Toddlers love buttons
Kids love buttons. One year olds will push anything they can reach. Once they get up and walk around, their entire environment is fair game. What does this do? What does that do? What’s really interesting is that, far more than previous generations could learn, today’s toddlers learn that their environment responds back. Even if it’s just a beep, to them, their environment is alive. Surfaces answer their questions.
This makes me think of three stories.
- Lou Rosenfeld sent me a beautiful quote. His daughter is two and a half and loves to catalog (heh, no irony there, eh Lou?) all the Big Girl things she can do. Sleep in a big bed. Brush her teeth. A couple of mornings ago she announced, “I press buttons.” I love this. Being an adult means you press buttons.
- About a month ago, I travelled to my grandmother’s 80th birthday party. I saw my nephew Jack for the first time in about a year, so he was a year and a few months old. Incredibly curious, he’ll push any button in sight. My aunt had a stand-up floor fan with four speed buttons, just above Jack’s head. He loved them. After being asked to please not push those buttons, he walked to my grandmother, silently grabbed her hand to pull her out of her chair, walked her across the room to the fan, and used her hand to push the fan buttons. Brilliant.
- Over ten years ago, I visited my stepbrother and his family across the country. One of his sons was less than two years old and wasn’t quite talking yet. I marveled to watch him grab the tape he wanted to watch, put it correctly into the VCR, and even more correctly push the button with the one triangle pointing to the right. Play it! He had made the symbolic connection between the Play icon and playing the tape.
Babies absorb their immediate surroundings. You can see it in their eyes that even though they can’t make words, they’re taking it all in, processing it, and making sense of it. They are constructing the world in their head.
Babies in previous generations grew up in a far more static environment. Of course they can always knock over a lamp, pull the cat’s tail or find other ways to poke around. But in the pre-digital world, or when there were fewer buttons, the objects available to manipulate were more discrete. A ball, a dog, a hammer. In our current generation where many objects have buttons or other small controls, babies learn at an earlier age that complexity exists.
They can grab a small box-shaped thing and it won’t be just a box. Fifty years ago, it would be just a box. You can look at it or you can throw it. But today, that little box may have some hidden treasures. Here’s a little circle that sticks out. Ooo, when you push it, it makes a noise. A light turns on. It might even talk back.
Or imagine a surface like a microwave. The buttons are flat, blending in with the main object. Yet if you push them, they make noises. Tiny regions of big objects do different things.
The web of discovery is much denser. Objects have hidden properties that want to be found. The question evolves from “what does this do?” to “how many things can this do?” This is an incredible development for the one year old brain.
But what’s truly different is that kids learn at an early early age that if they interact with their environment, their environment responds back. Their environment is alive. How does this affect their worldview when they become adults?
(You parents out there, let me know if I’m way off base.)