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“One night, my 3-year-old asked me if she could sleep in my bed. I told her no. She said, “That’s not fair! Why does Daddy get to sleep in your bed?” READ MORE
Early Years (2-6)
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The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once wrote, “The limits of my language are the limits of my world.” At least I think he did. The quotation may be, indeed, a paraphrase. I don’t have the time to look it up. These days I have little time for philosophers and their big thoughts. What working mother does? Still, I have been thinking lately of the Austrian thinker and his assertion about the relationship between the size of one’s world and one’s ability to speak. I think about it when I consider how my son’s world has grown along with his language. Or is it that his language has made his world? At any rate, he’s a big boy now. His is a big world. Yes, I turn philosophical when I hear myself say that, with capital letters and the congratulatory emphasis on his growth. Big Boy. You’re a Big Boy now, not a baby. In the past, we spoke to our son like we were talking to people sitting in the next room, reading how-to-assemble instructions out loud, repeating the step-by-step directions to some life manual. Carefully, repeatedly, with cheerful parental enunciation. He listened and responded, often echoing us. These days, increasingly, he speaks back to us, unprompted, with no small sense of authority. Sometimes the voice is loud (too loud for our tired grown-up ears) for a body so small. He wants to make sure we do indeed hear what he has to say. Sometimes he repeats and repeats and repeats not only because he wants to be heard but because, as one of his teachers pointed out, this is the way children learn. And we, his parents, listen and learn just how big he and his world are. We converse. There are jokes and there is irony, and nuance and fun. Exercising speech is exercising power. Our growing child is increasingly interacting with the world around him: communicating desires (“I want juice.”), reacting (“not orange juice. I want apple juice.”), assessing (“this apple juice is good.”) and, yes, creating his own world: (“My crab puppet likes apple juice too. So does Peter Rabbit. So does Chow-Chow (his imaginary friend) who lives on the ceiling”). I don’t know if Wittgenstein was a father, but if he was then we may have found as-yet undetected influence on his theories of watching a child’s language acquisition. “These are,” our little philosopher announced triumphantly last week as he slipped on his cowboy boots, “the shoes cowboys wear when they ride their cows.” Yes, his world has grown. There remains only the challenge of putting it all together, seeing how it works. Then again, there is the growing pleasure of subverting the world, part of the power of understanding language, grasping its full, fuller, fullest meanings. He now substitutes his parents’ names for those of characters in nursery rhymes and songs. We are falling down hills and jumping over the moon. His questions show him trying to understand the world’s rules. Nowadays he wants to know where things come from. At our house, the quick answer is generally Trader Joe’s or Home Depot, but by now he knows to ask for more. He has some sense of before and after, of time, of growth. Gorilla Munchies are made of corn and so are tortillas, cornbread and popcorn. They are not made of, or for, gorillas. But it’s the other questions that really make us think things through. “Why is she old?” he asks. “Because she has lived a long time.” “You mean like a long time ago?” I can almost hear the little synapses electrocuting each other. We thought him the most beautiful child ever when he was born. It turns out that we’re hardwired, biologically, to think that. I look at the photos now and the newborn I see was, I must admit, a newborn, no more beautiful than any other. Now we think he’s the smartest kid ever. Of course, his smarts inspire us. We serve up the world to him, with his Gorilla Munchies cereal, and see him dig in to the poetry and passion and purpose of the feast of language. We take special care to point out the rhymes, puns, the unexpected pleasures, contradictions and humor. My husband, who adores the American vernacular, embraces figures of speech he learned from his own father, a man who grew up in the 1930s on radio and vaudeville and the comics. What will it mean that our 3-year-old calls out to people that he will “see them in the funny papers” or advises that they “don’t take any wooden nickels”? It will mean, of course, the world. Lisa Alvarez, an English professor at Irvine Valley College, lives in Modjeska Canyon with her husband and 3-year-old son. |
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