Sometimes when I leave the nursery I lurk by the door and watch my son through the glass. This is primarily to ensure he is not inflicting his domestic hysteria on the harried nursery workers but also because I love to watch him interacting with other children.
The ease with which children play together is an instinctive and charming quality that sadly gets lost in adolescence when the notion that you might play with someone you had just met becomes absurd and freighted with all kinds of teenage angst.
There is something warming to the depths of the soul to see how solicitous children can be towards one another when they are in distress. Of course, as with everything child related, these moments are offset by countless episodes of snatching and selfish cries of 'mine'.
It is a basic hallmark of 'nice' parenting that you should be seen and heard insistently to impress upon your offspring the virtue of sharing. As with a lot of perfomative parenting I often feel this is not actually being done for the benefit of the child who would be much better learning for itself that to give is to receive.
We recently stayed with a friend and her 5 year old son and watching our 2 year old interact with him was fascinating and caused me to ponder something I had never wondered before. Do children know that other children are children? The obvious answer to this question is yes and certainly once a child is 5 or 6 it can plainly tell the difference between itself and a baby or an 11 year old.
But to a child of 2 is there anything other than size that differentiates a 7 year old from a 14 year old? It was immediately apparent with the older child that our son instinctively deferred but was that deference to age, experience and sophistication or half a foot?
These days many don't consider themselves adults into their 30s but when does a toddler see an adult? Does the concept of adulthood mean anything to one so young? I used to long for the autonomy of adulthood, not to engage in vice, but simply to go to bed when I liked, eat what I liked and do what I liked. Certainly a toddler sees its parent as the great interferer in its autonomy but does it imagine that one day it will be responsible alone for all that decision making?
Some day soon I will be able to ask my son and hopefully elicit an intelligible answer rather than his current babbling stream of consciousness; until then I hope he continues to make friends regardless of whether they are 9 or 90.
The ease with which children play together is an instinctive and charming quality that sadly gets lost in adolescence when the notion that you might play with someone you had just met becomes absurd and freighted with all kinds of teenage angst.
There is something warming to the depths of the soul to see how solicitous children can be towards one another when they are in distress. Of course, as with everything child related, these moments are offset by countless episodes of snatching and selfish cries of 'mine'.
It is a basic hallmark of 'nice' parenting that you should be seen and heard insistently to impress upon your offspring the virtue of sharing. As with a lot of perfomative parenting I often feel this is not actually being done for the benefit of the child who would be much better learning for itself that to give is to receive.
We recently stayed with a friend and her 5 year old son and watching our 2 year old interact with him was fascinating and caused me to ponder something I had never wondered before. Do children know that other children are children? The obvious answer to this question is yes and certainly once a child is 5 or 6 it can plainly tell the difference between itself and a baby or an 11 year old.
But to a child of 2 is there anything other than size that differentiates a 7 year old from a 14 year old? It was immediately apparent with the older child that our son instinctively deferred but was that deference to age, experience and sophistication or half a foot?
These days many don't consider themselves adults into their 30s but when does a toddler see an adult? Does the concept of adulthood mean anything to one so young? I used to long for the autonomy of adulthood, not to engage in vice, but simply to go to bed when I liked, eat what I liked and do what I liked. Certainly a toddler sees its parent as the great interferer in its autonomy but does it imagine that one day it will be responsible alone for all that decision making?
Some day soon I will be able to ask my son and hopefully elicit an intelligible answer rather than his current babbling stream of consciousness; until then I hope he continues to make friends regardless of whether they are 9 or 90.
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