Dear readers, in these times of constant noise, we find it increasingly difficult to pause for a moment or simply tolerate boredom. Children feel the same way too! But our reader Gabriella explains to us here today why children need to experience things in order to understand them – and what is often lost in everyday life.
There are those afternoons when all you really want to do is go home. Take your shoes off, have a quick rest, perhaps just not hear a thing for five minutes. And that’s exactly when a child suddenly stops in the middle of the pavement, because the light is reflecting off a puddle or there’s a particularly smooth stone lying somewhere between the paving stones.
When boredom becomes exciting
Adults often react in much the same way in such moments. Not now. We have to keep going. Your shoes will get wet. Just come along, please. Children, on the other hand, seem to really come into their own in precisely these situations. They crouch down, dip their fingers in the water or spend minutes observing something that adults probably wouldn’t even notice.
Perhaps it’s only when you have children that you really notice again how quickly adults normally rush through their surroundings without even consciously noticing many things. When was the last time you spent any time thinking about how differently dry earth and wet earth smell? Or how sand changes as soon as water is added? Children do this all the time. They observe such things with a naturalness that adults eventually lose.
Why children always want to touch everything
There is probably hardly a phrase parents say more often than “Please don’t do that”. Not necessarily out of strictness, but often simply out of exhaustion or time pressure. Don’t sit in the puddle. Don’t touch the wet leaves. Don’t pick up any more stones. And of course you understand that. Nobody is happy about clothes being completely soaked just before heading home, or about sand trickling out of every jacket pocket later on.
Nevertheless, with children you realise quite quickly that this touching is much more to them than just a little activity to pass the time. Children want to know what things are like. Not just have it explained to them, but to really experience it. They squeeze earth between their fingers, spill water or let sand trickle through their hands over and over again. To adults, this sometimes seems completely pointless. To children, apparently not at all.
Perhaps as an adult, one easily underestimates just how physical learning actually is in the early years. Children only really understand many things once they have experienced them for themselves. A child doesn’t automatically know what ‘sticky’ means just because someone explains the word. They understand it when cake batter suddenly sticks to their hands or jam is stuck everywhere, just not where it’s supposed to be.
Why simple things are often much more interesting than toys
It’s actually amazing what children can get up to. A new toy is unwrapped, and five minutes later a child is sitting contentedly on the floor, preferring to play with the cardboard box or a wooden spoon from the kitchen.
From an adult’s perspective, this sometimes seems almost a bit absurd. At the same time, however, it also shows how children play. They are often less interested in things that are already finished. Things usually become exciting when they can make something out of them themselves.
A cardboard box isn’t just a cardboard box. It becomes a den, a car or a boat. A stick is collected, carried about or built into something. And water is constantly changing. Sometimes it runs slowly through their fingers, sometimes it suddenly spills over. Children observe such things with incredible precision. Probably also because they do not yet take their environment for granted.
Adults and children often live at completely different speeds
Perhaps this is precisely why so many minor conflicts arise in everyday life. Adults want to get on with things, be on time and get things done. Children, on the other hand, constantly get held up by something or other on the way. A snail on the pavement is often enough.
Whilst adults immediately think to themselves that they should have set off long ago, children watch for minutes on end as the snail moves slowly. Sometimes this seems almost enviable, because children can still observe things with a calmness that adults have often completely lost.
Of course, this sounds nicer in theory than it does in the midst of everyday life. When time is short in the morning or, after a long day, nobody wants to have any more discussions about muddy trousers, every family is likely to react with irritation at some point.
Nevertheless, perhaps something gets lost in the process. Children experience their surroundings much more directly. They don’t just want things explained to them; they want to figure out for themselves how something works.
When learning doesn’t look neat
The problem is probably that learning rarely looks particularly neat when it comes to children. It is slow, sometimes chaotic and often quite messy.
A child who spends minutes pouring water from one cup into another doesn’t necessarily look busy from an adult’s perspective. The same goes for children who rub soil between their fingers or scatter sand everywhere. And yet, an astonishing amount happens in the process.
At some point, children realise for themselves when something overflows. They observe that wet sand suddenly becomes mouldable or that some things are heavier than others. Many of these experiences seem small and insignificant. For children, they are important because they enable them to truly understand their environment.
Why such experiences seem almost more important today than they used to
Sometimes one gets the impression that children today are far less likely to simply be allowed to experience things. There are an incredible number of stimuli, constant entertainment and often this pressure that everything should be as meaningful or beneficial as possible.
Yet the most intense moments often arise precisely when nothing special was actually planned. When a child is sitting in the mud somewhere, when more dough sticks to their hands than is in the bowl whilst baking, or when they spend twenty minutes collecting stones on a walk, only to leave them outside again later anyway.
It is precisely these kinds of situations that often stick in the memory. Not perfectly planned. Not particularly tidy. But genuine. Perhaps children need exactly these kinds of experiences much more often than adults sometimes think in the midst of their stressful daily lives.
