Abstract
That it is even possible to take a phenomenological approach to child development rests upon a radical empirical fact: To be human means that one is or was once a child. The experience of being or having been a child is known to every person as an essential condition of his or her existence. This knowledge is accessible either directly to children who are currently living through their own developing childhoods or indirectly to adults who recollect childhood experiences out of the fabric of their already developed life-worlds. It is the radicality of this “world fact” (Wild, 1959) concerning childhood that makes possible a phenomenological approach to child development. For one cannot make sense of the world of a developing child without existential grounding in the experience of living or having lived as a child. And one cannot hope to communicate with others about the meaning of the developing child’s world unless those others, too, are or have been children.
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for...
—T. S. Eliot
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Briod, M. (1989). A Phenomenological Approach to Child Development. In: Valle, R.S., Halling, S. (eds) Existential-Phenomenological Perspectives in Psychology. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-6989-3_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-6989-3_7
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