I would enjoy trying to trace in some detail how childsplay may grow well into sustained desire to succeed with structured learning opportunities (i.e., formal education)—a phenomenological exploration of early child development (probably beyond my competence). But that’s beyond my prevailing purpose here to explore human development generally (and relatively briefly), though respecting in some detail the value of a very good childhood (or, lacking that, rendering parts of the character of sustained remedial chances for awakening into a sustained renewal of development).

GENERATIVE FEELING

A child’s valuing of the moment is very episodic, yet growth allows for more focal attention, given habitual satisfaction with valuing one’s time. At best, sustained curiosity is fulfilling, not frustrating, much more often than not. We gain fidelity to appealing enactivity because it becomes habitually satisfying, and enowned purposes become valuable, integral to desire (i.e., a promise of fulfilled purpose tends to prevail over wanting mere satisfactions). Excitement easily transposes into entrancement, and sustained focus is fed by curiosity to reach further through a flow of appeals.

ASPIRATIONAL VALUING

Like the toddler who tries to unwittingly expand herself by making a surround hers—toying and appropriating (if not trying to eat it)—we become engaged with things, even entranced, as if it’s all Self, forgetting learned differences between self and world as we explore and cope, the child in us wanting the world to be oneSelf—or is it to have oneSelf become the world?—more of the world, more Self—SelfWorlding appropriated expansively, to be elated in the growing, the expansion.

In the beginning, to learn is simply to love being, and we want activity to stay that way as much as possible. We learn that structured love (being educively taught to accomplish) can accelerate the elation, loving oneself in the accomplishment, loving to fabricate purposes and destinations, ever more imaginative—so many novel ways of filling time, assembling, making, and finding oneself there.

I feel that growing to give prevalent appeal to accomplishment over mere satisfactions happens easily, given fair chances, educive play, and intriguing options. We grow to be able to conceive better purposes requiring more pieces, more steps, more time, but for grander accomplishments of “mine.“

Intrinsic to us, integral to our nature, I feel, is having a selfidentifcal power of generative feeling to fuel and sustain motivation, persistence having promise. Appeals of prevailing promise sustain our activity. Through guiding importances of attentive activity (enactivity or purposeful action), we build prevailing desire for fulfillment through selfidentical valuing.

FROM GENERAL TRUSTFULNESS TO A DURABLY PURPOSIVE LIFE

Brief discussions can’t be fair to the great distance (for a child’s sense of life) from attachment to first explorations, natural self expansion to constructive self expansion, educed (parented) individuation to self-directed individuation. Yet, my dense dramatizations might be usefully evocative for appreciating how individuation is less about what happens than about what’s done. The so-called “constructivist“ approach to human development should not be about how natural growth passes through levels and stages that inquirers reconstructively “find“ (constructing a passive, “botanical” approach to human development). Constructivism should be about the reality: how individuation makes itself. But unfortunately, psychologists have tended to be overly adaptationist. A generative psychology retrieves (by really finding) the intrinsically valuing and purposive nature of human individuation, which I’m having fun rendering.