Before I ever held a camera in a professional way, I spent years learning to watch children. I earned a doctorate in developmental psychology, with a focus on infancy, early childhood, and the long evolutionary story of how small humans come to know themselves. Then I spent seasons of my life as a forest and nature preschool teacher and mother, kneeling in the mud beside three-year-olds while they studied a beetle as though it were the whole world. Long before I understood light, I understood looking. I understood that a child in a room is almost never doing only one thing, that even while she builds a tower or chases a gull or hides her face in your knees, some quiet part of her is tracking you, reading your face, gathering from your eyes the answer to the only question that ever really matters to her, which is whether she is safe and whether she is loved and whether she is seen.
When I finally turned toward photography, I did not leave the psychologist behind. I brought her with me into every session, and she quietly shapes everything about what I choose to point my lens at. I am, on paper, a Seattle family photographer, and I do all the things that phrase implies, photographing families in the golden light and on the fern-lined trails and the beaches of Whidbey Island where I live. But underneath the craft of it, I am doing something a little different from what most people expect when they book family photos, and the difference comes almost entirely from what the science of child development taught me about what is actually happening between a parent and a child in any given ordinary moment. This is the post where I try to explain that, because I think it will change how you see your own family, too.
The Question the Child Is Always Asking
There is a study that every parent deserves to know about, and once you know it you will never quite watch your baby the same way again. You may also put your phone down a lot more frequently when your children are around. In 1975, the developmental psychologist Edward Tronick set up something now called the Still Face experiment. A mother and her infant play together, faces close, the ordinary music of coos and smiles and little answering sounds passing back and forth between them. Then, on a signal, the mother goes blank. She keeps looking at her baby but lets her face fall completely still, no smile, no response, nothing but absolutely flat affect. What happens next is heartbreaking to witness. Within seconds, the baby notices. He points, he reaches, he calls out, he throws every small trick he has at that unmoving face, working with his whole body to bring his mother back. And when she stays blank, he begins to come apart, until at last he turns away, folds inward, and goes quiet with a kind of despair no baby that age should have to feel.
What the Still Face experiment reveals is that a baby is not a passive little bundle waiting to be entertained, but a fully engaged social being who expects a response and organizes his entire inner state around it. Developmental psychologists describe healthy interaction as serve and return, a rhythm as old as our species, in which the child sends something out, a gaze or a gurgle or an outstretched hand, and the parent sends something back, and in that endless volley the child’s nervous system learns how to settle, how to feel, how to trust. The parent’s face is not decoration in this exchange. It is the instrument on which the whole of the child’s early emotional life is being played. When the returns keep coming, the baby learns that the world answers when he calls, and that knowledge becomes the floor beneath everything he will ever build. The attunement between mother and child is the very foundation of the child’s own emotional regulation, ability to empathize with others, and secure attachment (i.e., the internal working model that communicates that relationships are safe and reliable).
I carry the Still Face experiment into every session I photograph, though I would never say so out loud on the day. It is the reason I do not spend our time together trying to get your child to look at my camera and perform a smile for a stranger. A smile aimed at me is a smile aimed at no one your child loves, and it tells the truth about nothing. What I am watching for instead is the serve and the return, the moment your daughter checks your face and finds youthere, the split second your son’s whole body relaxes because you answered. Those are the frames that hold something real, because they are photographs of the actual thing developmental science says is happening, the ceaseless, tender traffic of a child being met where they are.
The First Mirror Is a Human Face
If you want to understand why beingseen matters somuch, and why I have built an entire way of photographing around it, you have to sit for a moment with the work of the pediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott. He asked a deceptively simple question. What does a baby see when he looks at his mother’s face? And his answer reshaped how a generation of us think about the birth of the self. Ordinarily, Winnicott wrote, “what the baby sees when he looks into his mother’s face is himself.” The mother’s face is the mirror in which the infant first finds out that he exists, because when she looks at him with love and attention, her expression gives him back to himself. She is moved by him, so he learns he is worth being moved by. She lights up at the sight of him, so he learns he is a delight. Long before a child can understand a single word, he is reading his own reality in the face bent over him.
Winnicott put it in a line I have never been able to forget. When a child looks and is truly met, the child comes to feel, in Winnicott’s own words, “I am seen, so I exist.” And the shadow side of that truth is just as important, because he warned that where the mirror is absent, where the face looking down is chronically blank or distracted or turned away, the child’s own capacity to feel real begins, quietly, to wither. This is not about mothers being perfect, and I want to say that clearly, because the last thing an already tired mother needs is one more impossible standard. A child does not need a flawless mirror. He needs a real one, a face that is mostly present, that returns often enough, that finds its way back after every inevitable rupture. The self is not built by perfection. It is built by being seen, again and again, in the ordinary.
