Children say the darnedest things. Wasn’t that an Art Linkletter saying or the name of a show? I didn’t understand it until I had children and now I understand it and it makes so much sense and it’s great.
As adults we have brains full of lots of things. We have brains constrained by what we’ve learned and observed over the years and what we know to be “the way things are”. It’s why we don’t think to ask why the sky is blue, because we already asked that question long ago.
Children aren’t hampered by knowledge. They don’t know how things are suppose to work and they don’t have years of observational data on how our world behaves. The result is interesting questions and funny statements.
On Tuesday my daughter asked me, “do aliens grow smaller or bigger when they have a birthday?” You can follow the logic, right? She knows children grow bigger as they get older because we just measured her height on the wall and marked off another year in her closet. She knows about aliens because even Mickey Mouse Clubhouse has an episode with “Martian Mickey” and aliens are mentioned in all sorts of places. But do aliens grow the same as we do?
How do you answer that question though? We try to always be honest with our children and we try to keep fantasy to a reasonable minimum, because we know children are trying to make sense of the real world and throwing in imaginary characters and places only makes things more confusing.
So I told her we didn’t know the answer to her question. I explained how we, as humans, hoped to find other forms of life, but so far we haven’t been successful. My daughter and son asked questions about where aliens might live and how we might meet them. I told them there were people who dedicated their lives to looking for signs of other life in our universe and that if we did meet aliens some day, we could find out if they grew bigger or smaller on their birthdays.
The Big Boy Update: My son asked for me to come up after Grandpa had read a story to them tonight. It turns out he didn’t like the color of his bed sheet and wanted it changed. It was dirty and in need of being changed so he and I changed it together. As we were finishing he said outlaid to himself, “ugh, my tongue is dry as sand”. He went to the bathroom and got a drink of water from the sink and then went up to bed and went right to sleep.
The Tiny Girl Chronicles: At dinner tonight my daughter said, “there are two kinds of sweet. Candy is sweet because of the taste, and I’m sweet because I’m nice.”
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