Sunday lunch at a Mexican restaurant for the birthday of one of our friends' godkids. Lucian was in the high chair next to me, locked in on the paper activity menu the host had handed him. The puzzle was a maze of hidden pictures. Every time the friction reached a peak, he let out the same short, compressed grunt. not a cry. not a complaint. a sound he is using more & more right now whenever something does not give the way he expects.
he wanted the koala. he was pointing at the bag, then pointing at the floor, then pointing in the general direction of outside. the koala had been left in the car.
I went out to the car & got the koala.
I came back. I put it in front of him.
he tried to launch it onto the floor.
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a thing I am sitting with is the gap between what he asked for & what he actually wanted.
he asked for the koala. that is signal. it was clear, it was direct, it was the kind of pre-language request a parent learns to read inside the first year. he was not confused about what he was pointing at. he wanted the koala.
then the koala arrived & he immediately started trying to put it on the floor.
an adult would call that a contradiction. you asked for the thing. I got the thing. the thing is in front of you. why is it now flying.
I do not think it was a contradiction. I think the ask was real, & the toss was also real, & the two of them were both data about him. the request was about closing a perceived absence. the toss was about establishing his relationship with the object once it arrived. the gap between the two is the thing I keep watching.
the ask is not the intent.
he did the same move twenty minutes later with a crayon. wanted it. got it. immediately tried to put it in his mouth. I had to intervene before the crayon became a snack. the same arc. ask, accept, repurpose. ask, accept, repurpose.
most of his afternoon, in fact, was a systematic clearing of any flat surface he could reach. the menu went to the floor eventually. the koala went to the floor several times. a packet of saltines went to the floor by his hand & stayed there, as if it had always been heading for that spot. there is a logic to how he is mapping the room. the floor is where things go to be true.
he is asking for things in real time. he is also, in real time, telling me what he actually wants by what he does with them once they land.
watching this is teaching me a discrimination I did not know I needed to practice.
I am aware that the world my son is growing into is a world that will respond instantly to any stated request he makes. the systems that will surround him at six, at thirteen, at nineteen, will be calibrated to fulfill the surface signal. you say you want the koala, the koala arrives. you say you want a movie about a boy who falls in love with a robot, the movie is generated. you say you want a friend who will listen to your problems all night, the friend is online. the bottleneck of the orchestration economy is not delivery. delivery is solved. the bottleneck is recognition.
what does he actually want.
it is going to be hard to learn that, inside that world, because the world will keep removing the small uncomfortable interval where he gets to find out. ask, receive, reject, redirect. that is the loop where intent gets calibrated, where a person learns the difference between what their mouth says & what their body does once the thing has arrived. systems that close that loop too efficiently leave the inside of him uncalibrated.
I am not anti-fulfillment. I went out to the car for the koala. that was correct. but the part of the afternoon where he then decided the koala was for launching, not for holding, was the part where he was doing his own development. it was not a misuse of the toy. it was him learning what he wanted by handling what he asked for.
if I had treated the toss as misbehavior & insisted he hold the koala because that is what you asked for, I would have closed the loop in the wrong place. the loop is supposed to stay open long enough for the body to weigh in.
a one-year-old does not have the muscle of self-narration yet. he cannot tell me what he wanted. he only acts it out. the acting-out is the language. the parent's job, right now, is to read the language.
later, the muscle will become his. some afternoon at nine he will catch himself in the act of asking for something & then not wanting it, & if he has been allowed enough small interval over the years to notice that pattern in himself, he will be the kind of person who can recognize when a stated preference is not the actual one. that is the muscle that runs the whole orchestration economy from the inside.
without it, he will be very efficient at receiving things he does not want. that is the failure mode I am watching for.
What I am holding onto
the ask is not the intent. signals are real & worth honoring. they are also not the whole picture. the floor is where the rest of the picture lands.
my job today is not to police the gap between what he asked for & what he did with it. it is to keep the gap open long enough for him to notice it himself eventually.
the systems he is going to live inside will be good at closing that gap on his behalf. the small uncomfortable interval, where the koala gets launched & no one rushes to put it back in his hand, is one of the few places where the loop stays open. that is the loop that builds the inside of him. it is also the loop I am, increasingly, learning to keep open in myself.
Cheers, JanCarlos
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