How Much Does a 4-Year-Old Know?

Well, At Least My Grandson …

William Sundwick

He does love to talk! From the moment his dad dropped him off Friday afternoon, duffel bag stuffed with changes of clothes and toys, until we took him back home Sunday afternoon, it was nonstop conversation! (Except after 9:00 P.M. Friday and Saturday nights.)

Four-year-old Owen got to spend the weekend with his grandparents, while his parents celebrated their wedding anniversary on the Maryland Eastern Shore. It was a new experience for grandpa and grandma “G.G.” Baby sister Mira was farmed out to the other set of grandparents.

Speech in children develops in interesting ways. Owen has always been a talker (like his dad at that age?) and seems to have modeled both parents. His grammar, including tense, use of pronouns, gender and number, all fit proper contemporary adult speech patterns. This has been developing for a while. Owen now seems to have even mastered verbal punctuation: exclamation points, question marks, commas for independent phrases, are all apparent in his oral arguments.

Somehow, he has also learned unique speech mannerisms that I must say I’ve never heard in other children. He habitually introduces a statement when others are speaking, even when talking to him, saying “Excuse Me!”– whether interrupting or not. Statements of fact are often preceded by “Actually,” as though he is providing surprising new information to his listener. Still evident in his conversation is his favorite interrogative from toddlerhood, “why?” This is typically a stand-alone sentence, neither preceded nor followed by any context – it’s been his favorite signal that he wants to continue the conversation, at least since he was two. He is seeking explanation.

Lately, Owen has also exhibited awareness of pop culture. This goes beyond speech mannerisms into real shared experiences with his parents and friends at “school” (their accepted name for the licensed family daycare facility down the street where he’s been since infancy). Action and characters from the Lego Movie, and Star Wars, are an integral part of his world. Marvel comics are now creeping in as well.

Would a more formal pre-K program enrich him more? He won’t be entering Kindergarten until he is almost six, due to his November birthday. His parents have discussed pre-K, but apparently rejected it, so far. His dad and uncle both had formal pre-school at Owen’s age or earlier. But I must say his language skills haven’t suffered!

What does Owen learn from observation? Where do his interests take him? At four, nature is the biggest draw. He notices the earth, soil, rocks, bugs. He helps Mom with her vegetable garden. He notices trees in the woods as well as people’s yards. And animals! He loves not only reptiles and dinosaurs, but everybody’s pets (he doesn’t have one of his own) and his favorite books are about wild animals, sea life, and dinosaurs. Owen even expresses concern about climate change and fragile ecosystems. He wants to build habitats for animals to “rescue them” from climate change, and thinks that people build “too many factories,” in his words.

Is Owen at a pre-reading level? He can print his name, and knows the alphabet, but familiar story books are memorized, the words aren’t read – including those “chapter” books his parents are collecting for him. He fooled me the other day when he appeared to read word-for-word the text on a page of one of them. But, when I asked him to identify specific words in the line of text, he couldn’t. It was the illustration on the page, and the sequence, that he had memorized.

Videos seem to be the best way to teach him concepts – much of his apparently deep understanding of complex things appear to come from educational videos that he’s shown me online. Some of them are brilliantly produced for preschoolers. Nonfiction children’s books are also a favorite, like D-K picture books, or National Geographic. Much factual knowledge in his interest areas comes from such additions to his home library. His dad loved pictorial reference books when he was Owen’s age, too.

Owen, the builder
Christmas, 2019

Analytical skills, including math and physics, are not yet apparent, except in primordial form, with Owen. The best exercise for this right now is building with Legos. He can now follow the pictorial instructions for small Lego sets by himself – meaning he can identify the pieces shown in the instructions and recognize the patterns of how they fit together. Larger sets still require help from dad, who was an avid Lego builder himself, and remains so today! (I suspect It’s now a stress-reducer, especially as a shared activity with his son.) Owen, so far, seems to limit his math to counting, some simple addition and subtraction, and he is finally beginning to understand gravity and balance when he gets creative in his building projects. But symmetry is now both a mastered concept, and a word in his vocabulary! “See grandpa, I made it symmetrical!” He was correct!

