Going out to eat today, I noticed a father and his 5-6 year old daughter. The little girl was completely hyper, jumping up and down in place. She wasn’t yelling or doing anything annoying. Just really, really worked up. I couldn’t even remember the last time I had that much energy.
It seems like this is the natural state of affairs for kids between their brief hours of sleep. Why is this so? You’d think that all the growing that their bodies have to do would be a major drain of energy and would keep them tired.
I’ve met plenty of adults with no jobs, bills or deadlines. They’re usually occupying a couch and not moving for a good part of the day watching TV. I think children just need a lot less energy to operate, their bodies are light – they’re not exactly exerting themselves doing what they do: running, jumping up and down, being hyper and loud. Try making a child carry bricks or something else that is actually demanding and they can’t keep up even with the elderly.
kids have no sense of planning for the future–(i.e. 5 minutes from now).They run at 100% of their energy, and then, the minute they get tired, lay down on the floor and go to sleep.
The only adults who run at 100% till exhaustion are professional athletes.The rest of us are smarter than that.
Because they are learning. Adults hear the word ‘learning’ and think it is about how knowledge or facts are commited to your brain but learning is about how your body works, how your body interacts with physical spaces/conditions, can I hop, how annoying I can be without copping a response, Does NO really mean NO, how hot is HOT etc
It is all about learning what your physical body can do and how much your body/mind is allowed to do to meet societal norms.
It is no suprise that crimainals often come from families that did not set many boundaries in place.
When I say boundaries do not for a minute think I mean smacking!
Because life is freekin’ beautiful for them. Everything is thrilling. They experience so many “firsts” every day. They’re basically carefree. Their hardest task is trying to will their Happy Meal to come sooner by hopping around a lot.
Mom can’t knit any more and a case of Grandmotherness has resolved into abscesses of Cross-Stitching and of “dropping clue by 4s on DiL’s and Son’s heads”. She was pretty much dropping this one on everybody’s head for a while. The Nephew’s parentals seem to finally have grasped the concept.
No, there’s nothing wrong with your kid getting absorbed by his hands. I mean, look at yours. Aren’t they interesting? You can do so many things with them! And all those joints! And when you bend a finger, other things move… there’s fingers you can bend on their own and others that try to go together… wow…
And no, there’s nothing wrong with your kid then becoming interested in other people’s hands. Or with him running all over the place like the Energizer bunny on speed and then dropping dead zzzZZZzz in a corner of the sofa. It’s what kids do!
Too right! Children should be busy exploring, doing, thinking and annoying.
That proof is reason in itself that we in the first world should be overly concerned about children in the Third world whose circumstances force them to hold adult responsibilities.
I remember when Mrs. Keeve was in labor with Little Keeve #1, and the nurse reported that his heart rate was 120 per minute, I asked, “At what point in the birth process does it start dropping?” The nurse has no idea what I meant, so I explained, “Isn’t a normal pulse rate more like 60 per minute?” She answered, “Oh, no, that’s for adults!! For infants, this is totally normal, and it gets slower as a child gets older.”
That was a sort of epiphany for me, in my understanding of how fetuses, infants, children, adults, and the elderly, are not really distinctively different, but simply convenient labels and areas of a continuum with an infinite range of points of maturity and immaturity.
Most relevant to the OP, the initially high heart rate, which slowly slows as a person ages, is strong support for
In other words, I am suggesting that the heart rate is physiological evidence that children really do have more energy than grownups. (Their learning about themselves and such, which most posters have mentioned, may also be a contributing factor.)
Right. You don’t often see Third world kids jumping out of their skin for no apparent reason. They’re too busy worrying about things like food, shelter, and dodging bullets.
Children “should” be busy running away from saber toothed tigers, carrying their little brothers and sisters everywhere, digging for roots and picking berries, making fires, learning how to tan hides, carrying rocks from that pile over there to this pile over here, chipping bits of flint to make them sharper, poking trees with sticks to learn how to poke animals with sharper sticks, carrying hides full of water for half a mile and weaving baskets out of grass they’ve helped to harvest. Repeat daily until adulthood around 15, when pregnancy may commence.
They’re all full of energy because we’ve created so many “energy saving” devices that mean our kids don’t have to work hard and long every day just to make sure we can all eat!
“Nature” had a “plan”: young people work and learn, older people breed and teach and work, the oldest people simply teach and die. We’re the ones responsible for little Timmy’s freaky buzz.
I’m not saying it’s idyllic, but it’s “natural”. My kids are far less jumpy when we’re camping and they’re put to work chopping wood and hauling water and washing pots in the river.
It’s also true that we tend to feed them better than we ourselves eat and drink. Who’s gonna let their kid sit around drinking beer and eating chips, never mind smoking and staying up all hours.
This reminds me of a famous (or infamous) moment my parents like to fondly recall. I was on some sort of tear in terms of asking questions about anything I could think of; I must have run out of ideas but not momentum as I blurted out “Is this my hand?” Still cracks them up.
But, as mentioned, they get to plop down and sleep whenever they’d like, and sleep hard at night. That would go a long way toward giving extra energy.
Not so true, IMO. This is a view that adults have of childhood, but it’s not one that I believe most children have.
Kids have little sense of time, and the need to wait for something desirable can be a heavy burden at times. Adults are everywhere - they’re large, powerful and have way too much control over life. They make you submit to doctors and their needles - torture. They expect you to eat veggies when cookies are so obviously superior. They’ll send you off to bed when any fool could see that the game with the dog, the cat and Uncle Fred should continue indefinitely.
My answer to the OP is that to do the best job of learning (something that children’s brains are remarkable good at - far better than any adults’) they need to spend their waking hours getting into as much of the world around them as possible. A sluggish kid would waste these best brain years, and so be much less successful in later life.
