Dad The Observer

The psychology of Lego Star Wars II

Charles Fernyhough — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 13:05:22 +0000

Here's the thing. I've been playing this game for a few months now, and I'm losing track of who I am.

At the beginning of each level, we choose our characters. Today Isaac has gone for Qui-Gon Jinn, while I've plumped for Obi-Wan Kenobi. Both of these characters have lots of hair and long brown capes. I don't know if it's just my old eyes, but I can't tell them apart. Across the distance between the TV and this sofa where we're sitting, I can't see whether I'm controlling the little hooded dude on the left or the one on the right. Maybe I should have picked someone more distinctive, like Yoda or R2D2. But Yoda walks with a limp (although he wields his light saber like a bad ‘un), and R2D2 is only good for getting through doors on spaceships or falling off platforms, which he does with an unnerving, child-like scream.

So I'm there, one of two brown-hooded Jedis, and there is warrioring to be done. The only way to solve the puzzle of my identity is through action. I can use my Nunchuk to move to the left or right, and see which of the characters on the screen moves in response. I can spring into a Jedi Slam, or wave my light saber from side to side, and see what difference my action makes to the image depicted on the screen. By acting, and watching closely the effects of my action, I can work out who I am.

This is a version of a problem that newborn babies have to face. You don't come into the world brimming with self-knowledge; you have to carve out a self for yourself in all sorts of complicated ways. One aspect of this is learning about your self's efficacy: what it can do and not do. Although they probably have certain kinds of innate knowledge that help them with the task, babies have to learn about the effects of their own actions, and thus the limits of the self. Here's how I have described it in the case of Isaac's big sister:

At eight weeks, Athena spent much of her time on her back on her activity mat, looking up at the soft animals that dangled above her. [...] These were the air guitar days. I would play Tom Waits songs on my old electro-acoustic, and she would play along, windmilling her right arm across her left in great wide circles, unicycling her feet as if trying to push herself higher for a better view. [...] Even when I wasn't playing, her arms and legs were constantly in motion. With all this zoology dangling above her, it was only a matter of time before an animal was sent flying. Colourful life-forms would be swinging, inches from her face. Until now she had paid no attention: all this was just part of Athena, absorbed into the universe of her undifferentiated self. But one day, after landing a punch that set Zoë the Zebra pogo-ing, she stopped and looked at what she had done. [...] She had swung that fist, and now a thing was moving that hadn't been moving before. She had made this difference. She had had some impact on the world.
(Charles Fernyhough, A Thousand Days of Wonder: A Scientist's Chronicle of His Daughter's Developing Mind, pp. 64-65)

In working out which of these Jedi warriors is ‘me', I have to do a version of what Athena had to do as an eight-week-old. I have to use trial and error in working out who I am. As we'll see next time, I am going to face further complexities in sorting out my identity crisis. Truly aligning myself with Obi-Wan Kenobi, as opposed to all the other characters that fill the screen, is going to take some further action and observation.

'Accents' in the womb? A brief note

Charles Fernyhough — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 10:57:47 +0000

Image via Wikipedia

Making the news this week have been some findings that newborn babies imitate aspects of the 'accents' of their parents' language. What's striking about these findings is not that fetuses pick up information about language in the womb—there is already plenty of evidence for learning about auditory stimuli in the third trimester. The real significance of these findings is that newborns are showing an ability to imitate those aspects of the language they are destined to learn. This shows that they have considerable control over the articulatory system: the muscles in the throat and mouth that shape speech.

You can read some more of my thoughts on this study, and its possible significance, here.

The psychology of Lego Star Wars I

Charles Fernyhough — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 09:15:19 +0000

Image by nickstone333 via Flickr

Above all, it's about cooperation.

‘Isaac, you open that door and rescue C-3PO! I'll hold off these Stormtroopers!'

‘Wait! We both have to pull these levers together or the door won't open!'

What does it take to be a good collaborator? You need to want the same things as your partner, of course, and have the necessary skills to fulfil your intentions. But you also need to be able to represent your shared goals; to keep in mind what your partner wants, and how those intentions might change.

That's a problem of social understanding. Isaac and I look as though we are questing together into the heart of Darth Vader's mothership, but we are actually voyaging into each other's minds. As he commands this virtual reality with his Wii controller, Isaac needs to represent his own goal of getting through that door, but he also needs to bear in mind my goal of holding off the Stormtroopers. A complex adventure game like Lego Stars Wars requires that both participants keep track of rapidly changing intentions and motivations: both their own, and those of their partner.