Owen has always been a physical kid, he loves outdoor running, and indoor yoga. He understands the difference between indoor physicality and outdoor physicality. Although, I haven’t been apprised of any interest in team sports yet. Outdoors, whether the terrain is familiar or not, he senses the opportunity to run, not walk, when he sees a path before him. His daycare facility deploys a Cosmic Kids yoga curriculum, and Owen confidently shows us his expertise, including naming poses, the horse pose from the farm “adventure” or the banana pose from the Betsy the Banana video adventure. All adventures begin with the secret Cosmic Kids word: “Namaste.”

His body awareness goes back to toddler days. I believe his mom has always emphasized it (his dad, not so much, if memory serves). He seems to be aware now of some grooming concerns – not just potty routines. He insisted, unprompted, during his weekend with grandparents, that we clip his nails! He instructed grandpa how to give a manicure! He also seems to know when to use a band-aid, and for how long, when he has a scratch or cut on his finger. He can now bathe himself in the tub, although he says he hasn’t had any experience with a shower.

Perhaps the greatest measure of early childhood development, however, is social awareness. Here, Owen, as can be expected, places the heaviest emphasis on his parents. They are the most important people in his life, and it’s critical that he get along with them. He expresses this by obeying their rules, and sometimes by showing genuine concern for their feelings. He seems to sense when his father is anxious, fading into the background as warranted (at least when grandpa is nearby), and I suspect he is at least as considerate toward his mother – I’ve noticed him asking when mommy is coming back, which is more likely than asking when daddy is coming. On the other hand, when confronted by a complex engineering (building) problem, he wants his daddy. Owen seems to see his grandparents as fun, somewhat lax in the rules department, which he works to his advantage – but he’s still amenable to the overall dictum, “when you’re with grandpa and G.G., we make the rules!”

Moving down the hierarchy from parents, Owen’s baby sister Mira (18-months) is becoming a playmate these days. There are competition and territory issues when they both occupy the same space at home – Mira isn’t allowed to play with Owen’s toys – but, generally, they interact well when the activity can be supervised and shared. When we brought Owen home that Sunday, slightly before his parents returned from Maryland with Mira, the first thing Mira did when she arrived was run to Owen and give him a hug! She hadn’t seen him for a whole weekend!

The outer circle of Owen’s world includes friends from “school,” children of his parents’ friends, and fictitious characters from play scenarios. The latter are invariably divided between “good guys” and “bad guys” – each playing a role, usually a function of their identity (policeman, “space guy,” or generic bad guy). Some school friends seem to be influencers as well – there are a couple older (or bigger?) boys at the daycare center. But I learned that “Logan is a troublemaker” – why? “Because Miss Eymy said so.”  So much for influencers.

As Owen relates his social experiences to grandpa, I can’t help but wonder if any of it portends a primal morality – or is it merely reflecting conflict? I haven’t heard Owen say anything about “fairness.” He seems to have all his needs met – for now! Neither can I see him parroting any sense of injustice from his parents, either. They seem to have their needs met, too. What am I missing?

Puzzlemaster Owen: two 48-piece puzzles all by himself!

  

Warp & Woof

v.1.2

Welcome to Warp & Woof, a blog from William Sundwick. Its purpose is to share with its readers some ways to navigate the philosophical, moral and aesthetic dimensions of life.

It is not a scholarly blog, but the author hopes that his own life experience and reading can inform his readers’ journeys through these realms.

He wants to share some of the things that he believes matter, not “fake news,” and he will offer a frequent enough dose to motivate you to keep checking in. Comments are welcome. While Blogger requires you to identify yourself via your email address, the author will anonymize any comments before publishing them.

