More Observations of a Tiny Human in Development

Things I've noticed in my Toddler

Related: 10 Things I’ve Noticed About My 10 Month old

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When I found out I was going to have a child, one of the first things I looked forward to was shaping a blank mind. Here we have a consciousness that has no sense of right/wrong, no ego, no indoctrination in politics, no assumptions about physics, no harboring of those sticky self-referential viral ideas (and also no long-term memory). But now that I’m over a year in, I mainly just try to make sure they feel supported, loved, and confident to (safely) explore the world. Between reading Hippos Go Beserk eight times in a row, spending 30 minutes getting dressed in the mornings, and cooking/cleaning up after a snack every few hours, I haven’t had as much time to philosophically ponder her psychological development and have the deep revelations about the nature of the mind that I had hoped for. But I have jotted down thoughts and observations along the way.

1. Play: Children do something very strange. They just play. All the time. The world is a sensory bath of novelty to them. Approximately zero times a day, I feel the urge to fall face-first into the bed and roll around uncontrollably while yelling. My child feels the urge about 20 times in a row every time she enters the bedroom. One day, she will ‘map out’ what it is like to do this, and it won’t be novel, and the behavior will fade. I will be slightly sad on that day.

2. Work v Play: There is no distinction between work and play for children. Somewhere along the way, the idea that there are things we ‘need to do’ and things ‘we want to do’ develops. I want to play video games, read books, and hang out with friends. I need to do dishes, call health insurance to figure out this bill, and shave. But to a kiddo, this distinction is bizarre. It’s clearly a healthy skill to prioritize needs > wants, take care of your future self, etc. But spending time with children makes it much easier to turn some of the ‘work’ of life into ‘play’. Playfulness is an attitude that is independent of the task.

3. On being mute: My daughter knows and uses some sign language, with the idea that that is easier to learn than talking, and a way to communicate until she unlocks that life achievement. She can hand sign, ‘more’, ‘please’, ‘food/hunger’, ‘milk’, and of course, the translingual sign language form of communication - pointing. Pointing can be split into imperative pointing (hand me that) and declarative pointing (look at that). In regards to imperative pointing, I can see the concept of ‘hand that to me. That that that please!’ light up on her face. The way she looks at me, the anticipation, the leaning forward slightly. I can feel this concept without any words going on in my head. In those moments, I feel very close to her.

4. No concept of a plan: Tomorrow, we are going to the beach. Much like my dog, my daughter has no idea. She wakes up and goes where she goes, and experiences what she experiences. Maybe it’s daycare; maybe it’s a plane; maybe it’s a park; maybe it’s a friend’s house. It’s hard to think of what going through life like that would be like. I can quickly imagine how notions of security and safety emerge from the parenting style in this regard.

5. In a few years, I won’t remember much from my pediatric residency rotation, but I will remember the following that my preceptor told me in regard to toilet training toddlers: 99% of kids will learn how to do this. Some sooner, some later. Sure, there are some principles to follow to encourage success, but the main thing parents need to do is not fuck it up.”

6. Surprise: I think kids love peek-a-boo because it tests their models of the world. Every game of Peek-a-bo is a chance to update said models. If I hide behind a towel and surprisingly reveal my face, my daughter gets excited. But if I vary how long I hide behind the towel or change my facial expression, she gets really excited. Why the difference? In the latter, it is a mismatch in prediction, and she experiences surprise. There is a meta component here as well where my kiddo doesn’t know which instance of peek-a-boo I am going to mix it up on. Thus every instance of peek-a-boo has an unknown variable with the chance to be surprised - that sounds rewarding. The older I get, the less often I am acutely surprised. My model of what’s possible and probable gets more and more fine-tuned. In turn, there is a tendency for novel experiences (and pure surprise) to decrease as we get older.

7. On bubbles: Imagine you enter a world and you know nothing. You slowly learn that objects tend to not disappear and that you cannot see behind them. After you develop a sense of 3-dimensional space and you finally understand how things work out here in the post-womb world, you are introduced to bubbles. Those gravity-defying, clear, spheres that pop in and out of existence. When things defy the conceptual underpinnings of our understanding of reality, we call it magic. I’d argue, for kids, bubbles are magic.

8. Concrete Thinking: The other day my daughter had two dryer balls that I asked her to put into the dryer. She could easily pick up the first with both hands, but then would bend down while holding the first in one hand and try to palm the second one. The problem was, these balls are much larger than her tiny hands can palm. As I watched her keep dropping the first ball and struggle with the second one, I had the urge to intervene. ‘Look little friend, you can put the first one in the dryer and then pick up the second one’. But instead, I watched. Lo and behold, after 3 minutes, she got both balls into her hands and was able to walk over to the dryer and place them in. Not once during the episode was she frustrated at her failures, and at the end, she was ecstatic. I wonder, what are the dyer balls in my life? And two, whats stopping me from adopting her equanimity?

9. Mom and Dad (more so mom) are these two beings that rescue her from the dark every morning, satiate the primal urge of hunger, and help her move around the world (children are mostly immobile for the first 6 months, only crawl for the second six months). She is helpless in comparison to us. We are so smart. So powerful. If the concept of an omnipotent god comes from somewhere natural, it probably subconsciously came from this.

10. One time I laid down to see what her mobile looked like from her perspective when she was an infant. It looked drastically less cool from her vantage point. She has since grown and is now at knee height. I wonder about how different every room feels from that height. The kitchen counter is towering over you, with no idea of what is going on up there. A refrigerator so tall you can only see the bottom row of food. You can never open a door. What a world for her to be in!