Sophia Week 1: The Oblivion of Toddlerhood

    The other week, one of my campers, Lola, asked me why I couldn’t go to school with her and my other campers. I tried to explain that it was because I was going into my second year of high school while they were going into the threes. Obviously, she still didn’t understand why I couldn’t go to school with them, so I attributed the reason to age, which finally made sense to her because she knows that she is 3 and is convinced that I am 4. This conversation among many with some of my campers made me think about one very important question: what does the world look like from a toddler’s perspective?

Like most children, toddlers are oblivious to the world around them, just on a completely different level. For example, a kid in kindergarten named Jacob might know that even though everyone calls him Jake, his full name is Jacob. On the other hand, my camper, Theo, did not know that his full name is Theodore and when I tried to tell him that, he replied with, “No, my name is Theo.” Conversations I had with my fellow 3-year-olds, similar to this one, really opened my eyes about what younger kids process and think. They only know what they are constantly exposed to and trying to get them to understand new things takes many repeated attempts. While we might not remember what went on in our heads as toddlers since let’s be real, no one remembers anything before kindergarten, talking to younger kids and learning to understand them helps us form an idea. 

On top of being oblivious to the seemingly basic parts of life, most toddlers know nothing about the real world. For example, most young kids think their local mall Santa is the real deal, and the whole idea of kids assuming that someone in a costume is actually that person can really apply to any situation.  During my camp’s color games (war is too violent for preschoolers I guess) one of my campers, Kian, saw a counselor wearing a blue morph suit. Being only 3, Kian thought that he was a “bad guy” and had a nervous breakdown. We had to try to explain that he was just in a costume, and it took a good fifteen minutes for him to comprehend that. My personal favorite example of children not understanding simple concepts has to do with Theo, again. Any one of us would know that if we saw an abandoned bike in the middle of our path that it wouldn’t just move (at least I would hope so). Theo, on the other hand, did not know this and started beeping at the bike. Literally, he just kept saying “beep beep, beep beep.”

Taking all of these into perspective, I just sat there at lunch with my 3-year-old best friends thinking about all these stories and more. I started thinking about why kids are oblivious to the world, and how such seemingly common knowledge to us is like a foreign language to them. This led me to the question of how does common knowledge become common knowledge? Like ever since I was little, I knew that a red light means stop and a green light means go. Was that something I was repeatedly told or did I pick up on it from my surroundings and experiences? I don’t really know the answer to this, but I do know the simple fact that we aren’t born with this knowledge. It’s part of the oblivion of toddlerhood. 

What parts of the obliviousness that comes with young age do you miss?