It has a structure. There are five departments of thinking (pages) … but, some entries may be cross-posted in more than one department. These five “realms of deliberation” are:

The Present

    … what matters, for sure! 

 The Past

       … what used to matter     

  

                                                               

                                                                            

                                                   The Future

                                                       … what may matter, who knows?

                                                    Totems

     … objects that matter (or mattered)  

                         

Beats

    … sounds that matter, since we never get tired of hearing them! 

Author’s Introduction

Switching to the first person now and translating -- readers can expect entries dealing with health and wellness for seniors (that’s me) in The Present, along with musings on bigger psychological/philosophical issues. This includes a fair dose of writing on child development (I spend much time babysitting my grandchildren).  

The Past will be filled with lots of hopefully knowledgeable meanderings around politics, sociology and history. I’m a liberal arts type, undergraduate major in history, and professional librarian for something like 30 years before imperceptibly transitioning to IT professional. I retired from the Library of Congress in 2015, after 42 years at that institution.

Exciting (to me) developments in science and technology will be found in The Future, along with a healthy dose of fear about things like global warming and other planetary or civilizational catastrophe! Perhaps that is my apocalyptic frame of reference -- and includes most of my thinking about economics and anthropology. Economics, in turn, covers consumer behavior and marketing, both interesting fields for me. But, The Future is not the place for invective about the current state of American politics -- those things belong on the page for The Past!

On the page for Totems, you will find lots of apparently senseless information about cars, past, present, and future. I’m a “car guy”, by virtue mostly of my upbringing as a General Motors brat in Flint, Michigan during the fifties and sixties. I’m not a car guy mechanic, however. I never open the hood or crawl under my own vehicle (much less anybody else’s!), but a car guy who was raised in, and by, mid-century American “car culture.”

Finally, on the Beats page, another personal obsession gets its due: rock music, from the origins in the Great Migration, through the British Invasion, hard blues, acid rock, punk, metal, techno. If anybody thinks this genre is still alive, please let me know! I’ve “got my ear down to the ground” to paraphrase Jim Morrison, When the Music’s Over. Yes, there is audio here, via YouTube videos.

That’s been the concept. Version 1.0 of Warp & Woof launched on Ground Hog Day, 2017.  I’ve made some changes to the layout and design recently, for a v.1.2 (sounds better than v.1.1).  I hope my mission statement remains unchanged at least through version 2.0; i.e., helping my readers see the “big picture” more clearly, making the complex simple, and having fun while we expand both our peripheral vision and depth perception!                     

                                                      Me, with grandson Owen (Oct. 2017) 

                       

Poetic Elegance of Erik Erikson, p.1

The Poetic Elegance of Erik Erikson: An Homage to the “Eight Stages …”

William Sundwick

Eight stages of psychosocial development -- such a pedestrian name for such an influential theory. But, the language and vitality of its dialectical tension has resonated with me ever since I was first introduced, in my undergraduate Developmental Psych class, 47 years ago. 

In a nutshell, Erikson (Erik, a German immigrant, and his wife and collaborator, Joan) took the concept of Hegelian dialectic (thesis à antithesis à synthesis) and constructed with it a general architecture of personality development throughout life. Influenced by Freud’s ideas about development of the id and superego, Erikson built his model, instead, around ego development.

When I was first exposed, I had already captured, from earlier philosophy courses, a similar Hegelian (even Marxian?) world view. Continuous struggle was the theme. Instead of one great reward at the end of a single monumental struggle, however, Erikson posited eight sequentially ordered struggles, resolution of one leading only to the next, with each of them having a characteristic tension, and acquisition of a labeled virtue to mark successful transition to the next struggle, up the hierarchy. Each was built upon all the preceding. This orderly structure for personality development always appealed to me. It had an aesthetic, a poetic elegance to it.

