Interesting concepts brought to your attention by your children

In My Humble Opinion
1

Background and Setup:

My daughter is 3.5 years old and is course above average (as are all doper children).

Anyway, I thought maybe we could watch a movie together. She has never really watched a movie before (just short “educational” type youtube videos), so I thought I would choose something fairly simple. I chose Milo and Otis*. It is pretty simple movie with two main characters so I didn’t expect her to have difficulties with it.

The one part that she struggled to understand is when Milo and Otis become separated. Every 5 minutes or so, the movie hops back and forth between the two characters to keep you updated on what each character is experiencing. Whenever she saw Milo, she wanted to know where Otis was. When she saw Otis, she couldn’t understand where Milo was.

The Point:

Apparently, simultaneity of multiple character timelines is a learned idea. We don’t even think about it because we are so used to it, but she was not. I tried to explain it to her, but she couldn’t quite grasp the fact that when she was watching what Milo was doing, Otis was supposedly doing something else at the same time somewhere else. If I had shown her this, this it all would have become clear.

Discussion Topic:

If you spend a lot of time around children you come to realize that there are so many things that we as adults don’t even think about because we are so used to them. But having children really shines a light on how our minds work and the assumptions that go into everyday living. We are not born understanding them, they have to be learned. But we easily forget that we had to learn them.

Do you have any interesting examples?

*This is NOT the thread to discuss any negative feelings you may have toward this movie. Go start your own thread if you want to.

2

Limbs may not operate independently. Asking a child to move a foot sometimes has them moving their hand also. They learn to move in a gross manner, just something that works, then refine from there.

3

My older son took a while to distinguish between the names of colors. If you asked him to pick up something blue, he could. But if you asked him what color some item was, his answer was ‘yay-yoe’ (his word for yellow). He clearly realized there were different colors and could accurately identify them, but for some reason it took a while to articulate that each color had a different name.

I didn’t see that with my second son, so not sure if this is endemic to most children or a singularity of my eldest.

4

I have an example of situations wherein adults are often vague, because we know what each other means, but kids take us literally and we have forgotten that.

True story: I went on a guided herpetology nature walk at a state park for some nature festival thingy they were putting on. So, a group of about 15-20 people following a biologist through the forest in the baking hot Florida sun. We’d stop at sinkholes and/or streams, fallen logs, whathaveyou, and the herpetologist would catch a lizard or a snake or a turtle or something and teach us all about it, release the critter, answer questions, and we’d move on to the next spot.

Near the beginning of the walk, at the first stop off-trail, just as the herpetologist is about to go catch a lizard or something (he was really good at it; kind of amazing to watch actually), he turned back to the crowd. A five-year-old girl was standing right in front of him, and she had shorts on (because it was like 10,000 degrees out). He pointed in the general direction of the grass near her feet and offhandedly tossed off a comment about “watch out if you have bare legs, there’s a lot of poison ivy around.”

He apparently did not think to consider if the kid knew what “poison ivy” is, or if the kid knew how to identify poison ivy – he wasn’t even speaking directly to her. She immediately requested that one of her parents pick her up, which they did. This walk was like maybe an hour or so long, and the kid was five, so naturally, the parents got tired of carrying her through the swampy woods. At another stop, they tried to put her down and make her walk a while, but she freaked out and started crying and refused to walk. The parents were mystified. “Why are you acting like this, honey?” They’d ask her, and she could only cry. She was terrified.

Finally, I pulled a parent off to the side and mentioned that A) she probably didn’t know what poison ivy was, so anything green might “get her,” and B) She didn’t know what poison ivy does, so maybe she thought it would kill her. Nobody had spoken about the poison ivy, nobody identified any, or explained anything at all about it – because most adults know all about poison ivy. But this kid was terrified to walk through the woods, obviously to me, because she wasn’t clear on what was the thing she was supposed to be watching out for and what to do about even if she was clear on that. Poor kid. As soon as I said that, it all appeared to click for the parents and they managed to stop and do a little teaching about poison ivy and finally managed to get the kid to walk under her own power.

I’m sure many of you can think of dozens of examples where you took something literally as a kid only to find out later, that something meant something totally different from what you thought it did.

5

When my daughter was 3 1/2, she was 8.

6

If you’ve never seen the little kids’ show Blue’s Clues, go to about :45, and watch until about 2:00. The dogs talk like Scooby-doo, or Kenny on South Park, but it’s obvious what they’re saying. One day my son, about 4, asked me “How can we understand what Blue is saying?” I consulted with my mother, the linguist, to put together a satisfactory explanation, because the truth was, I didn’t quite know the mechanics of it myself. Part of it was “context,” though. Before I could answer the boychik’s question, I had to explain the concept of “context.”

7

My daughter was a good talker at 2, but seemed to make MORE vocabulary mistakes by 3 years old. After some reading, I found out that was normal because kids want to connect words with meaning, even if they have to force it. I loved noticing what she came up with – once I had this meaning thing in mind, I could see there was definitely a method to her madness.

