Running around the house has always been the sure way to crack Lucian up. jumping was the surest thing of all. something about the whole body leaving the ground at once cracked him up more than anything else i tried.
now that he can walk, the running is not just a joke anymore. it is still funny. but there is more in it now. he tracks it. he reacts to it. he looks a little more locked in, a little less like an audience & a little more like somebody with a stake in what is happening.
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the humor is turning into engagement. the laugh is still there, but it is no longer the whole point. the whole point is that he can imagine himself doing it now.
i saw a video on facebook recently of a toy. a little dinosaur speaker & a set of stickers. you place the "refrigerator" sticker on the refrigerator, & when the kid triggers the dinosaur near the fridge, the dinosaur says the word "refrigerator" back. object, sticker, sound, word. a labeling machine.
it got me thinking ahead. once he is steady enough to run the length of a room on his own, i can picture him doing laps. couch, wall, tv, fridge. collecting the names of things the way he is currently collecting laughs. same legs. different payoff.
the jumping & the running were never really about the motion. they were about him watching me do something & reacting to it. the dinosaur toy is the same trade, run in reverse. him moving toward something, & getting a word back for it. right now he laughs when i move. soon enough he will be the one moving, & the house will start naming itself back to him one sticker at a time.
zoom out for a second.
there is a certain kind of hinge that is easy to miss when you live inside it. the hinge is not the walking. the walking is the thing everyone notices. the hinge is the moment the child figures out that a particular kind of motion of his own body is a way to get a specific kind of answer back from the world. take a step. arrive at a thing. get a word for that thing. do it again. do it going the other way. build a map of the room out of small motion-to-answer trades.
i saw the trade start today. he was watching me from the position of a walker for the first time. not from the position of somebody who watches walkers because he cannot walk yet. that is the whole thing.
there is going to be a whole product category over the next ten years that tries to be the source of the words on the other side of that trade. the dinosaur is one honest, low-stakes version of it. it is not the last version. there will be much smarter, much stickier versions. some will use my child's name. some will remember what he pointed at last week. some will be better at holding his attention than i am when the day has been long.
the ones i most worry about are not the loud ones. the loud ones are easy to see. the ones i most worry about are the quiet, always-on ones. the ones that will just be running in the background, ready to hand him a word for anything he moves toward.
it is not that the words will be wrong. most of them will be right. the problem is more upstream. the problem is who is on the other end of the trade.
when he takes a step toward a lamp & says "uh," & i say "lamp," a specific thing happens. a specific human, in a specific room, who knows him, is naming the lamp for him. the exchange has a witness. the word arrives inside a relationship. the naming is one of the ways he is going to know that he is a person to me, & that the room is a real place we live in together.
when he takes a step toward a lamp & the room says "lamp" because a sticker & a sensor arranged that, the naming is technically identical. socially it is not. no one saw him take the step. the exchange had no witness. the word arrived inside no relationship.
that is where the twenty-year problem sits.
i do not have a rule about the dinosaur toy. i am not going to write about that toy specifically. it is a fine little labeling machine. what i want on the other side of his motion, the majority of the time, is a person he knows. not because the labels will be more accurate. because the labels are one of the earliest ways he is going to figure out what a witnessed life feels like versus an unwitnessed one.
right now he laughs when i run around the house. soon enough he will start running himself, & things in the room will start having names. i want most of those names to come from a specific mouth that belongs to a specific person in the house with him.
What I am holding onto
the hinge is not the walking. the hinge is the moment his own motion starts trading for words back from the world. that trade has started. my job is to be on the other end of it as often as i can be.
there will be many good labeling machines over his childhood. accurate ones. patient ones. always-on ones. accuracy is not the point. the point is who is doing the naming when he is looking to see who noticed.
he is not going to remember any of the specific lamps or refrigerators or couches. he is going to remember that when he moved toward a thing, somebody who knew him was there to say the word back.
Cheers, JanCarlos
reply & tell me a word your kid learned that you can still remember the moment they learned it. i am collecting these.