Agency & Emergence

“Things are always changing, and we have agency in that change.”– Rebecca Solnit

"Developmental change is not planned but arises within a context as the product of multiple, developing elements."- Esther Thelen

a Toddlers session at Babies Project, 2018
Photo by Clarissa Sosin

Agency is the first of our core values, and we come back to it again and again. It encapsulates many of our ideas, underlies our principles, and guides our teaching.

As we define it, agency is the ability to make choices, to have an impact, and learn from experience. We do not think agency carries the same connotation as autonomy. For us, agency evokes the relational, interdependent, and participatory.

We believe that emergence and agency go together. In our usage, emergence implies self-creation, arising from within a complex non-linear relationship with the environment. As living organisms, we are emergent, from our beginnings as one or two-celled embryos and continuing throughout our life. Babies (of all ages) can fully participate in their emergence through a sense of their agency. How they develop is more than a matter of the sum of the parts, and a small change in the environment can play out in big ways.

This brings us to babies and Babies Project.

Much of our work involves educating parents and caregivers about how they can respect and nurture their baby's agency through how they shape their environment. Babies are picked up, put down, dressed and undressed, transferred, and otherwise handled many times each day, and thousands of times over their first years of life. Small changes in these everyday interactions can have a large effect on a baby's movement skills, the emergence of their full self, and their relationship to others and the world.