Lucian has been banging on everything.
blocks against the window. blocks against the door. blocks against everything. he is fourteen months old & he has discovered that one solid object meeting another solid object makes a sound, & he is investigating it from every angle.
the bangs have no destination. they are not asking for anything. they are not telling anybody anything. he is just learning that the world responds when he hits it, & he likes that the world responds, so he keeps hitting it.
i have been showing him how to knock.
whenever a door is closed in the house, i show him. i tap on the wood. then i open the door. he watches my hand. he does not do the gesture back yet. but he has the motion already. he bangs on everything. the next step is intention. turning the bang into a knock. the noise into a message.
i keep coming back to one line all day. he has the reaching. i am just trying to help him aim it.
the other thing he is doing right now is pointing at everything.
he points at the wall, & we tell him it is the wall. he points at the door, & we tell him it is the door. he points at the light, & we tell him it is the light. i love the light one most. lux is latin for light. lucian is a derivative of it. so every time he points up & i name the light for him, i am handing him back the thing he is already named after. he does not know that yet. but i do, & it gets me every time.
this is the part of language i did not expect to love.
he points. we answer. the world gets a little more labeled for him, one object at a time. the part i keep noticing is that he decides what gets pointed at. the curiosity is his. all we are doing is meeting it with a word.
both moves are the same move at different stages.
pointing is curiosity that has already half-aimed itself. he sees a thing. he wants the word for it. he extends the finger because he knows the extension will get him a response. he is already converting motion into signal, & we are completing the loop with language.
banging is the version that has not aimed yet. he has the motion. he likes the noise. he does not yet mean anything by it. the parental move is not to take the banging away. the banging is the engine. the parental move is to be in the room with him often enough, with my own hand demonstrating the intentional version of the motion he already has, until the bang starts arriving at a door he wants opened, with a number of taps that means please.
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i wrote yesterday about responding to a small precise gesture with a small precise response. tonight is the version of that for a motion that has not yet figured out what it is asking for. yesterday's move was calibration. tonight's is aim. both have the same parental shape.
i remain of the mind that one of the most consequential things a parent does at this stage is provide the directed version of motion the kid already has. not new motion. not foreign motion. the same reach, with a body modeled around it. the same bang, but smaller, paced, aimed at the wood of a closed door. the same point, but answered with a word so consistently that the kid figures out the loop closes when he points.
he is not going to be raised in a world that rewards undifferentiated motion.
the algorithms he is going to grow up inside are going to register every bang. every scroll. every tap. they are going to treat the noise as the signal, because for their purposes, it is. the system makes money on the bang. it does not need him to mean it. it just needs him to keep hitting things.
the next twenty years of him are going to be one long version of this same move. learning to make the difference between hitting a door & asking through one. between the noise & the message. between his attention being captured & his attention being aimed.
i do not have a fancy frame for this. it is not a discipline strategy. it is not a developmental program. it is mostly me, on the floor, tapping on a piece of wood while he watches. & it is also me sitting on the carpet while he points at the light & i say light.
he has the reach. he has the bang. he has the point.
i am just trying to help him aim them.
What I am holding onto
the reach is already in him. the bang is already in him. the curiosity is already in him. my job at this age is not to install motion. it is to be the demonstrated, intentional version of the motion he already has, repeated often enough that he starts choosing the directed form on his own.
he has the motion already. the next step is intention. i want to remember that the next time i am tempted to think of fatherhood as transmitting capacity. most of what i am actually doing is helping him aim a capacity he showed up with.
every time he points at the light, the world hands him back his own name in a different form. i want to stay in rooms with him long enough to keep doing that for the next twenty years, in larger & larger versions.
Cheers, JanCarlos
if you know a parent who is in the room with a small kid right now, watching the bang start to become a knock, forward this to them.