Emmi Pikler, A Different Pediatrician

Emmi Pikler, a different pediatrician

Emmi Pikler was born in Vienna on January 9, 1902 and died on June 6, 1984 in Budapest, Hungary. It was an Austrian pediatrician who impulses the look on early childhood care. His mother was a teacher and his father a Hungarian cabinet. His real name was Emilie Madeleine Reich. He obtained the surname Pikler by marrying Gyorgy Pikler.

He spends his childhood in Budapest and in the twenties he returns to Vienna to study medicine. He obtains the doctoral title in pediatrics at the University Hospital of Australia, where he performs his practices with DR. Pirquet. In this university hospital he discovered, the way pediatricians treated with love and respect for children, so they won’t cry.

In 1930 at the end of his studies he moved to Trieste, where he exercises as a family pediatrician. Later he meets her husband Gyorgy Pikler, a progressive pedagog.

In 1932 his daughter Anna was born, where he had the opportunity to put his knowledge about free movement and autonomous development into practice. In 1935, Gyorgy Pikler was taken prisoner and accused of political positions.

For several years Emmi Pikler, as a pediatrician, advised parents, the importance he had about food, hygiene and changed and free movement and autonomous development.

In 1946, after finishing World War II, her husband was released and the government proposes Emmi Pikler to direct a cradle house in Budapest. This is an institution for children of newborns at three years.

Some of these boys and girls were orphans and others had their sick parents.

With the years this cradle house that housed hundreds of boys and girls was known as “Lòczy”, because it was located at number three of Lòczy Street.

The objective of this institute was to provide children with good psychophysical, psychological and affective development due to the absence of their parents. Over time Emmi Pikler, director of the Lòczy Institute and his collaborator María Reinitz, propose to seek help for the care of children, hiring young people without experience, but who had interest in the care of children.

For the formation of the new educators, they were offered training manuals where furniture, toys, clothing, hygiene and changed diapers and food were specified. All related to aging aspects.

Emmi Pikler, as a pediatrician and her experience in her profession has shown that children must move free from their own initiative, learn for themselves to sit down and walk, without adult intervention. They have the ability to freely develop their movements.

Dra. Emmi Pikler, discovered autonomous postural development discovered that all children have a genetic physiological program to develop different positions, movements and displacements, which everyone has and that everyone goes through the same stages.

She also observed that children are acquiring different motor skills and also language. Language is in communication. They appear in all their expressions, as in the gaze, the gestures and everything that the child proposes to the adult. In 1970, the Lòczy Institute, became the National Institute of Methodology of Children’s Households of Hungary.

At present, this Institute remains one of the Educational Center for Teaching Early Childhood from 0 to 3 years. The Lòczy Institute receives children whose supervision is responsible for educators, who are attachment figures. The links are very important in the relationship of a baby because they are very vulnerable. Dra Pikler created an educational system based on respect for the child and a non -interventionist attitude of the adult, which allows their autonomous development. I watched over the physical and psychic health of children, taking into account movement, outdoor and food.

The spaces where boys and girls could explore, had to be broad and appropriate to the age of each of them, so that they can move freely and the adult does not intervene in their autonomous activities.

For Emmi Pikler, playing, crawling, running, climbing outdoors refines child motor skills and strengthens health. For these activities the boys and girls had to be with comfortable clothes, so that they did not prevent their movements.

During care as is the change of diaper, feeding and bathing it, the adult must do it softly, speaking, giving time to the child to listen, focused on what he does, and paying attention to the boy or girl.

The child’s development has to do with the floor. He drinks fight the whole first year, to have less support, to raise the floor, until he stopped and walking.

The boy and girl do not learn to walk in a bed, corralito or walker, but on the floor. Babies raised with this conception, which also have an ideology of life, have the ability to develop manipulation, because he drinks that he is sitting prematurely or that they are standing and lead him to walk is using his hands all the time to sustain himself andDo not fall.

Emmi Pikler wrote several books in countless articles published in different languages. His most relevant works are:

• "What your child knows how to do" (1938)
• Free. Development of global motor skills ”(1969)

Finally, in 1978, Pikler retired and the Loczy Institute passes to his daughter and child psychologist Anna Tardos. Emmi Pikler dies in 1984 in Budapest. In 2007 the Loczy Institute, officially called Emmi Pikler, opens a kindergarten. In 2011 the orphanages have been replaced by kindergarten