This is why, when I photograph your family, I am not actually trying to make you look flawless. I am trying to catch the mirror in the act of doing its work. I want the frame where you are looking at your child with that particular expression that belongs to no one else on earth, the one your face makes only for them, because that look is the mirror in which your child is quietly learning who he is. Years from now, when he is grown and you are older and the specific weight of him on your hip is only a memory, that photograph will still hold the exact quality of your attention. It will show him, in a way no words ever could, that he was seen. There is no more valuable thing I could hand a family than proof of that, and it is the reason I would rather photograph the way you look at your children than the way you smile at a lens.
The Glance Over the Shoulder
Somewhere around the end of the first year, a new and remarkable thing appears in a child’s behavior, and developmental psychologists have a slightly clinical name for something that is, when you watch it happen, almost unbearably tender. They call it social referencing. It means that when a baby who is old enough to crawl or toddle meets a situation she cannot read, a strange dog, a loud noise, the top of a small hill, an unfamiliar face, she stops and looks back at her parent to find out how she should feel. She borrows your emotional read of the world because she does not yet have her own, and your face becomes the map she navigates by.
The most famous demonstration of this is an experiment involving what researchers called a visual cliff, a glass-topped table with a drop-off underneath, safe to crawl across but visually alarming to a baby. When the drop was ambiguous, neither obviously safe nor obviously dangerous, the babies did something extraordinary. They crawled to the edge, and then they looked up at their mothers’ faces to decide. When the mothers had been coached to look joyful or encouraging, most of the babies crossed the apparent cliff. When the mothers posed fear, almost none of them did. The child, poised at the edge of the unknown, was reading her mother’s expression like a weather report and setting her own course by it. The parent’s face was, quite literally, the difference between the baby venturing forward into the world and shrinking back from it.
I think about social referencing constantly during a session, because it explains one of the most photographically precious moments there is, the glance over the shoulder. A child runs ahead down the beach or the trail, delighted and brave, and then, at the crest of her courage, she turns and looks back to find you. That glance is her checking that the tether still holds, that you are still there, still watching, still glad. It is one of the truest gestures of childhood, this constant looking back for the parent who anchors the whole adventure, and it passes in less than a second. A photographer who is busy arranging everyone into a tidy row will miss it every time. I am not arranging you into a row. I am giving your child room to run ahead precisely so that I can be ready for the moment she turns around, because that turning is a photograph of the invisible cord between you, and that cord is the actual subject of everything I do.
The Importance of Play
For a long time the whole industry of family photography was built around a single instruction, everyone look here and say cheese. I understand the appeal of it, because a row of smiling faces feels like proof that everyone was happy and everything was fine. But the science of child development quietly undoes that whole approach, because it tells us that the smile aimed at a camera is one of the least meaningful things a child’s face can do. It is a performance requested by an adult, disconnected from any real feeling, and children are so honest in their bodies that the strain of it almost always shows, in the stiff shoulders, the too-wide grin, the eyes that have gone slightly vacant with the effort of complying.
What developmental psychology celebrates instead is connection and play, because those are the conditions under which a child is most fully herself. Play is not a break from a child’s real work. Play is the work, the medium through which she practices being a person, tries on feelings, navigates the world, and reveals who she actually is. A child absorbed in play forgets to perform, and in that forgetting she becomes luminous, entirely present, unguarded in exactly the way that makes for an honest photograph. The same is true of connection. A child folded into her mother’s neck, or shrieking with laughter as her father swings her up, or leaning quietly into the family pile on a Sunday bed, is showing you the truth of her attachments in a way no arranged pose could ever manufacture.
So I have built my sessions to protect play and connection rather than interrupt them. I keep things unhurried and low pressure, I let the children lead and wander and be as wild or as shy as they honestly are that day, and I follow the family’s real rhythms instead of imposing a schedule of poses. This is what I mean when I talk about child-led, emotive family photography, and it is not a stylistic quirk. It comes straight out of what I know about how children work, which is that they cannot be commanded into authenticity, they can only be given the safety to fall into it. My job is to create that safety and then to watch, patiently and closely, for the moments when the real family surfaces, because those are the only moments worth keeping.
If it would help to have a gentle companion as you begin to notice these moments in your own days, I made a free guide called The Sacred Ordinary, full of prompts and reflections for seeing the small, unrepeatable beauty already alive in your family’s everyday life. You are warmly welcome to gather it, and to let it teach your own eye to catch the glance over the shoulder and the look that only your child receives.
The Photograph as the Family’s Origin Story
There is one more piece of developmental research that has changed not only how I photograph but why, and it moves the whole conversation from the individual child outward to the family as a living, storytelling thing. For years, researchers at Emory University, principally the psychologists Marshall Duke and Robyn Fivush, studied what actually makes children resilient, and they arrived at an answer almost no one would have predicted. The single strongest predictor they found of a child’s emotional health, of her self-esteem and her sense of control over her own life, was not wealth or achievement or even the absence of hardship. It was how much she knew about her own family’s story. Children who could answer questions about where their grandparents grew up, how their parents met, what hard things the family had come through and survived, were measurably more grounded and better able to weather stress.
