I would like to begin
by clarifying that I, the author, am not the preschooler. I am an almost-adult
who is mildly obsessed with holding onto my childhood and reattaining the idea
that life is as simple as I make it out to be. I have a fascination with how
kids think and process information, along with how they convey it, seeing as
they don’t yet have the vocabulary or experience to explain all that they think.
In an attempt to understand how the mind of a child works, I went to someone
who I truly feel is an expert in being a kid: my four year old nephew, Seth.
“I’m going to be asking you some questions, okay. Can you answer them for
me?” I asked.
“Yes,” he responded, with an emphasis on the length of the s.
“What is your name?”
“S-E -,” he paused to point at the uppercase E I had just typed. “No!
Do a circle with a line!” I realized that he wanted the e to be lowercase instead, and was
immediately reminded why I put off interviewing a child with the patience of,
well, a child, for so long.
I feel the need to add
some background on Seth. He is learning how to write the letters of the
alphabet, but so far can only spell his name. He doesn’t yet understand capital letters, but he
knows that his name is a snake, followed by the “circle with a line”, a line with a line, and a “little.” This
is what he says to describe the letters in his name, just in case I don’t
know what letters are. He does this with everything. He calls things by what
they are to him, hoping that his
explanations will help you get on the same page as he is. This often results in
him calling things “this little thing” that’s “this big” and “like this” with absolutely no further explanation as to what “this” is. But what else do you expect from a preschooler.
“How old are you?”
“Four,” he says while holding up three fingers.
“What does that mean?”
“I have a lot of cuts. Right here,” he pointed at his knee while making the most dramatically pained face I
had seen him make in the last ten minutes, “Just a little bit more cuts little bit right
here.”
“Of course,” I replied, having no more idea what that means than I had before. “What
is the best color in the whole world?”
“Blue because he’s really fast and red is the fastest fast.”
I paused to think of
how to explain that colors aren’t fast, but then realized he’s a kid, so of course colors are fast. There was nothing I could do to
change that. “What makes blue so fast?”
“You go zoom zoom,” he yelled as he leaped off of the couch and sprinted around the room. I
have no idea how he ran so fast, seeing as he wasn’t wearing anything red or blue.
“Tell me about your dog,” I asked him.
“Lucy?”
“Yes.”
“Lucy is one old and that’s it. Lucy is one leg, two leg, three leg, five leg, one head, two eyes,
one nose, and a tail. A lot of hair. She has a body, too! I love her 100! Lucy
is bigger, that’s why lucy is big, that’s it,” he paused to stand up and walked towards the door. “Goodbye,
I’m done,” he announced as he walked out.
I don’t
know how long I expected him to sit still and answer my questions for, but I
was definitely not expecting him to walk out at that moment. He took a break to
go bug his mom about something while I sat in bewilderment at what I had
already learned. Now don’t get me wrong, I love kids, but I have a bad habit of just saying “uh-huh” to
everything they say to me. I hadn’t taken the time just to listen to them in a while, at least since
winter break ended. I felt refreshed learning that my dog was 100, and that
blue was fast, and lowercase letters were better than capitals.
He came back and sat
down, smiling, as if to say he was ready for the next question.
“How did the world begin?” I asked.
“It just it’s morning time, that's why. That’s all I know,” he replied with equal parts certainty and wonder. I believed him.
I
continued asking him questions about this and that waiting for something that
would pull an original response out of him.
“Can you tell me what love is?”
“Hugs!” He jumped up to hold me. I froze, and then relaxed. He wasn’t
wrong. “And kisses and I don’t know, that’s it.”
“No you feel it, tell me more.”
“Loving penguins, and eyes, and the water and bellies like this.”
“And what else?”
“And uh S-E-T-H,” he proudly spelled his name.
“Can you tell me what I look like?” I asked.
“I know, a person!” he responded as though he, himself had discovered that.
“Keep going,” I inquired.
“A person who says agh just like Seth!”
“But you’re seth.”
“Agh!”
At
this point in the interview process, I decided it was time for another break.
Seth does a wiggly dance when he is distracted, and the dancing had begun. I
took a break from typing and asking to just play with him. He showed me his toy
cars and explained that one is faster simply because he says so. He pointed out
things about my room that I hadn’t noticed in a while, trinkets and books from when I was younger, the
first thing I sewed that I felt proud of, my time out chair from when I was
small. He picked up the small sushi plushie I made years ago and began
fidgeting with it, waiting patiently for more questions.
“Tell me about your mom.”
“My mom is so tall all the way up there big,” he said, pointing at the ceiling with total
conviction. I would like to point out that his mom is five foot one.
“What do you want to be when you grow up?”
“A policeman.”
“Why?”
“‘Cause I like the police.”
“What do the police do?”
“Put the bad guys in jail.”
“Who are the bad guys?”
He paused to point to
the words on my computer screen before softly declaring, “Him.”
We had been at this for
a while and I couldn’t tell if he was joking with some of these answers anymore. I chose two
more questions from my list to ask.
“What's the saddest thing ever?”
“I don’t know,” he said while smacking his forehead. “Are we done?”
“Almost. What’s the happiest thing ever?”
“Toys because they are fun!”
“Thanks. You’re done”
“Yay! Done, yes?” He asked with enthusiasm.
“Yes.”
He
gave me a quick hug before grabbing my hand and pulling me out the room. He
brought me to the living room and asked me to play his favorite song for him.
We sang and danced until the song ended. Then he went up to his room and I went
back to mine. I sat down to start writing this blogpost and wrote this first:
I
know nothing more about children than I did when I started this. Maybe people
were meant to stay clueless and curious, and maybe that’s the one thing kids truly have figured out.
