ABSTRACT
From infancy, a child is busy trying to grasp what the world is about-watching, touching, exploring, turning things in and out of boxes, dropping them, playing with them, pulling them apart-to discover the way things work, and how to control them. Each of us soon learns to do some things for ourselves, to understand some relationships and categories, and then put words to them. We also learn to avoid things which are frightening, either because they disconcert, or hurt, or because they are associated with things like loud noises, sudden drops, or strangers which we seem predisposed to fear. This growing ability to do, to avoid, to understand and to say constitutes a large part of what we mean by the power to control, and it grows out of the discovery of predictable relationships. A child who knows how to operate the system which he or she has constituted from their world of experience is no longer helpless.
