Some children walk into a room full of strangers and start playing within a minute. Others stand at the edge and watch. If yours is a watcher, here is what I think is actually going on, what the research says, and what tends to help.

My son held a red spade at the edge of a sandpit for eleven days before he put it in the sand.

I tell that story properly in the book, so I will not retell all of it here. The short version is that he was three and a half, we had just moved to a new town, it was his third kindy, and he knew nobody. Every morning he stood on the wooden sleeper around the edge of the sandpit, holding the spade in both hands, and watched four other children dig. I watched him from the car park, and I counted.

The part I want to start with is not the counting. It is what he looked like while he was doing it, because I think that is where most of us go wrong.

He did not look sad. He looked absorbed. His head moved when the action moved. When the bucket tipped over, his mouth opened a little. He was following every part of what was happening in that sandpit. He just was not in it yet.

Watching is a kind of playing

In 1932 a researcher called Mildred Parten sat in a preschool and recorded what children were doing socially. She described several kinds of participation: playing alone, playing alongside other children, playing together. And in between, something she called onlooker play. A child watches other children, often closely, sometimes talking to them or about them, without joining in.

Her categories are almost a hundred years old and they have been argued over since, and they should not be read as a ladder that every child climbs in order. Children move between these modes all day. So do adults. But the reason the idea has lasted is that she noticed something we still tend to miss. Watching is a category of play, not the absence of it.

When you think about what a child has to work out before stepping into a group, it is a lot. How do you get in? Do you need to ask? What happens if you pick up the bucket somebody put down a minute ago? What are the rules? Because there are rules, and none of them have been said out loud. What happens if you get it wrong?

An adult arriving at a party where they know nobody does something very similar. You look at the bookshelf. You hold a drink you did not particularly want. You spend a few minutes working out who knows whom and how the conversations are going, and then you join one. Nobody calls that a problem. It is called reading the room, and we think of it as a social skill.

A child doing the same thing at three is doing serious work, and it is tiring. Tracking several people at once, guessing what they mean and predicting what they will do next is not a rest state. It is much closer to studying. That is one reason a child who has spent a long morning at the edge of things sometimes falls apart in the car on the way home.

Is it temperament, or is it something that happened?

This was the question I was really asking at three in the morning, and I suspect a lot of parents of watchers ask it too.

Part of the answer is that some children arrive like this. There is a long line of research, associated particularly with Jerome Kagan and later with Nathan Fox and colleagues, on what is called behavioural inhibition. When babies and toddlers are shown unfamiliar people and things, a meaningful minority react strongly: more wariness, more withdrawal, more watching from a distance. That early caution shows some continuity into later childhood. It is real and it has been replicated. It is also a tendency rather than a destiny. Many cautious toddlers do not become anxious adults, and the research suggests that how adults respond to that caution matters.

The other part of the answer is that circumstances obviously play a role. A child who has moved house, started a new centre, gained a sibling, or simply spent less time around other children than most has had less practice at exactly this. It would be strange if that made no difference.

And then the honest part. For any one child, you usually cannot tell which it is. There is no test that apportions the cause. What finally let me put the question down was noticing that it did not change what I would do. If his caution was temperament, the right response was to support him at his pace and let him find his way in. If it was circumstance, the right response was exactly the same.

That is not to say nothing ever needs looking at. If your child seems frightened or distressed rather than interested, avoids other children almost completely over a long period, has lost skills they used to have, or if you have other concerns about their communication or development, please talk to your Well Child provider, your GP or your child's teachers. They know your child, and I do not. Watching on its own, though, is not a symptom of anything. It is a strategy.

What usually makes it worse

The most common thing adults do is also the least useful: "Go on, go and play with them."

It asks the child to do the one thing they are not yet ready to do. It tells them, quite clearly, that watching is not acceptable. And it adds an audience to a task that was already hard. In my experience, and this is a practitioner's observation rather than a research finding, a child who is propelled into a group before they are ready usually has a bad time, retreats further, and finds the next attempt harder, because they now have evidence that this goes wrong.

The second thing is the word "shy". It is almost always said kindly. The problem is that it is a label pretending to be a description. "He's shy" is a statement about what a child is, and children hear it, and repeat it, and eventually use it to explain themselves. Compare it with "she likes to have a good look first" or "he takes a while to warm up". Those describe a process, and a process has an end.

You do not need to correct the aunt who says it. A cheerful reframe in front of your child does the job. "She likes to watch first, don't you. Then she goes." You are not arguing with anybody. You are giving your child a better sentence about themselves, from someone they trust.

What tends to help

Be a base, not a launcher. The thing I watched good teachers do again and again was to go and do the activity themselves, nearby, without inviting the child in. Sit at the edge of the sandpit and start digging. Do not look up expectantly. A child can come to you, which is easy, and once they are beside you they are technically in the sandpit. The entry problem has been solved without them having to solve it.

Learn their signals. Most cautious children have a sequence they go through before they join something, and it is small and consistent. My son's was that the spade moved from two hands to one, then he started talking quietly to himself, then he turned his body to face the sandpit rather than the side. Once I knew those three things, the waiting stopped feeling anxious. It also stopped me stepping in at exactly the wrong moments.

Expect alongside before together. When a watcher does join in, the first stage often looks like playing near the others rather than with them. That is not a consolation prize. For a young child in a new place it is exactly where they should be. I write more about playing alongside, and why adults expect cooperation too early, in the piece on sharing.

Bring home in through the gate. Te Whāriki, the New Zealand early childhood curriculum, treats a child's family as something that comes into the centre with them, and looks for children to have "confidence that their family background is viewed positively". It also says plainly that infants should have "opportunities to observe and play with, and alongside, other children and adults". Watching is written into the curriculum. When my son started at that third kindy, his teachers asked us for photos of his grandparents for the wall. A child who could not yet talk about home could at least stand in front of it and point. If your child is starting somewhere new, it is worth asking what the service does to help a new child belong.

For educators. If you are the teacher, the most useful thing you can give a watching child is the same thing you would give a confident one: a predictable adult, a predictable day, and permission. Sit close. Describe what is happening without asking anything of them. "They're filling the bucket. It's getting heavy." And resist writing "reluctant to engage" in a learning story when what you saw was a child doing the hardest part of engaging.

What happened in the end

On day twelve he sat down on the sleeper. On day fourteen he had one foot in the sand. Somewhere around week four he was in it, digging at the edge, near the others rather than with them, which is exactly where a three-year-old in a new place should be.

His teacher had told me early on, "He's not doing nothing. He's doing the hardest part." It took me a long time to understand how right she was. He was not failing to take part. Taking part was the last step of a process he had been running the whole time, in a way I could not see because it did not involve moving.

If your child is standing at the edge of something right now, it may be worth watching them watch. Not to hurry it. Just to see what they are reading.

Sources

  • Parten, M. B. (1932). Social participation among pre-school children. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 27(3), 243-269. doi.org/10.1037/h0074524
  • Fox, N. A., Henderson, H. A., Marshall, P. J., Nichols, K. E., & Ghera, M. M. (2005). Behavioral inhibition: Linking biology and behavior within a developmental framework. Annual Review of Psychology, 56, 235-262. doi.org/10.1146/annurev.psych.55.090902.141532
  • Kagan, J. (1994). Galen's prophecy: Temperament in human nature. Basic Books.
  • Ministry of Education. (2017). Te Whāriki: He whāriki mātauranga mō ngā mokopuna o Aotearoa. Early childhood curriculum. Mana aotūroa | Exploration strand (online) and Mana tangata | Contribution strand (online).