See the world through fresh eyes
Sonia has been learning her numbers.
One! Two! Three! ….
Ten! Eleven! Twelve!....
Seventeen! Eighteen! Nineteen! Twenty!....
Twenty-eight! Twenty-nine! Twenty-ten! Twenty-eleven!
I couldn’t stop laughing. I found that continuation from 29 hilarious. When I finally caught my breath, it dawned on me. She was pointing out an inconsistency in our English numeric system. I realized that the pattern in our numbers doesn’t come at 10, but rather 20. Some quick Google research revealed this was a real problem.
Malcolm Gladwell describes the issue well in Outliers:
It turns out that there is also a big difference in how number-naming systems in Western and Asian languages are constructed. In English, we say fourteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, and nineteen, so one might expect that we would also say oneteen, twoteen, threeteen, and fiveteen. But we don’t. We use a different form: eleven, twelve, thirteen, and fifteen…And, for that matter, for numbers above twenty, we put the “decade” first and the unit number second (twenty-one, twenty-two), whereas for the teens, we do it the other way around (fourteen, seventeen, eighteen). The number system in English is highly irregular. Not so in China, Japan, and Korea. They have a logical counting system. Eleven is ten-one. Twelve is ten-two. Twenty-four is two-tens-four and so on.
That difference means that Asian children learn to count much faster than American children. Four-year-old Chinese children can count, on average, to forty. American children at that age can count only to fifteen, and most don’t reach forty until they’re five.
The regularity of their number system also means that Asian children can perform basic functions, such as addition, far more easily. Ask an English-speaking seven-year-old to add thirty-seven plus twenty-two in her head, and she has to convert the words to numbers (37 22). Only then can she do the math: 2 plus 7 is 9 and 30 and 20 is 50, which makes 59. Ask an Asian child to add three-tens-seven and two-tens-two, and then the necessary equation is right there, embedded in the sentence.
By the age of five, in other words, American children are already a year behind their Asian counterparts in the most fundamental of math skills.
We hadn’t taught Sonia the number thirty yet. So her mind latched onto the only pattern that existed in the Western numeric system, which started after twenty. She had exposed the idiocy of our numeric system with one word. Twenty-ten.
One of the unexpected joys of being a parent has been questioning my assumptions about what makes sense. I tend to assume the world around me makes sense. Children, seeing and learning about the world with fresh eyes, tend to see through faulty assumptions with razor-like precision.
They don’t articulate what’s wrong with what you believe to be natural; they just give you what’s natural to them. If you pay attention, you can learn a lot from diagnosing the differences. From trying to understand why they are seeing the world differently and what that might imply. Here are a few of my favorite examples.
I asked my two girls to decide how long a break they wanted before they returned to eating dinner. I told them to agree with each other and then tell me what they decided.
As they huddled up, I heard Sheela tell Sonia she wanted 1 minute. Then, I heard Sonia reply that she wanted 2 minutes. Sheela just said, “OK, got it.”
She returned to me and confidently said, “We decided together. We want a 3-minute break.”
I was befuddled. I thought 2 minutes was the obvious answer since it was greater than 1. Or was it? As I watched Sheela return to Sonia and ask what she wanted to do for 2 minutes, I realized the brilliance in her strategy. By adding the two, she made sure that they could both do what they wanted, together.
She didn’t think of each of them spending their time independently, but rather what they could do together. Therefore, Sheela took each person’s response as a proxy for “How much time do you need for whatever you have in mind for this break?” It wasn’t about how long before they returned to eating; it was about what they wanted to do before they returned to eating. Getting to the optimal solution requires knowing what your true goals are.
“Here me comes!”
That’s one of my favorite Sonia sayings. She uses it when she’s doing something with excitement, usually a race or going down a slide. After I laugh, I realize – is there a reason for the I / me distinction? The purpose of language is ultimately to communicate, and I can’t think of any example where I wouldn’t understand someone whether they used I or me. Once again, a little research showed that the distinct object pronoun doesn’t exist in many languages, so it clearly isn’t essential.
I decided to pose the trolley problem to Sheela. I didn’t want to get into a death discussion, so I modified it to ‘really hurting’ five people by doing nothing, or turning the wheel and ‘really hurting’ one person. Here’s the conversation that ensued:
So, what would you do Sheela?
I will stop, unstrap the people, give them each a toy to play with, then keep driving the train.
But Sheela, what if the train won’t stop?
Then I’ll use my special horn which makes the train stop. And they can hear it.
What if you can't find the special horn?
I will because I put it right next to the wheel.
What if it doesn't work?
It will work. I made sure.
What if it doesn’t?
Then, if the special horn doesn't work, I will pull my hand switch to stop the train. That always works to stop the train. It will knock the train over.
At first, her inability to grapple with the philosophical dilemma frustrated me. Then, I realized: this thought experiment is designed to pose an ethical dilemma. But what if it instead forces a reconsideration of your design principles to avoid the dilemma in the first place?
The trolley problem can be viewed as a ‘single point of failure’ issue. Why can we not stop this train? What has gone wrong in our train design for this to happen? If, as Sheela suggests, we had built in multiple points of success instead of having a single point of failure, we might never have to face this dilemma at all.
Whenever your child is saying or doing something that doesn’t make sense, try to understand why it could make sense. More often than not, they may be the ones with a deeper common sense.