tonight beck and i noticed lucian was biting his hand.
he brought his own hand to his mouth & bit down with focus, like the pressure or the sensation was doing something for him in the moment. it was the first time we had seen the behavior. we did not know if it was teething or sensory. we did not say it out loud.
we watched him for a beat. he was busy. we were not the audience he was performing for. we were not the audience at all.
what i am thinking about now, after the fact, is the part where we did not name it.
he was doing something a baby's body does. he was sorting an input. the input was his own hand against his own mouth. it was small. it was specific. it was his first version of running the experiment. neither of us had any idea what the answer was. neither did he. that was the entire point. he was generating the first frame of the data, & the data was about his own body. it was a closed loop. there was nobody in it but him.
we are about to live in a world that does not let a moment like that close on its own.
every behavior the child has is about to be pre-labeled. every micro-pattern is about to be matched to a category. an app to tell us what the bite means. a tracker to tell us how often it happens. a flag in a profile somewhere to tell us whether it falls inside or outside a normal range. a paragraph of suggested interventions waiting in a tab before the kid has even finished the second bite. the diagnostic before the data. the answer before the question. the round of self-investigation collapsed into a notification.
i do not think the categories are wrong. teething is real. sensory processing is real. the labels exist because something true is being tracked. that is not the argument.
the argument is the order of operations.
the child has to get a first round at the question without us. the body has to do its own sort. the bite has to belong to him before it belongs to a category. if the label arrives before the first frame of his own data, his own data never gets generated. he learns instead to wait for the label to tell him what he just felt. that is the failure mode i am watching for. not the diagnosis itself. the displacement of his own first read by somebody else's pre-read.
the post-labor world is going to be very good at supplying the pre-read. the friction it removes is the friction of having to figure out what is going on inside your own body. for a kid being raised inside that, the protection i actually owe him is the round. the round where his hand goes in his mouth & nobody in the room hands him a meaning for it.
neither of us spoke for a while. the instinct in a parent is to fill the silence with a meaning. to call the thing what it probably is. to move the kid from confusion into category as fast as possible, because confusion in a child reads as discomfort in the parent, & discomfort in the parent wants to be resolved. tonight we did not resolve it. we let it sit. eventually the moment closed on its own.
it took longer than i expected to want to name it. it took longer to want to look anything up. that disposition used to feel like a parenting failure to me. tonight it felt like the right one. there is a kind of knowledge that arrives by not knowing first. the knowledge that the body had its own first sentence about itself, & nobody overwrote it.
i will probably look the behavior up eventually. i will probably ask the pediatrician. categories help. labels are useful. but tonight i wanted him to be the first one to register what just happened to his own hand.
What I am holding onto
the body sorts before the brain sorts. there is a round of first-person investigation that has to belong to him before anybody else weighs in. that round is the floor of every later act of telling signal from noise. i do not want to be the one who shortens it.
the discipline tonight is the discipline of not naming. not the refusal of categories, but the order. the data first. the label second. let the kid generate the data his own way before the world hands him the read.
the world that is coming will offer to do the reading for him before he has finished doing the looking. the protection i owe him is the round where the looking still belongs to him. that is mine to defend. the rest of the work is downstream of it.
Cheers, JanCarlos
if you have ever caught yourself reaching for a label before your kid had finished feeling something, this one is for you. reply & tell me what you noticed.