Elbow = armbow
Night table = goodnight table
Snake = hisssnake

Another thing I read somewhere was about kids don’t get a cause-and-effect narrative until they’re at least three years old. So a book or a show about a kid who is a picky eater, and then tries a new food for the first time, and then likes the new food is useless, because the kid has no sense that the last part supposed to be the outcome. In fact, they’re more likely to focus on the first part, the initial problem, because their attention span is fresh. So there were a few times when we got a book from the library that turned out to be about a problem we didn’t even have, like picky eating or not wanting to go to bed, and I’d have to make up some weird random story on the fly to go with the pictures.

8

Two-year-old daughter, upon seeing the first frost of the season: Look, mommy, the grass is turning into rocks.

Well, um…yes, it does look like that but…

9

Your daughter is at the perfect age where you can do all sorts of fun experiments on her, just like a chimp. Try this one:

Show her two identical glasses with the exact same amount of water in them, and ask her which one has more water, or if they’re the same amount. Then pour one glass into a bowl and remove the empty glass. Then ask which container (the remaining glass or the bowl) has more water, or if they have the same amount.

Here’s another one:

Put two rows of five identical items (coins work well) in front of her and ask which row has more, or if they’re the same. Then spread the coins in one row further apart, and ask again.

10

My 3 year old daughter (now 51 YO by the way) always called a hammer a “pounder” . Not a bad name for the tool, actually.

11

^Another experiment. There is an age at which kids can recognize their brother/sister/cousin but cannot see themselves as such. You ask them if they have a sister and they point out Jane. You ask them if Jane has a sister and they say “no”.

ETA: that was directed at my fellow mad scientist, friedo.

12

Did anyone try the famous experiment where you put a smudge or some lipstick on a toddler’s cheek or chin, and then have him or her look into a mirror. If they know what their self-image is, they’ll either be embarrassed or touch themselves to try to remove the spot. If they don’t recognize themselves in the mirror, they’ll laugh or point at that other person in the mirror. (Did I get that right?)

13

I remembered another one of the famous Piaget experiments.

Get some Graham crackers and break them in half so you have some squares. Give two squares to yourself and one to her, and ask if that’s fair. She will probably conclude that it’s not fair since you have two and she has one. So break her one square in half and ask if it’s fair now.

14

It’s the same age at which my brother declared that some of the bras encountered at the beach (in Spanish sujetadores, “holders”) weren’t holding anything nor trying to and must therefore be called tapatetas, titcovers. My parents agreed that the logic was impeccable, and so the family acquired a new word. When many years later and at that age my nephew had a similar problem with the name/function mismatch, he was very happy to learn the appropriate term for the non-holding kind of bra.

15

We have definitely noticed that. An amusing example:

We periodically go on walks in our neighborhood and some of it does not have sidewalks. When a car would approach we would say, “Watch out, a car is coming” in order to encourage her to use caution.

Apparently she internalized the phrase “Watch out, X is coming” to mean that something exciting is arriving. So when we were about to hand her blueberries (her favorite food) she would exclaim loudly, “Watch out, the blueberries are coming!”

This of course became a common phrase in our house.

16

When I was a kid, I always got handed a banana with the warning “Don’t eat the skin.” Apparently, I reasoned that this must be what the delicious yellow things were called. I couldn’t say such a complex phrase, so I somehow shortened it to “donty”.

This became a saying in the family, and I’m told some distant branch of the family exported it to Canada.

17

Reminds me of an old Sam & Cat episode.

Cat: Here, use this! (pulls out a hammer)
Sam: I just asked if we had one of those!
Cat: No, you asked for a hammer.
Sam: So what do you call that?
Cat: A nailbanger!

One that never would have occurred to me: when the firstborn was younger, she was in the back seat of the car, happily counting from 1 to 10, then backwards from 10 to 1. After a few times, she got quiet, thinking, then asked, “Daddy, how do you count side-to-side?”

18

Non-standard descriptive names for things: xkcd: Winter

19

I feel the Force is strong in that one. Scary-smart she shall be.

20

Back in the days when my eldest was about three, he came in exclaiming worriedly, “The wokkabees get me! The wokkabees get me!” I had him lead me out and he showed me a line of ants on the back porch.

Aha. The only name he knows for an insect must be bee, and these are like bees only they’re not flying. Walk-a-bees. Cool.

I showed him that they were walking in a line and told him that he must have been standing in the line. I showed him with a stick that they would crawl all over anything that got on the line. But another stick away from the line didn’t get any ants on it.

He was relieved to know that they weren’t coming after him, particularly, and pleased to know how to avoid them. The word didn’t enter the family storehouse, but the story did. The phrase “kiss a rock” did enter, but it was a mis-hearing on our part.