Detachment and Ego Development in the Rubicon

Sometimes you can find desperate parents on internet forums who find their nine or ten-year-old daughter obnoxious: She isolates herself, withdraws from family activities, criticizes everything and everyone and is inexplicably sad from time to time. If the mother then asks about the reason for the streaks of tears running down her cheeks, she might say something like: «Stupid question, I don't know either!» Some parents then write back to their troubled peers and explain that this is not yet puberty, but anthroposophists would refer to it as the Rubicon. And indeed, this term has now become widely used. Rudolf Steiner used the Rubicon to describe a point of development that takes place between the ages of nine and eleven. It was named after the Rubicone, a border river in northern Italy, which Julius Caesar crossed with his army in 49 BC against the instructions of the Roman Senate. Crossing the river meant a declaration of war, after which there could be no turning back – which Caesar confirmed with the famous words «Alea acta est!» (Latin for «The die is cast!»). 

One-way street Rubicon

Rudolf Steiner thus chose a metaphor for the period of time in which children also experience a transition. This is full of tension, even crises. In the middle of childhood, Steiner sees a turning point that leads to a deepened sense of self. After the child has lived through this exciting phase, it no longer returns to where it once came from – figuratively speaking: to the cozy and familiar sphere of early childhood mentality. There, they could not only be magically enchanted by fantasy worlds and fairy tales by engaging with their images and stories; they could also actively shape the world of objects with their imaginations so that they seemed to answer questions. Parents and teachers alike are always amazed at the extent to which young children are willing to let their imaginations be populated by figures and creatures. These do not simply spring from the child's inner imagination; they must first be brought in from outside in the form of stories, myths and fairy tales. However, the almost detached openness towards these worlds characterizes a fundamental relationship between the self and the world: just as the self is not clearly defined and active, the world is not fixed in its contours and laws.

Maturity of breath and first search for identity

Entry into middle childhood now brings about a dramatic impulse of separation. Children wrestle with biological-rhythmic change processes and this upsetting event is reflected in their emotional experience. Doctors cite the changing relationship between breathing and blood circulation as evidence of this. A stable balance of around 18 breaths to around 72 pulse beats first develops during the Rubicon. The inner equilibrium is therefore only slowly balanced out in a process. In the inner realm of the soul, this can be experienced as a crisis. Similarly, the ten-year-old child seeks a new equilibrium in their relationship with their social environment. It now looks at the familiar basis of family life with a disconcerting gaze and begins to question everything it is used to and loves. They don't even stop at themselves: «Are you really my parents or was I perhaps switched at birth?» The Rubicon marks a new step in the formation of identity. While the defiant phase is endured in amazement by others as a pure first separation, the events of middle childhood pile up with big questions that touch the child's experience with unexpected force; these are questions about life and death, about one's own future and destiny. But parents should not be worried here: it can also be one size smaller. The doctor Hans Müller-Wiedemann has described the Rubicon as a «manifestation of the activity of the ego between childhood and adolescence, in which, for the first time in the human biography, the child's emotional life unfolds between past and future and seeks to create experience.» The child becomes aware of relationship experiences from the early phase of life: Family, feelings of security and festive events may appear in memories and form a contrast to the sensation of a more isolated self. Both a diffusely felt past and a sharper sense of self lead to the first questioning of one's own existence.

Curiosity and discovering the world

On a relational level, this goes hand in hand with the fading of the instinct to imitate, which involved the child in natural learning processes in the first years of life. The imitative instinct is closely interwoven with the relationships that the young child lives out with parents and other close people. They act as natural authorities; the child simply imitates the example they set – for better or for worse. When the instinct to imitate, whose inner quality can be described as dreaming-imitating-acting, subsides, curiosity and the urge to take a closer look at the world and the people around them awaken in the child's soul. The developmental psychologist Doris Bischof-Köhler describes how ten-year-old children already acquire very nuanced and sometimes contradictory inner perspectives of adults by observing facial expressions, behavior and verbal utterances – even independently of sympathetic or antipathetic feelings. The doctor Peter Selg expresses this as follows: «The world of you – the other as other and own – becomes the child's subject for the first time.» But the child's own relationships are also reorganized. For example, parents sometimes report with irritation that the children's room or the place where they do their homework is marked off from other family members and access is regulated by a sign on the door:  «Please knock!» Orientation towards peers and their environment or their interests receives a visible boost. Suggestions for discovering and celebrating their own impulses are often taken from playmates. Overall, the child's radius of action, which is protected by the family, is broken up and gradually expanded. This can also include independently organizing appointments such as visits to the dentist or shopping, as the mother of an eleven-year-old daughter reported. In their imagination, they like to equip themselves with skills that they may acquire later or that will no longer play a role: «I'm going to be an astronaut and fly to the moon!»

What parents can do

Parents have an important perceptive and accompanying role to play here. Children experience something like an inner natural event for which words are sometimes lacking; accordingly, it is not appropriate to rationally explain it away, but rather to translate the child's forms of expression or carefully explore their neediness, even and especially when everything is on the defensive. In family life in particular, developmental phases that push for change can be irritating. Detachment processes create unrest and misunderstandings on various levels. If you understand that they are unavoidable and significantly promote the individualization of people, then you will look for ways to help shape them.

Ambivalence and detachment

Detachment processes in middle childhood, such as the Rubicon, live in a permanent ambivalent tension: they push forward and at the same time they live from the memory of the previous relationship qualities and the safe haven. The accompanying phases of grief can be an indication that the dichotomy is difficult to bear. On the one hand, children of this age are looking for a new, more critical and scrutinizing relationship with their primary caregivers, while on the other hand they wish to return to the magical world. It is of great importance to recognize this ambivalence and to make oneself available. Many skills are acquired in life by practicing. And practising means, on the one hand, acquiring a new set of rules and aligning your mental and physical potential with them and, on the other hand, learning from your initial shortcomings and mistakes. Skills can therefore only be acquired through practice and through observation and reflection – as long as you are past the age of infancy.

New horizons

In this respect, middle childhood is like setting off for unknown lands. The cognitive and social possibilities expand in every respect, which means that there are many models available for one's own interests and forms of action that one could try out. If children at the age of seven have a basic vocabulary of around 27,000 words and actively use 5,000 words, ten to eleven-year-olds already have 40,000 words. This is accompanied by an increased linguistic ability that ensures skillful movement in the social sphere. The children want to experience that their attempts to appropriate new spaces are taken seriously. At the same time, they do not want to give up the safety guarantees that cushion them if they fail in the meantime. The educational space in which autonomy can be practiced is therefore an experimental space. The child's confidence in the stabilization of their own new skills is relatively high if their existence is accepted on a trial basis. The as-if space is always open to correction, which means that the temporary failure within it is only a relative failure. If the unsettling processes in middle childhood are understood as an expression of a first, tentative self-discovery and accompanied accordingly, this turning point may also serve as preparation for the subsequent puberty.