We know that babies aren't born with this kind of understanding, although they are probably innately endowed with some of the capacities that underlie it. From early in the second year of life, infants have a sophisticated understanding of other people as intentional agents, who act according to goals and show frustration when those goals are not achieved. As children's social understanding improves—as they develop a fully fledged theory of mind—so they become better at representing the complexities of shared goals, and are able to engage in more and more sophisticated forms of collaboration and cooperation¹.

What's more, even at very young ages human children show a tremendous motivation to share goals in this way. It's not just that they can align their intentions with someone else's, but also that they want to, and they enjoy doing so. The pleasure of two-player mode is that we can indulge this shared motivation of Isaac's and mine. He could be tramping the path to Jedi Knighthood on his own, but it's much more fun with me at his side.

This kind of collaboration comes with social rules. The most important stricture is that both players should commit jointly to the task, and not break off except for pressing reasons. If I suddenly quit being Luke Skywalker and wandered off to check my email, I would get a stern look. I've declared myself willing to combat the Sith in all their forms, and that, for my five-year-old brother-in-arms, is a sombre commitment.

When do children begin to understand these social commitments? In the latest issue of Developmental Psychology, Maria Gräfenhein and her colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology investigated joint commitment to game-playing in young children². In one study, they observed how two- and three-year-old children behaved in each of two conditions of a collaborative game. In the first of these conditions, an experimenter established a joint commitment to play the game by explicitly inviting the child to join her. In the second condition, the experimenter simply joined a child who was already playing, without any joint commitment to collaborate. In both conditions, the adult then suddenly interrupted her play. How would the child react? Would he or she try to re-engage the experimenter, or carry on playing alone?

The results showed that two-year-olds did not behave differently in the two conditions. Whether or not there was a commitment to play together, two-year-olds mostly seemed to expect some continued involvement from the adult. The three-year-olds, in contrast, showed different behavior in the two conditions. Where there had been a joint commitment, these children made efforts to re-engage the experimenter, through a verbal invitation, for example, or by offering a toy. In the condition where there had been no joint commitment, three-year-olds proved much less likely to try to re-engage the adult. It was as though they recognised that the adult's attention had easily come, and so it could easily go. In a second study, three- and four-year-old children were enticed away from a shared game by another experimenter. When there had been a joint commitment, children were more likely to acknowledge their departure to their partner, compared to where there had been no such social pact.

Plenty of reason to think, then, that Isaac will be taking this shared responsibility seriously. My protestations that I cannot help him rebuild this spaceship (because I need to get on and make his dinner) fall on deaf ears. The prospect of completing this level and unlocking some more characters ought to matter more than eating. But, if the rewards are potentially great, the price of failure is also high. One aspect of successful collaboration is knowing when to give your partner a break. When you are both crucial for the success of a project, you need to be able to show forgiveness to a comrade who sometimes gets it wrong. Usually Isaac is patient, recognizing that we old-timers don't have a natural feel for video-gaming. But occasionally the enormity of the adventure overwhelms him. I'm too slow through a doorway, or I get in the way while he is trying to perform some tricky operation. Retribution is swift. He turns to me, raises his hand high and smites me with his lightsaber, reducing my clumsy avatar to a shower of colorful Lego studs.

¹ Tomasello, M., Kruger, A. C., & Ratner, H. H. (1993). Cultural learning. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 16, 495-552.

² Gräfenhain, M., Behne, T., Carpenter, M., & Tomasello, M. (2009). Young children's understanding of joint commitments. Developmental Psychology, 45, 1430-1443.

The Grandad they never knew

Charles Fernyhough — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 15:48:25 +0000

I've been thinking a lot about memory recently. In the last few days, I've been mulling over the reaction to my article in the London Guardian, in which I discuss a conundrum faced by many parents: how to negotiate children's memories of family members who are no longer here. In the piece, which you can read in full here, I describe how I have talked to my children about the grandfather who died before either of them was born. Along with the obvious props such as photographs and a little video footage, I have tried to bring Dad alive for them through the funny things he did and said.

There are two main reasons for thinking that this would not be a wasted effort. Firstly, young children seem oddly willing to have relationships with people who are no longer, or who have never been, among the living. I describe research by developmental psychologists such as Paul Bloom and Paul Harris, which demonstrates children's readiness to accept some continued psychological functioning after death. A couple of examples will suffice. In one recent study¹, a majority of preschoolers reasoned that a dead mouse would continue to have thoughts and feelings about the events that had killed him. In a study of Spanish schoolchildren², children as old as eleven, hearing a story about the death of a grandparent, proved remarkably willing to attribute continued mental functioning after death, particularly when the narrative was framed in a religious context.

