Follow up question. If she did, is that normal for a child her age?
I have a 5 year old and 3 year old who are about to turn 6 and 4 respectively. The 3 year old just threw her milk bottles out because she is getting too old to be having a bottle of (cow) milk at bed time. It’s something we had been talking to her about for a little while and we were keen for her to do it herself so she felt some ownership over the decision.
Later that day, we are sitting around the table having dinner. The 3 year old has a habit of refusing to eat unless one of us spoon feeds her and, against our better judgement, we sometimes relent. This time our 5 year old looks on and, sensing our frustration, says to her sister, “Why don’t you just throw Mummy and Daddy feeding you into the rubbish bin like you did with the milk bottles?”
Now I know we all think our own children are the best in the world, but this statement of hers seemed very advanced for someone her age. She was suggesting her sister take her desire to be spoon fed by us and metaphorically throw it out.
Is this kind of thing normal for a 5 going on 6 year old? At what age do children start using and/or understanding metaphors?
I don’t know the scientific answer from a cognitive development perspective, but my kids seemed to develop awareness of metaphors and analogies among intangible things at about that age. It varied among them but late pre-school seemed to be about the tipping point.
It’s really hard for me to gauge as it’s not something I would explicitly notice, but my 5 and 7 year old daughters both use metaphorical langauge from time to time; I don’t know when they started. Maybe 3 or 4? I certainly know they both did wordplay by around age 3, (I remember the younger one remarking “Uncle Jim is a gym you can’t play in” two years ago). Not the same as a metaphor, but playing with language concepts. Actual metaphors – like I said – I know they both use it now, but I can’t think of an explicit example. I’ll keep my ears peeled for the 5-year-old.
At any rate, it strikes me as a perfectly usual age.
Sounds metaphorical to me! It’s fun to see kids develop. I remember my younger one was around 5 when he replied to “Many hands make light work” with a grin and “So does that mean few hands make dark work?”
I vaguely recollect reading about this topic in a book on children’s language development. (Note that my description is based on memory and may not be quite accurate.)
The author said his own very young daughter, while running around the house naked, had said, “Look daddy, my bottom is barefoot!” or something like that. The author cautioned against reading too much into what seemed like an exceptionally clever comment; he seemed to think, “meh, young children employ the tools they’ve got to describe things; she knew the word “barefoot” but not the word “naked” so she made use of the language she had.”
I don’t know that I necessarily endorse that rather unencouraging view. In any case, enjoy your child’s creative verbalizing regardless of whether she’s ahead of her peers. To this day I fondly recall some of my son’s earliest chit-chat, like when he said that the moon looked like an eyebrow, and compared the swishy sound made by crinoline to the chirping of cicadas. Lovely stuff! (But in my son’s case not a sign that he was on the road to becoming a great author; while his verbal skills are excellent, now that he is in his 20s he only cares about math and physics.)
That sounds to me like it’s a little beyond a metaphor. It’s one thing to, for instance, call a housecat a tiger when it’s being particularly fierce, or to call a child who likes to climb trees a monkey. But housecats and tigers (and children and monkeys) are both physical and tangible. That’s an ordinary metaphor. This is taking an abstraction, and speaking about it as something tangible: You can’t literally “throw away” the act of spoon-feeding.
Sorry but I cannot refrain from telling the story of my daughter when she was approximately 27 months old. My wife had just bathed her younger brother and they would go out for a walk, “When Adam got a little dryer.” Next thing my wife heard was her going on in sing-song voice, “Hafta wait will Adam gets a little dryer, hafta wait till Adam gets a little washing machine.”
We were never able to find out whether this was a conscious pun or a genuine misunderstanding.
Here is another story about my granddaughter, aged 2 years, 5 months, 5 days. I was so astonished I wrote it down verbatim. We were in the backyard of my son’s house. Her older brother had pushed her over and been given a time out in the kitchen. A couple minutes later, he shouted to the screen door, “Madeline, come and get me out of here.” She started running to the door, saying as she ran, “I will come and get you our of there.” She had correctly turned (implicit) you to I, me to you, and here to there, things kids are not supposed to be able to do until they are about 4.
Kids are all over the place, developmentally, up until about 7, when it seems to level out. I could tell you all sorts of precocious things my son could do as a preschooler, and an equally long list of appalling things he couldn’t do. Watching him, so much seemed to be about what caught his interest: in the things he liked, he advanced in leaps and bounds, and in things he didn’t much care about, he lagged. But eventually the leaps and bounds hit a plateau and the laggy areas caught up. I saw the same in his peers.
Brilliant! Don’t apologise. I wish I could remember all of the funny things the kids say. The 5 year old, whose birthday is approaching, went up to Mum the other day and said, conversationally, “So, do you have any places that you hide things? Like presents?”