Kids' thoughts puzzling, don't ask why
When I started out as a father, I was convinced that the mental processes
of small children could be predicted. Adults, I reasoned, had already been
corrupted by life; to find out how they thought was like unraveling software
written by monkeys. But children, being so new, surely could be figured out.
Careful experimentation should lead to empirical formulas of behavior like
Newton's laws, but easier.
My first experimental subject was our 1-year-old son. I let him play with a
silver teaspoon of which he grew very fond. In the next stage I held up the spoon
and, as he streched toward it, I let the spoon drop into a cardboard tube that
I held with my other hand. He then lost interest as if the spoon had never
existed and didn't want to look into the tube or anything. Sometimes he started
crying though.
I didn't know what all this meant but considered the result significant. My
wife, however, put a stop to further experimentation on the grounds that it
might traumatize the baby for life. She was wrong though, because my son grew
up normal, although he forgets where he puts things, and grows tearful trying
to remember.
My further research proceeded along more anecdotal lines. One morning, for
instance, on my way to work I saw the the neighbors' four-year-old sitting in
a cardboard box, making rowing motions with his arms. "Hi Clivey," I said,
"are you rowing your boat?" Without losing a beat he said, "No, I am sitting
in my cardboard box." This delayed my research for decades.
Recently I have taken up fieldwork again with my granddaughter Hannah, who is 5
and fond of asking "why," following every level of explanation I propose. Now
we all know that such questioning ultimately leads to the Prime Mover and that
the answer to further "whys" are left by philosophers as an exercise for the
reader. I tried to explain this to Hannan by the use of a cleverly constructed
fable of my own making.
In my fable a pesky frog asks a curmudgeony lion all kinds of questions about
his life, gradually probing deeper and deeper. For example, he asks the lion
why he roars so loudly, to which the answer is: "To frighten pesky frogs like
you!", and so on. Finnaly the frog asks the lion why he isn't green and, of
course, the lion has no answer.
"So you see, Hannah," I said, "some questions just don't have an answer."
She looked at me pensively, because she is a thoughtful child. Then she
started smiling, as if she had seen through my pathetic fable.
"Why is that?" she said.
At Random-Adrian Korpel