For some reason, even though I never pursued teaching as a career, despite it being my intent at the time, the language of the relational dialectics, which wouldn’t be named until the 1980s, and the description of the “virtues” at the successful completion of each stage, have always stuck with me. I’ve negotiated each successive stage’s tensions, in my mind … from ego identity, in those days, through intimacy vs. isolation; generativity vs. stagnation; and, now, I believe, integrity vs. despair.

The dialectical struggle at each stage of my own life has been palpable.

What I didn’t grasp in my youth, though, was another central theme in the theory: there is often retrograde motion as we plow through life … what may appear to be resolved doesn’t necessarily stay resolved! The role of crisis is fundamental to understanding Erikson.

While clearly something like the layers of an onion, Erikson’s writing strongly suggests that crisis floats around chronologically, each stage is not fixed to particular age ranges. He arrived at the age brackets for each stage only as statistical norms. We should always expect outliers, within one or two standard deviations. And, we should remember that he, and wife Joan, always felt that people, in times of personal crisis, would often revisit an earlier, comfortably resolved, tension later in life. External events, stressors, can throw you back, perhaps even to the very earliest stage of development, characteristic of infants! Nevertheless, the basic theory asserts that successful resolution of one stage generally advances to successfully resolving the next stage, like advancing a grade in school!

Fair enough, despite the uneven progress that many of us follow, as we negotiate through all life’s crises, large and small. Let’s look at each of the eight stages, and think of our own experiences with child rearing, or our own development through life crises. It really DOES make sense, and I will illustrate some throwback crises people close to me have experienced. The reader may easily recognize other situations. Each stage is identified by its distinctive tension, and the resolution virtue is identified in parentheses:

       1. Tension: trust vs. distrust (virtue = “hope”) … think what impact abandonment could have on an infant; but, then, what about extreme survival situations in adulthood? Perhaps failure, in such a crisis, to rely on hope, would result in death? It strikes a chord, doesn’t it? “Abandon Hope, all Ye Who Enter …”

2. Tension: autonomy vs. shame and doubt (virtue = “will”) … we think of emergence into toddlerhood from infancy (mobility and language), but what about an adult who has their livelihood stripped from them? Or, crippling disease, like Parkinson’s? Was it their fault? What shame must they feel at becoming totally dependent, once again, on others? I experienced this with my mother, who declined over her last years (almost 12 years, as I recall) little by little, from Parkinson’s, until at the end of her life, she was entirely immobile, in a skilled nursing facility, dependent on aides for all daily functions, yet still sentient, still able to talk … with a fainter and fainter vocalization ability, then one day she simply stopped breathing. It was her only release from the prison of her body.

3. Tension: initiative vs. guilt (virtue = “purpose”) … now that I have “will”, when can I use it safely? What can I get away with? Who doesn’t know this tension as an adult? I won’t elaborate, due to my desire to avoid self-incrimination … but, think of how you feel when you get caught! What if getting caught were to lead to prison time? To what stage would be beat your safest retreat?

4. Tension: industry vs. inferiority (virtue = “competence”) … although Erikson characterized this as the dominant tension among school age children, on into adolescence, don’t most of us have a gnawing feeling of incompetence through most of our professional lives? Or, for that matter, as a homeowner, or a parent, or a cook? While many of us will grow to accept that there are some things we just can’t do as well as other things, there may be cases where later progress through stages 5 -8 may have seemed assured, until suddenly one is confronted with a failure to perform competently in a life role where they have become accustomed to success. I’m reminded of the difficulty many older employees at my agency faced with new technology. Jobs which they performed perfectly well prior to the introduction of new digital technologies became impossible for them once typewriters, or word processors, or card catalogs, disappeared. I was a librarian for many years at the Library of Congress, and saw a wave of retirements, some premature, among this group back in the eighties and nineties. If they stayed on the job, many retreated to Stage 3, where they filled their time with less demanding tasks. I chose to reinvent my job, to become an IT specialist, perhaps merely a cover for a similar retreat!

   (continued in next post, p.2)