ABSTRACT
Most parents will greet their child's first birthday with pleasure and a sense of achievement. Their child has made huge visible progress over the past months. As in all development, the physical characteristics—that is, the innate bodily givens, the emotional characteristics, and the environment of the child interweave, determining through their different strands his own particular pattern of progress. For the 1-year-old, the single most important and obvious physical development is the emerging capacity to walk. As their child's personality begins to emerge, parents also have to begin to negotiate their own parallel change of role and loss of omnipotence. For some, this will be experienced with sadness as the feelings of warmth generated by the tiny, helpless, dependent baby are replaced by a little more reality as they watch their child growing. Such parents will have to cope with no longer being needed in quite the same way.