The second reason for being optimistic about my plan to keep Grandad Philip alive in the kids' memories has to do with the way that memory works. Is it actually possible to seed a memory for someone you have never known? Can it ever become a vivid moment of experience, of the kind that can be cherished as a personal memory and endlessly relived? Experimental work in psychology is answering these questions in the affirmative. I talk about some of the evidence from the science of autobiographical memory, which shows that our memories of people and events are hashed together from varied sources of information, some of which might not actually be related to the original event. (You can read a little more on this here.) Memory is fallible and prone to distortion, and it is particularly so in early childhood.

The ethical question is whether it is right to manipulate children's memories in this way. The reaction to my article has suggested two things. Firstly, it has told me that this is a question that resonates for many people, but which is not widely discussed. One person who got in touch had lost his father earlier this year. His dad had written children's stories, several of which included an uncle who led the child protagonists on a series of adventures. My correspondent had the feeling that the intrepid uncle in his father's stories might have been a disguised version of his own paternal grandfather, whom the children never knew. On that interpretation, my correspondent's dad was keeping alive the memory of his own father through the bedtime stories he was handing down to his kids—and which, with his passing, are gratefully remembered.

I'm sure that parents, consciously or unconsciously, are doing this kind of thing all the time (I've considered some of the ways in which this might happen in a separate article). The second main thing I have learned is that some people are uncomfortable with the idea that parents might deliberately set out to do this. For my part, I have always tried to make the mentions of my dad seem natural, as though he were still around and entitled to the usual portion of space in the children's lives. I slip mentions of his name into the conversation as unobtrusively as I can. I don't want to look as though I am manipulating their memories, even though I know that it is inevitable in so many ways. Perhaps that's because this whole process of talking about Dad is revealing about my own emotional needs. Is it a little egotistical, this contrivance to make the kids remember something they would otherwise forget? I like to think that this is about the children and their grandfather, but perhaps it's more about me.

As ever, I'd love to know what readers think.

¹Bering, J. M., & Bjorklund, D. F. (2004). The natural emergence of reasoning about the afterlife as a developmental regularity. Developmental Psychology, 40, 217–233.

² Harris, P. L., & Giménez, M. (2005). Children's acceptance of conflicting testimony: The case of death. Journal of Cognition and Culture, 5, 143–164.

Don't keep it to yourself

Charles Fernyhough — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 10:46:42 +0000

Isaac, five, is doing some homework at the kitchen table. He has been given some letter shapes to trace, and he is concentrating hard, working on the flicks and flourishes that link one letter to another. He is relaxed and happy, and enjoying the chance to show off what he has been learning at school. His little hands still find the pencil a handful, and the complexities of joined-up writing make this demanding work. I am not watching his hands, though, or the fine motor actions that drive his pencil lead across the page. I am watching his lips.

Have you ever been in a kindergarten classroom, or watched a first-grade class getting busy with a task? If so, you'll know that there is no such thing as quiet seatwork. It is not social chit-chat that adds to the decibel levels in these situations, so much as a different kind of speech. Give a child a puzzle to work on, and they will talk: not to their neighbors or their teachers, but to themselves. The more that psychologists investigate this phenomenon, the more convinced they become that the study of self-directed speech can add something important to our picture of how cognition works.

We call this phenomenon private speech. Piaget was the first to take it seriously as a issue in developmental psychology, but it is Vygotsky's explanation of it that attracts the most interest these days. Vygotsky argued that talking to yourself shapes thought. Thinking begins as a linguistic collaboration with other individuals, which gradually becomes internalized into a private dialogue with the self. When you see a child talking to herself during an episode of play or puzzle-solving, you are witnessing just such a private dialogue.

As development progresses, these private dialogues become steadily less noticeable to an external observer. Here's how I describe this process of internalization in my book A Thousand Days of Wonder: A Scientist's Chronicle of His Daughter's Developing Mind, where I describe Athena's persistent attempts to solve a jigsaw puzzle:

Since she brought a clattering conclusion to her first attempt, Athena's renewed application to her puzzle is proving to have a rather different feel. [...] The rich, mutually sensitive dialogue of a moment ago has been almost entirely appropriated by Athena. She is doing the elaborating for herself, such as making police car noises to accompany the placing of the car. She doesn't need Lizzie [her mother] to bring her attention repeatedly back to the task; she can keep her own self focused. And through it all she is talking: naming pieces, stating their destinations, asking questions and then answering them on her own. We are witnessing a new kind of thought taking shape, transforming from a shared, social activity to Athena's dialogue with herself. As thinking continues to move inwards-as it becomes ‘internalized'-she will be able to conduct these dialogues of thought completely silently. Like a pensive adult, she'll do it all in her head. Language will still be mediating her thinking, but it will be a new kind of language, the sort that only she will hear.

