The Child in the World: Embodiment, Time, and Language in Early Childhood (Landscapes of Childhood Series)
Here is a rich and many-faceted exploration into the lived experience of childhood, with its shuddering terrors and skin-rippling pleasures. We were all children once, yet how difficult it is even for parents to really feel our way back inside the wonder-strewn world of the child. Simms's book is a remarkable feat of corporeal empathy, guaranteed to provoke a steady upwelling of felt memories in the awareness of any adult reader. It enlivens our understanding. --David Abram, author of The Spell of the Sensuous and founder of the Alliance for Wild Ethics (AWE)If babies could speak they would all raise their rattles and their toys and salute Eva Simms. They would praise her for entering their world, for understanding that they live in a different space, a different time, with different things and qualities and a different body than we do as adults. They would in unison say, Thank you for giving us back our dignity as children. And, as an adult, I similarly raise my glass to Eva Simms and say thank you for showing us how profoundly children are our teachers, drawing us back into the sensuousness of the world, the deliciousness of open time, free play, sensory immediacy, unfolding wonder. --Robert Sardello, PhD, author of Freeing the Soul from Fear, Silence, and Love and the Soul, and director of the School of Spiritual PsychologyThis book challenges the standard assumptions made in the scientific analysis of the educational and psychological institutions related to childhood. In exploring the universal aspects of everyday existence, in the experiences of both children and adults, Simms makes excellent use of the generative power of close phenomenological observation. She opens up an alternative, deeply embodied way of considering the most important questions about how we raise our children and the implications that has for our own lives. --Shaun Gallagher, author of How the Body Shapes the Mind and professor of philosophy and cognitive science at the University of Central Florida