Photo-A-Day #2219
Being home all this week was great. I enjoyed being able to have more time to work on projects, spend time with Allison and Eva and more. Today I went to my first class at the Y. I decided that I wanted to go back to doing Tai Chi. I hadn’t done it since I took classes up in New Hampshire, long before I was blogging. The class was good, relaxing and fun. I was the youngest and the only guy but that is okay because I need to learn so much more to become better at this form of exercise. Eva was excited because she got to go to ChildWatch and play with her friends Nate and Audrey. She was over the moon when she saw them.
After the gym we came home, went for a quick walk and then we watched Cars. I figured that Eva would get a kick out of the movie and she did. But she asked questions the whole time so I didn’t figure that she was really paying much attention to the movie. she was playing in the closet and such but still didn’t glance to much over at the TV. So, I figured that she didn’t like the movie that much and that she didn’t get the point of teamwork that was the moral of the story.
I was wrong.
Allison and Eva went out for the afternoon so that I could sleep, or at least try to sleep before work tonight. I got in two good hours, I think. when Allison and Eva returned we shared a hot pretzel on the front steps. After we were done I walked over to bring the recycling buckets back up to the house. They are on wheels and you tilt them back and pull them along. Eva exclaimed that she wanted to help me. she came running over and I lowered it down to her so that we could both pull.
As we were pulling up the bucket she told me that she was helping me like Lighting McQueen helped the King finish the race. She did get the point about helping other people. Man that kid just plain floors me some days. she really does.
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Drew,
I believe it is Malcom Gladwell’s book Tipping Point which talks about the exact observations you just had. They spend considerable time on the aspect of stickiness with childrens television programming as related to sesame street, blues clues etc. One of the conclusions was that while children appear to be doing other things and not paying attention they can actually be absorbing a large amount of information from the television.
Children don’t tend to sit still and watch programming like adults instead the bounce around and look back to the screen often. There are lot of other factors that come into play but kids defintely don’t watch tv the way adults do.
It is also interesting the sometime in the 70’s sesame street tried to give big bird a name “Roy” this was a colossal failure as children could not rationalize that big birds name was not big bird. How could he be both Big Bird and Roy. The idea simply did not work for kids and that episode failed miserably is never seen on TV anymore.
Point being kids are not really little adults we want to transcribe our experience to their worlds but it really does not work. Their world is just different than our and I would go so far as to say better. We worry about gas prices, smog, run away nuclear power plans and global warming while children worry about why they can’t feed the dog 50 times a day like they want to.