A program sponsored by
The Family Center of Utah Valley
Through Children’s Eyes: How Adults and Children see things differently
It could be said that young children and adults occupy the same space while inhabiting different worlds. In the eighteenth century, the French philosopher Rousseau said, “Childhood has its own ways of seeing, thinking, and feeling, and nothing is so foolish as to try to substitute ours for theirs.”
Let’s take a look at how adult and children experience the world differently.
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The Culture of Adults Adults take a vacation to look at the world with new eyes and forget a bit of the pressures of their lives.
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The Culture of Early Childhood
Children are on vacation all the time. They have minimal obligations, and they have a different understanding of, and experience with, time. They don’t need to change locations to see with new eyes; their eyes are new.
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Adults rush from place to place and fail to see the places in-between.
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Children are all about the in-between. |
| Adults are limited by conventions and by previous experience. |
To children, nothing is obvious, so they are constantly creative. Children don’t respond to things according to preconceived notions because young children are relatively new to the world. They don’t have much “pre”. Without a lot of “pre” children are free to think of things they encounter in their own unique way.
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| Adults (hopefully) have common sense. Common sense is necessary to get safely through the day, but there’s not much fun in it. |
Children have child sense. It is delightful. The opportunity of seeing things through a child’s eyes is part of the fun of parenting.
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| Adults function on “automatic pilot” much of the time. For example, the small movements that make up driving a car become relatively automatic. |
Children are not on automatic pilot. They meet what are to us mundane experiences in daily life as things that are fresh and new. A child might skip or walk backwards to get the mailbox, just because. A child not only will stop and smell the roses, but she’s likely to want to touch them, taste them, water them, and dig around in the dirt they are growing in. |
How Children experience time.
Time is an abstract concept. You can’t hold it in your hand or portray it in a picture. You can’t taste it or hear it or smell it. Yet, everyone has some understanding of it.
| Adults | Children |
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Adults rarely occupy the moments in the day through which we live. At any given moment, we are likely thinking about what we need to do later, or thinking about something that has happened previously. We miss the things around us. The good side is that it allows us to prepare for the road ahead, to anticipate difficulties in order to avoid them, and to anticipate opportunities in order to take advantage of them. As adults, our understanding of ourselves in relationship to time lets us use our memory of past experiences to make decisions in the present to meet future goals. |
Your child’s mind is in the right here, right now. |
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In living an adult life, you need to function with an awareness of yourself in relation to time so you can plan ahead. (Fill the car with gas so you won’t be stranded.) Your mind is on the future. |
Children cannot be relied upon to plan ahead. |
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Because we have a long history, adults can tolerate unpleasant things in life. Adults understand that some things, while not enjoyable, are transient. |
Without memory of having lived through things and come out on the other side of them, children experience any threat as a dire one.
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To understand yourself in relation to time, you needed to:
To be able to stop yourself from responding to your first impulse in a situation. |
The part of the child’s brain that permits her to stop from responding to her first impulse develops slowly throughout childhood and is not fully mature until adolescence. |
How children think. The world of adults is populated by people who are, for the most part, able to think logically. This developmental achievement is reached in small steps.
Through actual experiences, the foundation of your child’s logical thinking and his understanding of abstract concepts is being laid. Parents should not try to rush their child’s development. We live in an age when to determine a child is average in any way is tantamount to calling them inferior. But average is not bad, especially when referring to child development. A progressive pattern of abilities develops that tend to follow a particular sequence. This sequence reflects the progressive maturation of connections inside your child’s brain.
Between the ages of two and six, children have specific, non-logical qualities to their thinking that are a part of the normal development of their mental abilities.
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Children will tend to see everything in reference to themselves. It gets dark because he goes to sleep. The sun moves when she moves.
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Children are easily fooled by appearances. She believes a ball will sink in water because it is big.
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Children attribute consciousness to everything around them and see everything as potentially coming to life. The moon sleeps at night, the sun wakes up, the mountain is following her in the car, and she is writing with a friendly pencil.
You cannot talk a child who is at this “illogical” stage in intellectual development past it. To help your child develop intellectually, provide concrete learning materials and hands-on, active learning experiences.
We live in a time when earlier and faster are assumed to be better, and the idea of being ahead of others is better. These cultural values are so ingrained in us that we may fail to question if taking action on these bases is the wisest choice. The earliest years are not the time to spend in front of flashcards. The time spent being drilled in phonics is the time children could otherwise be spending having hands-on, direct experiences to feed their brain and guide its wiring in the way nature designed. Children need good old fashioned playtime where they can run and play and get dirty and discover and not “accomplish” a thing.
When we push children to excel beyond their peers, or to do things faster than nature intended, we are smothering childhood with the values of adulthood. We are placing too much adult sense where child sense should be.
For more information see, Parents in Charge by Dana Chidekel, Ph.D, Simon & Schuster, 2002