Peer-reviewed article
Pre-verbal Children’s Participation in a New Key. How Intersubjectivity Can Contribute to Understanding and Implementation of Child Rights in Early Childhood
Eystein Victor Våpenstad, Brynulf Bakkenget ·
Summary
Written by AI, not yet AICS's view · claude-haiku-4-5-20251001This paper examines how pre-verbal infants can participate in exercising their rights, challenging the common exclusion of babies from participation frameworks that typically require verbal language. It argues that infants communicate actively through 'communicative musicality' and intersubjective relationships with caregivers from birth. The paper proposes that child participation in early childhood should be understood as adults attuning to and recognizing the child's voice through close, sensitive relationships rather than requiring verbal expression. The work draws on infant research and attachment theory to reframe participation as a relational concept accessible to all children regardless of language ability.
Key points
- The UNCRC grants participation rights to all children, but national policy and practice often exclude pre-verbal infants
- Pre-linguistic infants communicate intentions and feelings through 'communicative musicality' and proto-conversational narratives
- Intersubjectivity theory posits that humans are fundamentally interconnected from birth, not isolated individuals learning through imitation
- Infants actively engage in intersubjective relationships with caregivers only days after birth and influence caregivers' mental processes
- Early childhood participation means finding the child's voice within sensitive, containing adults who look inward to understand the child
Limitations
This is a theoretical paper that does not present empirical data or evaluate an intervention. It does not provide evidence about whether or how implementing this framework improves child well-being or outcomes in practice.
Abstract
Children's participation and involvement has increasingly been on the agenda for the last few decades. The right for children to participate was established in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC). However, even though the UNCRC gives the right to participate to all children, national policy and practice seems to draw a line on verbal language and exclude pre-verbal infants from participation. The spur of this paper is to challenge the exclusion of infants, to describe how pre-linguistic children communicate their intentions, and to show how an understanding of children's participation grounded in intersubjectivity, can inform and reframe the participation of all children as being fundamentally about close relationships with sensitive and containing adults who look within themselves for the voice of the child. The infant's proto-conversational narrative communicates interests and feelings through sympathetic rhythms of what infant researchers have named "communicative musicality," and it can surface in the mother's narrative about the child and their relationship. Intersubjectivity oppose the monadic view of man as separate and left only to imitate others and claims that humans from the very start are intertwined in a fundamental thirdness of co-created reality. Infants are powerful communicators who actively engage in intersubjective relationships with their caretakers only days after birth, and newborns actively influence and even control the mental process of those who communicate with them. Early childhood participation then, would be to find within ourselves the voice of the child. A research project building on the theories and ideas described in the first part of the article, is presented.