Wondrous things

One of the wonderful things we can do is to pay attention to how small children develop and grow, to watch them exercise their minds and bodies and push at the limits of what is possible for them. People describe the brains of young children as "plastic", and I don't really like the word because of all the meanings it carries in our time, but if you think of it as "plasticity", the ability to flex and stretch, or, to go back to the Greek root, to be moulded or formed, it makes sense as a descriptor of a body and mind that is growing and developing. The wonderful thing, I think, is being allowed to notice that plasticity in babies and young children, because one of their serious driving impulses is to spend their waking hours flexing and stretching and changing what was impossible to what is both possible and miraculous.

One of my sons talked to me yesterday about watching his eight month old daughter in a hands and knees crawling position, ready to go, or almost ready, but stuck in place, rocking back and forth. It is clear that some time soon she will make a move with one of her hands that will allow her to shift forward, maybe because she is trying to reach something, and perhaps a knee will then slide ahead, and, after some experimentation on her part, crawling will happen, and she won’t look back. In fact, she’ll just crawl over to the couch or chair so that she can pull herself up to a standing position and explore the next step. Seeing this process in action is to watch the wonder of growth and development happening.

Of course there is no real news here, because anyone who is around small children and pays attention knows this already. But what prompted me to write this post was the sheet of white paper that I saw after my other son and daughter-in-law took their girls home on Sunday. Our older granddaughter, A., who turned four last month, had told Lorraine, whom she knows as Nan, that she wanted to make a word with R's in it. Lorraine explained to her that her name had two R's and printed it for her, with a capital L and the rest small letters. A. looked at it and told her Nan she was going to print it in "upper case". Lorraine told her that was fine, and A. engaged with the task. Unfortunately her first R looked too much like an A (she’s been printing her own name for a while) so she started again, was happier with the result, and finished it, twice. When I saw the paper on the side table, Lorraine told me what A. had done, including her first attempt at the middle of the page, and I thought how wonderful. Not only did she convert the lower case letters to upper on her own, she persisted in extending the range of what she could do by practicing making R’s that didn’t look too much like A’s. It is always a great delight for me to notice how unstoppable children are in their learning.

It may not be a huge thing really, but it is one of the reasons I love to spend time around small children. It affords me the opportunity to have those privileged insights into how they are growing and developing and taking charge of their world by making sense of it. So I'm a very lucky guy to have our granddaughters to hang out with, as well as our pair of three year old friends in Istanbul, and to watch with wonder as they stretch and grow into their own unique and idiosyncratic manifestations of humanness.