This morning lucian said "at" for cat.
he is fourteen months old, the cat walked through the room, & he said "at." not the whole word. the back of it. the suffix.
he has been doing this for a while now & i did not have a name for it until this morning. he says "ba ti" for "bath time." he says "go go" before he says "let's go." "bye bye" is the same. the back of the phrase arrives first. the front fills in later (or vice versa).
it is not just words. he crawled backwards before he ever crawled forwards. he scooted away from things before he scooted toward them. he came off the couch face-first before he learned to swing his legs around & go down feet-first. every major leap he has made on this earth so far has arrived in reverse.
so this morning at 8:47 am i sat with my coffee & i watched him watch the cat & i thought: the language is already in him. we just have not learned to hear the front of it yet.
i am not making a developmental claim that scales. i am making a smaller one. for this kid in this house at this age, the parts of him that arrive first are the parts that do not show up where the books were looking.
he is probably already saying "outside" somewhere. not in a form i can map onto the word. a back-half of it, a hum of it, a piece of the cadence that he has not yet wrapped a front around. & the only way i will catch it is to be sitting in the room with him often enough, & quietly enough, to clock the moment when the back-half arrives.
this is a thing i do not think you can outsource.
i can put a camera in the room. the camera can flag a vocalization. the camera cannot tell me that the rising tone is the back of the word for the place we go for fresh air. that read requires having watched him point at the door three times last week. it requires having been on the floor with him while he tried to crawl backwards into a corner. it requires knowing what his language sounds like when it is half-built.
ai is going to keep getting better at recognizing patterns in general. it is not going to get better at recognizing this pattern in this kid. the training data for that is sitting in the same room with him. the model that will read him fastest is the one i am building one morning at a time.
the other half of what i was sitting with this morning is something i wrote in the journal & could not stop turning over. lucian arrives at things from the end. so do i. i reverse engineer everything. i did it with social media in 2011. bitcoin in 2016. ai in 2022. i am doing it now, in real time, with him.
he is doing it too. at fourteen months. with a one-syllable word for an animal he likes.
i remain of the mind that one of the most useful things i can do as his father is not to push him through the order the books described. some kids build from the end. some kids build from the front. some kids build from both & meet in the middle. the order the books described was averaged across a lot of kids who were not lucian.
the parenting move is not to correct the angle he is building from. it is to sit close enough, & long enough, to read the order he is actually using. & then to meet him there, not where i thought he would be.
i think a lot about being here in this newsletter. usually in big strokes. being here as the moat. being here as the gift. being here as the thing that does not scale.
this morning being here is much smaller than that. it is the difference between catching the back of a word & missing it. it is the difference between knowing my kid's language is half-built & assuming he has not started.
ai moves fast. my family moves slow. but slow is not what i want to call it anymore. slow makes it sound like the alternative would be faster. what i actually want is to be in time with him. he is on a clock i did not set, & a developmental order i did not pick. my job is to be where he is, not where i thought he would be.
he is going to learn the whole word eventually. it is going to be cat, not at. somebody is going to laugh at me for writing eight hundred words about a suffix.
but i do not get to choose which two seconds of his life turn into the next twenty years of him. i just get to be in the room.
What I am holding onto
the parts of him that arrive first are not always the parts the books were looking for. i want to be the kind of father who reads the developmental signature he is actually using, not the one i expected.
"at" for cat is not a partial word. it is a half-built word with a clear back end. half-built words are still words. i want to learn the language he speaks before he speaks the language he is going to be taught.
the model that will read him fastest over the next twenty years is the one i build by being in the room often. no camera, no model, no app will clock the back of "outside" the first time it arrives. i want to be the one who does.
Cheers, JanCarlos
if you know a parent sitting in a room with a small kid right now, trying to read the version of him that has not shown up in the order the books described, forward this to them.