it was 8:50 in the morning & Lucian was on top of the toddler tower again. he has been climbing it for a couple of weeks now. the new development is that he has started trying to get down by throwing his leg over the bar he uses to climb up. that move gets him stuck. leg on one side, body on the other, nowhere to go.
new here? this is a daily newsletter about raising a seventeen-month-old in a world that will not require him to work the way we did. start anywhere.
so we ran a lesson. i lifted his leg over the bar myself, & then i put my arms on either side of him. then i asked him. what are you going to do. how are you going to get down from there. he could not move either way. his foot was suspended in the space where the bad move lands you. & then he did the thing i was hoping for. he got his foot back into the top of the tower, exactly where it belonged. he sorted the move. he did not need me to tell him which foot goes where. he needed the physical situation to hold still long enough for him to see it.
later that morning i caught him trying it again. leg over the bar. same wrong move. too persistent for his own good. that is the whole problem in miniature.
yesterday i wrote here about the two accounts we keep on him. the delivered lessons & the quiet reps. tonight is the sharper edge of that same shape. he is not just accumulating reps of the thing we want him to learn. he is accumulating reps of everything he can do. the risky version of the move is compounding in his body at the same rate as the safe version. the wrong way down is being practiced right alongside the right way down.
zoom out for a second.
my read is that this is the pattern with everything now. every skill has a safe shape & a shape that gets you stuck. he learns both. the environment is not filtering for us. gravity does not care which version he is repping. the object does not know the difference. the only reason the right way wins in the end is that a parent kept running the right version enough times that his body reached for it first when it counted.
we are not teaching him the correct move against an empty background. we are teaching it against a competitor. every time i walk him through the safe way down, that side runs the tape. every time he does the wrong move without a correction, that side runs the tape too. the arms race is quiet. the outcome is decided by whichever version has more repetitions by the time his body stops asking either of us for input.
this is going to keep being the shape. it will be the shape when he is nine & the shortcut on the screen is faster than the thing that would actually teach him. it will be the shape when he is fifteen & the frictionless version of a hard conversation is a chatbot instead of a friend. some of what he is handed will be built to teach him shortcuts on purpose, because a shortcut into his attention is worth something to somebody who is not us. those systems will get their reps in. our only counter is running the honest version enough that his body reaches for it first.
back to the floor. the good news buried in this morning is that when i held the wrong move still & asked him to solve it, he did. he already has some of the muscle for the safe answer. he needed the situation to stop moving. i am going to keep manufacturing that pause on the tower. some mornings he will figure it out. some mornings he will not. the point is that the correct version keeps getting the reps in on our watch, so the version that gets him stuck does not win by default.
what this means for you:
if you are raising a small kid, notice that the wrong version of a skill is learning at the same speed as the right one. the environment does not filter. your job is not only to teach the safe move. it is to make sure the safe move gets more repetitions than the risky one, before his body settles on a default. that means fewer performances & more quiet reps. it means walking him through the same move on the same object at the same hour until the shape wears in. if you are running your own work, the same rule holds. the shortcut version of a decision is training in you every time you take it. the honest version has to be repped more often than the shortcut, or the shortcut wins by attrition.
what i am holding onto:
yesterday i wrote here about the two accounts we keep on him. tonight the same rule showed up sharper. the risky move is accumulating reps at the same speed as the safe one. i want to be a parent who keeps the right version in front of him often enough that his body reaches for it first when i am not in the room.
when i held him in the stuck position, he solved it. some of the muscle is already there. i want to remember that the situation being still is often more useful than me giving instructions. the pause is the lesson.
the world he is inheriting will keep engineering the wrong way down into his peripheral vision. some of it will look like a toy. some of it will look like a helpful screen. i want to keep the honest reps stacked high enough that the shortcut does not win by default, & keep the room around him quiet enough that the choice is actually his.
Cheers, JanCarlos
if there is a version of this arms race running in your kid's day or your own, hit reply & tell me what the safe move is & how you are getting more reps of it in.