up, down, up, down

Lucian has been learning how to turn on the lights.

not on his own. he cannot reach the switches. he is fifteen months old. that is the point.

when we are holding him, i lift him up to the switch. we already have a game that goes with the motion. up, down, up, down. he does it with his hands, with a toy, sometimes with the whole weight of himself when he wants me to bounce him. it is a rhythm that belongs to him. i did not teach it. he brought it into the house on his own.

what i have been doing lately is layering it onto the switch. up, down, up, down. the game becomes the flick. the flick becomes on & off. that becomes the lights.

he is starting to get it. sometimes he waits for me to say the words. sometimes he just does it & watches what happens above him. the room brightens. the room goes dark. he grins.

there is a small thing i want to say about this.

he already knows he can make light happen. he figured that out a while back on his own. one afternoon he pushed the button on the lamp in his room & the lamp turned on & he understood that he had done that. the connection between his own action & light in the room was already there. what we are doing now is extending it. one switch at a time. the lamp was his first. the ceiling light in the living room is next. after that the hallway. after that the kitchen. eventually every light in the house.

the switches are not the point. the extension is.

if i just carried him from room to room & the lights kept going on & off around him, he would be a passenger. plenty of parenting looks like that & it is not wrong. children need to be carried. he needs to be carried. but the whole day cannot be carried, or he will never learn that he is the one who does things.

so we made a place inside the carrying where he is the one doing the thing.

the game is his. the switch is mine. when he is up there in my arms & his hand goes up, down, & the lights go on, off, the game is the mechanism. the mechanism is the outcome. he is the reason the room got brighter. i am the reason he could reach.

that shape, his motion, my lift, the outcome that belongs to him, is what i want the rest of it to feel like too.

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i keep thinking about what authorship even looks like at fifteen months. he cannot make a decision the way i can. he cannot pursue a goal the way i can. he cannot even reach the light switch. the standard adult vocabulary for agency does not apply. but if i wait until he can do those things before i start treating him like he has some say, i will have already trained him out of it.

what a small child can do is participate. the ceiling of participation at fifteen months is not high. it is a hand on a switch, held up by his father. it is a spoon he can grip if the applesauce is in it. it is a block he can put in the wagon instead of over the wall. these are not important tasks. they are important seats. they are the first seats he sits in where he is the one deciding what happens next.

a house full of adults doing everything for him would feel like love. it would also feel like a movie he was in the audience for.

i do not want him raised in an audience seat.

so we found a game he already had, & we mapped it onto a switch he cannot reach on his own. the ladder is our arms. the rung is the wall. the doing is his. we did not add any new games. we just found the ones that were already his & pointed them at real outcomes.

this is what i think authorship actually is at fifteen months. not choice. not goals. not pursuit. just the constant, small experience of being the one who did the thing that then happened. the room got brighter because his hand went up. that is the whole lesson. everything else is built on top of it.

there is a version of the day where the lights go on because i flip them. there is a version where the lights go on because he does, in my arms, using the game he brought with him. the second version is longer. it takes more of me. it also is the one that leaves something behind in him after i put him down.

my job at fifteen months is not to do things for him faster. my job is to notice the games he already has, & to hand him the real world one small piece at a time.

What I am holding onto

Cheers, JanCarlos

if there is a small game your kid already brought into the house, reply & tell me what real thing you have started pointing it at.