My kid has started yelling at people, “Go away!” when he is frustrated by something they are doing. I figured he picked this up from one or more of his playmates (it seemed unlikely he had picked it up at home.) I figured some kid was using the phrase around my kid, and my kid just sort of picked up on it as a way to vent frustration.
This afternoon, I went to pick up my kid from a friend’s house, and my kid wasn’t very happy about leaving. As I walked him back to my house, his playmate followed along.
And something funny happened: at one point, his playmate called out, “Jacob, tell him to go away!”
So it just seemed funny to me. From this incident we see that this other kid–three years old, only!–wasn’t just using the expression, rather, he was consciously making use of it quite purposefully as a strategy for negotiating certain kinds of situations, his degree of self-awareness about this being high enough that he was able to formulate the strategy in higher-order language and communicate it to other kids! :smack:
Just not what I was expecting, is all.
-FrL-
