From milestones to wayfaring: Geographic metaphors and iconography of embodied growth and change in infancy and early childhood

This article discusses the curiously geographic metaphors that shape how we understand embodied growth and change in infancy and early childhood and explores possibilities for developing new metaphors, and iconographies, which better represent how young children’s bodies grow and change. To do this, it explores the dominant milestones metaphor, and its iconography of milestone charts. It then considers alternative metaphors, which represent the dominant approaches within contemporary developmental movement science: Esther Thelen’s physical landscape metaphor, which represents the dynamic systems approach, and botanical metaphors, which represent a Gibsonian ecological approach. The paper, then, suggests that Tim Ingold’s notion of wayfaring may provide a simpler metaphor that retains the dominant motif of developmental journey while emphasizing the adaptation, flexibility, difference and diversity that characterize the more complex physical landscape and botanical metaphors. In doing so, the paper seeks to develop a metaphor that can meaningfully capture the geographic character of embodied growth and change.