My son, Nikolai, is just about six months old. We have a djembe drum at home and sometimes I sit, with him on my lap, and we play together. At first I played and he watched. Then, I would lift up his little hand and guide him to hit the drum. Within the past month, as soon as the drum comes within arm's length, he flails his little hand up and down, making an impressively steady beat.
The other day we were at the mall. Deciding to take a break, we sat down at one of the tables in the Food Court. As soon as we sat down, Nikolai got very excited and started repeatedly banging his hand down on the table. It wasn't until then that I realized that the shape and colour of the table strongly resembled that of the djembe. I was much more focused on the goal of getting settled and arranging snacks for my children. This had me reflecting on Alison Gopnik's work on flashlight versus lantern attention, and what that means to our development over the lifespan.
For those of you not familiar with Gopnik's work, please allow me to provide you with a link to her TED talk about "What Babies Think" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cplaWsiu7Yg. She explains that babies and small children have what she'd describe as lantern attention - the attention is spread out across the entire environment in a diffused way, much like the soft, broad light of a lantern. Adults, however, learn to focus that attention on one or two key elements and filter out other stimuli. Therefore, an adult's attention is more like a flashlight - a bright, focused, concentrated area of illumination. My experience with Niko in the mall illuminates (if you'll forgive the pun) this discrepancy. I was focused on the goal of providing snacks, so my attention to other shoppers, the table, shapes, smells, sights and sounds was, for all intents and purposes, shut off. His attention, however, was on all of these things at once, leading him to make the discovery of the "djembe table," and all of the glee that came with that discovery.
Gopnik makes it clear that it is important, much of the time, for adults to have flashlight attention...they have jobs to do, errands to run, houses to maintain, etc. If all adults had lantern attention, it would be a pretty different, and probably highly amusing, society. She mentions, however, how important it is for adults to allow themselves to experience lantern attention from time to time.
Babies and small children learn everything from this lantern attention - they absorb the world and process their findings at incredible rates. All species who show greater mental processes and the ability to experience a range of environments, problem-solve and adapt, have babies who take a long time to become independent from their parents - they need this time to learn about their worlds, make sense of them and learn skills they will need later, as adults.
So, if lantern attention is so critical to early childhood development, why are we, as a society, so eager to rush children into adulthood? Over the past few decades we've seen letter and number learning and traditional academic tasks assigned to younger and younger children. Preschools boast of their graduates coming out reading and doing simple math, we have flashcards for toddlers and babies and we even have music and programs to play through our bellies so that our fetuses becomes primed to learn specific tasks. The shift is away from allowing babies and toddlers to experience the world through simple interactions, observations and exposure (all lantern-type activities) and toward forcing flashlight attention, on squiggles that represent letters and symbolize numbers at the expense of everything else.
This leads me to my biggest concern...what happened to the importance of play and social competence? More than early academic learning, enriched environments, exposure to academic tasks, IQ tests and early academic competency, social competence (the understanding of social etiquette, social skills, learning turn-taking, good sportsmanship, kindness, compassion, empathy, helping behaviour, conflict resolution skills) is the biggest predictor of later academic success and the biggest buffer against mood disorders in adolescence such as depression or anxiety. Children, with their lantern attention, are perfectly equipped for taking in information about social interactions - they naturally imitate, they learn social language by experiencing it, by taking in information from both their's and other's interactions about what flies and doesn't fly with peer groups and the adults in their lives. Socio-dramatic play offers the lantern-biased child to soak this information up on all sensory and cognitive levels. We under-estimate what children are getting from natural experiences such as water-play (math skills), drawing and telling their own stories (literacy skills) just to name two examples.
I hope that I can provide my little person with as many walks in nature, giggles with peers and creative opportunities as I can before they are driven into a microcosm that wants them to trade in their lantern for a shiny new flashlight.
great read. much to consider in my own future.
ReplyDelete:) Thanks for the comment - if you want to share more, I'd love to hear from you!
ReplyDeleteFascinating, Katrina. I read an essay once on children and play, which cited some "hippy" commune stuff and explored why children who had been "exposed" to much that we now hide from then, specifically sexual activity, still retained a kind of "innocence" (all these words are loaded--I need all the quotation marks I can get!). Do you know the work I am talking about. Female author . . .
ReplyDeleteHmm...not sure which one, Kelly, but I'd love to read it. If you remember the name, let me know and I'll research it...do you remember what year it was published?
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