"We Rise by Lifting Others"
Robert Ingersoll
What infants have taught me is everything! I want to advocate for them since they cannot speak. Every infant is different, but the same at the very basic levels. The studies that have been performed by brilliant researchers have been done for you! This generation of millennials question everything and I believe it is because they are Internet babies and arrived swaddled in tons of information from the Internet since birth. They more seriously want to know the how, why, when and “who says?” Many of them have been my clients and this is my way of responding to their need to know – these studies are for you!
After falling into this profession by accident when the IT industry collapsed due to the fall of the “.coms”, a girlfriend asked if I could help out one of her friends who had an agency. A doctor in Newport needed someone to be a temporary nanny while she searched for one. I’m Italian, I love children and I was out of work. I agreed to do it for a couple of weeks while my resumes floated out there. And . . . it changed my life!
After the doctor found a nanny, he asked if I could still come and work with his baby a couple days a week. He liked how his baby responded to me while I read her board books and introduced music to her. At that point he added, “You have a gift! You should really do something with it.” That was the beginning of a life change for me and 20 years of working developmentally with infants. I went on to become an Infant Specialist and then trained as a Child Behavior Specialist.
Working in this capacity helped me discover the great amount of intelligence that infants have. I didn’t see it before as a new mom with my own baby, because I was so engaged with all the new baby responsibilities in combination of being a working mom. At that point you’re just trying to juggle your life and keep up with things in you and your baby’s day to day existence.
Up close and personal working 1:1 with them in this capacity I came to understand their amazing untapped intelligence and it became intriguing to me. This progressed into the reason I went back to school to get my Child Development Certification, then my Bachelor’s Degree in Psychology, which then led to my Masters in Child Psychology.
But it was during my first Psych class that I fell in love with Carl Rogers, a humanistic psychologist, and through him the importance of positive regard. I had a very young and new professor, Michael R. Cassens, who was excited about psychology and who lit the match in me to major in psychology, with Carl Roger’s theories giving me a new positive focus and approach to working with infants. The rest is history! The great founding fathers like Carl Rogers, Jean Piaget, John Watson, Erik Erickson, Harry Harlow and Charles Darwin, to name a few of infant development researchers, were introduced to me. Many of them were biologists or other scientific specialists who upon the birth of their own babies discovered this untapped intelligence in their own infants. It was a long time ago so their studies were mostly observational research and/or animal research. They did not have the miraculous brain scanning capabilities this generation is blessed with. I can only imagine how excited they would be!
They have passed the baton onto a generation of extremely gifted infant brain and behavioral researchers who have spent countless hours on these studies whether written, videos or podcasts and we pass them onto you! Enjoy!
Angie Cimmarrusti
Up close and personal working 1:1 with them in this capacity I came to understand their amazing untapped intelligence and it became intriguing to me. This progressed into the reason I went back to school to get my Child Development Certification, then my Bachelor’s Degree in Psychology, which then led to my Masters in Child Psychology.
But it was during my first Psych class that I fell in love with Carl Rogers, a humanistic psychologist, and through him the importance of positive regard. I had a very young and new professor, Michael R. Cassens, who was excited about psychology and who lit the match in me to major in psychology, with Carl Roger’s theories giving me a new positive focus and approach to working with infants. The rest is history! The great founding fathers like Carl Rogers, Jean Piaget, John Watson, Erik Erickson, Harry Harlow and Charles Darwin, to name a few of infant development researchers, were introduced to me. Many of them were biologists or other scientific specialists who upon the birth of their own babies discovered this untapped intelligence in their own infants. It was a long time ago so their studies were mostly observational research and/or animal research. They did not have the miraculous brain scanning capabilities this generation is blessed with. I can only imagine how excited they would be!
They have passed the baton onto a generation of extremely gifted infant brain and behavioral researchers who have spent countless hours on these studies whether written, videos or podcasts and we pass them onto you! Enjoy!
Angie Cimmarrusti