept introduced to explain an adaptive function of the negativity in the early mother-offspring relationship. Kowakare is the psycho-somatic development of the relationship as the process of accumulation in the otherness of offspring. Early human Kowakare has two frameworks, biological inter-body antagonism and socio-cultural allomothering compensating the antagonism. Some features of feeding/weaning, parental aversion to offspring’s bodily products, and transition from dyad to triad relationship (proto–triad relationship) in tactile play are discussed. Early human Kowakare is promoted by allomothering with the nested systems of objects/persons/institutions as interfaces between mother and offspring. Kowakare makes mother–offspring relationship a mutually autonomous and cooperative companionship

An infant‐led approach to complementary feeding is positively associated with language development

The timing and strategy with which parents first introduce their infants to solid foods may be an important predictor of subsequent developmental outcomes. Recent years have seen a decline in the prevalence of traditional parent‐led feeding of soft, puréed food and a rise in the prevalence of infant‐led complementary feeding. Although there has been some research espousing the benefits of infant‐led complementary feeding for improving food fussiness and self‐regulation, there has been little exploration of this approach that may impact on other developmental outcomes in children. The current study explores whether aspects of the infant‐led approach, specifically the child eating unaided and consuming finger foods and eating with the family, are related to child language outcomes. One hundred thirty one parents of children aged 8–24 months completed questionnaires about their approach to complementary feeding, their current feeding practices, their child's experiences with family foods and child language comprehension/production. The findings suggest that an approach to complementary feeding which promotes infant autonomy in feeding (i.e., eating finger foods rather than puréed foods) and consuming more family foods is related to more advanced child language production and comprehension. Specifically, the prevalence of eating family foods mediated the relationship between eating unaided at the onset of the complementary feeding period and later language outcomes. This study is the first to find a significant relationship between different approaches to introducing solid foods and child language outcomes and these findings highlight the potential for different complementary feeding approaches to influence behaviour beyond mealtimes

Kinematic development of infants and their interaction with their mothers during specific tasks

Everyday social projects exhibit regular action patterns structured by their motor goals. Shared understanding is developed in infancy in participation in common motor projects by learning anticipations of their motor intention, such as during feeding, being picked up or put down, and in play. Co-operative, participatory games and rituals enacted every day by mothers and babies likely establish distinct, culturally specific motor styles. Generation of non-verbal embodied understanding is dependent on intent participation, and requires co-ordination and contingent timing of actions from both mother and baby. In this study, we examine the action patterns of mothers and their babies from Japan and Scotland during every day games and rituals. Goal-directed movements within these are analysed for their prospective control of action using General Tau Theory, a mathematicopyschophysical theory of prospective perceptual control of movement shown to be universally basic in animal motor control [3] and [4]