Duke and Fivush gave a name to what these children possessed, and I find it beautiful. They called it the intergenerational self, the deep and steadying sense of belonging to something larger and older than oneself, a story that began before you were born and will continue after you. A child with a strong intergenerational self knows, in her bones, that she is one chapter in a long book, held by the ones who came before. That knowledge is a kind of anchor in the storms of a life, and the researchers found that it does its quiet work whether the family’s story is easy or hard, because what matters is not that the story is happy but that the child knows she belongs inside it.
This is where my two vocations, the psychologist and the photographer, finally become one thing. A family photograph, the honest kind, is not merely a pretty keepsake. It is a piece of your family’s origin story, a page in the book your children will read for the rest of their lives to know who they are and where they come from. The image of the way you held your daughter when she was small, of your family tangled together on an ordinary grey morning, of the particular land you walked and the particular light you lived inside, becomes part of the narrative that steadies her. They become roots that keep her grounded. When I photograph you, I am not just making art, I am helping to author the story that your children will draw resilience from long after this season has passed. That is not a small thing. It may, in the end, be the most important thing photography can do.
So This Is How I Photograph You
When all of this science settles into practice, it looks, on the surface, deceptively simple, almost like nothing at all. There is very little posing. I do not spend our time barking positions or demanding that everyone look at me and smile (though I have been known to say, “Don’t look at me.”). Instead I set a scene that lets your family be together in a way that feels natural, whether that’s in your own home among the warm ordinary rooms where your real life happens, or out on a trail or a shoreline that means something to you. Then comes the magic, I largely get out of the way. I ask you to play with your children, to talk to them, to chase and gather and rest with them, and I move quietly around the edges of that, watching for the serves and the returns, the glances back, the mirror doing its work in your face.
I let the sessions breathe because I know from experience, and from the science, that the truest moments cannot be rushed into being. A child needs time to forget the camera and fall back into herself. And a mother needs time to stop worrying about what she looks like and if everyone is acting civilized (it’s actually better if they’re not). I watch for the in-between, the second after the posed moment collapses and the real one arrives, the private joke, the reach for a hand, and the sudden collapse of a child into a waiting lap. I am watching, always, for the relationship rather than the arrangement. Because the relationship is the only thing that will still matter when your children are grown and these photographs are all that remain of how it felt to be a family in this particular, unrepeatable year.
And I keep gently insisting, to every mother who books me, that she must be in the photographs herself, not only behind them. I have written before about the invisible mother, the one who does all the loving and holding yet somehow never appears in the pictures, and everything in this post is finally an argument for why she cannot afford to keep waiting. Your child’s whole developing self is oriented around your face, your presence, your seeing. To be missing from the family’s visual story is to be missing from the very origin myth your children will one day hold. You do not need to have lost the weight or fixed your hair or become someone more finished first. Your children do not see the flaws you are hiding from . They see the face that is their whole world, and one day they will ache for a photograph of you looking at them the way that only you do. (Note to self to take my own medicine and finally schedule those family photos).
When You Are Ready to Be Seen
I did not set out, all those years ago in graduate school, to become a photographer. I set out to understand how a small human becomes a self. What I learned was that we become ourselves by being seen, over and over, in the faces of the people who love us. We’re social animals, after all. Photography turned out to be the truest way I know to honor that, to make something lasting out of the fleeting, endless work of a family loving one another into being. Every session I photograph is really an act of witness, a way of saying, you were here, you were together, you were seen, and it mattered.
If any of this stirred something in you, if you found yourself thinking about the glances your own children throw over their shoulders or the look your own face makes for them alone, I would gently encourage you to listen to that. When you are ready, I would love to hear about your family, on Whidbey Island, in Seattle, or beyond, and to help you gather this chapter of your life into honest, soulful images that become visual relics of (in Mary Oliver’s words) your one wild and precious life. Booking begins with nothing more than a simple conversation, no pressure and no performance, just a chance for me to hear your story and for us to dream up the time and the place that will feel most like you.
Gather my free offering, The Sacred Ordinary, for seeing the everyday magic of these years before they slip by. And when you are ready to be witnessed exactly as your family truly is, you can tell me about your family here.
Sources & further reading
- Edward Tronick, the developmental psychologist whose 1975 Still Face experiment showed how completely an infant depends on the caregiver’s responsive face, and gave us the language of serve and return.
- D. W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality, and his essay on the mirror-role of the mother, where he proposed that the mother’s face is the first mirror in which a child discovers that he exists.
- James Sorce, Robert Emde, Joseph Campos, and Mary Klinnert, whose visual cliff studies of social referencing demonstrated that infants read their mothers’ facial expressions to decide how to meet an uncertain world.
- Marshall Duke and Robyn Fivush of Emory University, whose research on family narratives and the “Do You Know” scale found that children who know their family’s stories carry a stronger, more resilient intergenerational self.
- The Invisible Mother, The Lasts of Childhood, and Matrescence, my earlier reflections on why mothers deserve to be seen and photographed in the middle of these fleeting years.
