What It Means To Learn

Rocky has begun to count. Well, I mean, he has always counted to us and he'll now count as part of the census, but I mean he has started to recite ordered numbers. If you ask him how old he is, he will tell you "two" most of the time (other times he will unabashedly pretend like he hasn't heard you, an ability I envy). If you ask him to count, he will dutifully count to ten. Other than the fact that he skips seven for some reason, this is all very impressive for a two-year-old. I think. I have absolutely no concept of child development and where children should be when. Usually, I find out which benchmarks Rocky is supposed to hit when Rocky is at the doctor and is being tested for them. When he was one year old, they asked us if he could do "How big are you?" a game where you ask the child this question and you train him to flail his arms above his head displaying that he is, indeed, this big. I had never heard of this exercise until the appointment in which Rocky was expected to perform it. At his 18-month appointment he was asked if he could draw. We had just spent the last six months teaching him how big he was! There was no time for drawing. Two weeks ago, at his two-year appointment, he was expected to put string through wagon wheel noodles. Seeing as he has yet to master putting noodles of any kind in his mouth, that train has left the station. 

I had a vague understanding that he was supposed to know 20 words by his first birthday, which doesn't seem like many (I've used 1700 here, many of which weren't necessary) but is more than you think when you start counting them. It's easy to assume your kid knows 20 words but after "mama," "dada" and the various nonsense sounds babies call their grandparents, you probably still have double digits to go. One-year-old Rocky knew "shoes" and "socks" because he hated both and would yell "NO SOCK!" whenever we tried to put them on him. The Russian word for "sock" is носок, pronounced "no sock" and I remember wanting to add that to his list of words, and putting on his evaluation form that he was bilingual. While we’re on the subject of language and socks, your Spanish lesson of the day is this—if you spell out the letters of SOCKS in English, you are effectively saying the Spanish phrase for “it is what it is.” Alas, Rocky, though he knows some letters now, cannot spell then or now. 

It is every parent's burden to play the comparison game. We all want to know if our kid is doing as well as he should (or, more importantly, better than our friends' kids). Being raised on video games in which leveling up is measured in an unbending upward trajectory and achievements are unlocked through repetition, we expect children to be the same and that the checklist of milestones—20 words by one year, some colors by 18 months, proficient pasta artist by two years, apparently—can be filled with attentive and dutiful parenting. Conversely, missing those milestones is a failure of child-rearing, brought on by lazy, deadbeat moms and dads. I hate that we do this to ourselves as parents, a job which is hard enough without putting the responsibility of putting someone else's stubborn, developing mind on our shoulders.

I wrote last week that I had significant influence over my son, which I do, but that's about his routine and some of his behavior; he learns what he wants to learn. For example, though we work with Rocky on some things (mostly, animals and the sounds that they make), the counting thing came all on his own. One day, he just started counting. We encourage it now, of course, that he's shown he understands the concept (except for seven, for some inexplicable reason) but where he picked it up is anyone's guess.
Besides, I don't want any parent reading this to suddenly be in a panic that their kid of similar age doesn't count. First, Rocky doesn't count. He skips seven and goes right from six to eight. I'm not just being critical. If your accountant was like "I only work with 90% of the numbers," you would switch accountants. Besides, counting in English is relatively easier than in other languages. Ours is the only tongue in which every number shares a letter with each neighboring number. One has an O, just like two, which has a T in common with three, which has an R with four, and so on indefinitely. Furthermore, Rocky has no interest in using the bathroom, where other parents have told me their children all took to the toilet the second they reached their second birthdays. Liz and my heart's dropped into ice when we saw on Instagram a child, celebrating his second birthday just a day after Rocky did, beautifully singing "Happy Birthday" with perfect diction. Outside of saying "Elmo's World" at varying volumes, Rocky doesn't sing. And I have a distinct memory of being at a friend's house when Rocky was first born as their daughter, who was then Rocky's current age, recited one through ten (including seven), in both English and Spanish. My point is, there is no profit in worrying if your kid can do as much as every other child in the world, there is, however, a lot of joy in celebrating what they can for its own sake. 

I worry that we are setting up our children to fail with too much emphasis on intellectual early checkmarks. One of my favorite recent books is The Coddling of the American Mind by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, which examines how universities have never been better at teaching kids facts and figures but have never been worse at preparing them for the real world, which used to be a college's mission. The book shows a preparedness checklist for incoming first graders in 1979, which includes twelve items a six-year-old should be able to perform. The majority of the items are physical and emotional tasks including "Can your child tell, in such a way that his speech is understood by a school crossing guard or policeman, where he lives?" and "Can he be away from you all day without being upset?" One item—"Can he travel alone in the neighborhood (four to eight blocks) to store, school, playground, or to a friend's house?"—is now illegal in many American towns. A similar list from 2017 was almost exclusively about academics, asking incoming first graders if they can identify and write numbers to 100, read books with five to ten words per page, form complete sentences using phonetic spelling, etc. The authors' argument is that kindergarten two generations ago was about social interaction and self-directed play, education now resembles an endless preparation for the next standardized test to get into the next prestigious school and so on. The problem with this is that test-prep is not life-prep. When you are out of school, the ability to memorize and repeat is not anywhere near as valuable as the ability to think independently and socially interact, skills that are persistently being under-taught. I was, of course, proud that Rocky knew 20 or so words when he turned one, but I was more proud that he could walk, which allowed him to explore where he wanted to and direct his own experience (though, I must admit, that part is super annoying, because I have to keep him from breaking things and hurting himself). 

But maybe I don't. I often laugh when I think of the playground my school had in its weedy backlot. It was a giant, concrete monstrosity that included a pile of actual tires, uneven bars and a wooden bridge that caught many a finger in its slats, all housed on a bed of jagged pebbles. Now it seems unthinkable that children were playing in standing water in concrete tubes that came directly from a construction site, as most schools feature state-of-the-art playgrounds with soft rubber padding and standardized sizes for everything. However, these playgrounds are not necessarily reactions to children's safety as much as they are reactions to a school's fear of being sued should a kid hurt herself. In fact, Tim Harford's book Messy suggests that there is no compelling evidence that today's playgrounds are safer than more makeshift ones of previous generations and there is some thought that they cause more harm than good. "When the distance between all the rungs in a climbing net or a ladder is exactly the same, the child has no need to concentrate on where he puts his feet," says Helle Nebelong, an award-winning playground architect. "Standardization is dangerous because play becomes simplified and the child does not have to worry about his movements. This lesson cannot be carried over to all the knobbly and asymmetrical forms with which one is confronted throughout life." Auckland University of Technology ran a research project in which schools opened up unused land for grade schoolers to roam free during recess. They found there were fewer injuries and less bullying than in their usual playgrounds. Further, students paid attention better once they were back in the classroom, so much so that the school was delighted to get rid of their "time-out" room because of lack of use. 

Before I had Rocky, it was much speculated by my family that I would be a helicopter parent based on the hovering I did with my nieces and nephews and indeed I get anxious when I can't see exactly what Rocky is doing, but that is less the case since he's been born and has proven himself much more durable than I gave him credit for. I am also confident he will figure out seven. Almost as much as comparison, hand-wringing about the next generation is every parent's right. One of the little joys of this quarantine is that my home office window faces the street and I can see how many kids wander unaccompanied by adults during the day. They seem to have it well in hand. The kids will be alright—if we let them.