Researchers have been studying private speech in the laboratory, classroom, and other contexts for several decades now. A couple of months ago we published the first edited volume on this topic since Diaz and Berk's 1992 collection¹. This was a great opportunity for me and my co-editors (Adam Winsler from George Mason University and Nacho Montero from the Universidad Autónoma of Madrid) to see what was going on in the field as a whole. Our contributors describe some fascinating findings on private speech in children and adults, in typical and atypical development, in the classroom and in the MRI scanner. You can read more about the resulting volume here.

¹R. M. Diaz and L. E. Berk (1992). Private Speech: From social interaction to self-regulation. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

May I have your attention, please?

Charles Fernyhough — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 12:48:28 +0000

Image by BreckenPool via Flickr

A clearing of the throat will usually do it. In the old days, they would prefix a comment with something like 'I say,...' (these days, it is more likely to be a slackerishly inflected 'Hey,...'). A basic rule of conversation is that you don't start imparting your wisdom until you know you have got the attention of the intended recipient. Unless you've prepared the ground in this way, your words are likely to fall on deaf ears.

When do children learn about this essential convention? It must have a lot to do with their developing understanding of how attention works. Anyone who has spent time with a toddler will know that they will just launch into a conversation with little concern for whether their audience can keep up. Those early dialogues are full of attempts, on the part of the adult, to establish exactly what the topic of conversation has changed to now. Indeed, Piaget's explanation of the phenomenon of private speech (speech that doesn't seem to be addressed to anyone except the self) was that children were attempting to communicate without doing enough to adapt their utterances to the perspective of the listener. They weren't, he argued, doing enough to line up their own way of thinking with that of the person within earshot. (I'll be writing some more on this topic in a later post.)

At five, Isaac has a good grip of this convention, although perhaps an unconventional way of following it. When he wants to make a point or attract someone's attention, he makes a sharp quacking sound, blowing a raspberry through his clenched fist like you might do if you wanted to mimic Donald Duck. It's loud, striking and effective. It stops us in our tracks. It's his call for social attention, and it works. How I'll miss it when it turns to throat-clearing, a teenagerish sigh, or whatever the latest slangy bid for attention might involve.

What is it like to be a small child? III

Charles Fernyhough — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 12:55:56 +0000

In the last of this series of posts, I want to talk about some contemporary research in developmental psychology which offers clues to the experience of a small child. Last time, I mentioned how the Maurers had made good use of scientific knowledge about infant perception in their imagining of the world of the newborn. With further advances in knowledge since the time the Maurers were writing in the late 1980s, we now have a detailed picture of these perceptual capacities. We know that babies' visual acuity (the clarity of their vision) starts off pretty poor and improves quickly, so that by about eight months it is close to that of an adult. Babies' colour vision is very similar to an adult's by around four months, and newborns show many of the same perceptual constancies that adults do. (To see an example of a perceptual constancy in action, try holding a book in front of you at an angle. The actual shape that hits your eyes will be something like a parallelogram, but you will perceive it as a rectangle. Essentially, your brain makes adjustments to the distortion of the shape caused by the angling.) All of these facts give us important clues for imagining what the world looks like to an infant, and this body of knowledge is being added to all the time.

We also have a rapidly changing picture of the social world of infants. Those asocial blobs described by past psychological theories are now seen as having complex and sophisticated social lives. We now know that babies are attuned to their social partners from the very first days of life, and that in turn helps us to imagine how the world must look to them. For example, a study by Farroni and colleagues showed that newborn babies, despite rather terrible visual acuity, could tell the difference between a face that was looking at them directly and one whose eyes were averted. The babies preferred looking at the face with the direct gaze, suggesting sensitivity to this important social cue from right after birth. In my book, I speculate on what this might mean for the infant's view of the world.

Modern technology has also played its part in developing our picture of a baby's experience. Recent advances in camera technology have led to the development of head-mounted video cameras and eye-tracking equipment which could only have been dreamed of by previous generations of researchers. The result has been a clearer understanding than ever of where babies and toddlers look and how they construct a visual scene. Such studies have shown that young children don't attend to a small group of objects, as we would typically do, but rather bring them into their zone of attention (often with conspicuous, whole-body movements) one at a time. Analysis of footage taken by head-mounted video cameras shows lots of interest in people's hands (the baby's own, and those of the parents).

Finally, the growth of developmental cognitive neuroscience, whose proponents try to map developing psychological capacities onto changes in brain function, has given us a whole new way of thinking about the mental world of the baby. In her forthcoming book, The Philosophical Baby, the cognitive scientist Alison Gopnik argues that the study of brain activation in adults, combined with what we know about how a baby's brain is wired up, gives us an important clue to what consciousness is like for small children. Babies lack crucial inhibitory circuits which shut down certain irrelevant parts of the brain while attention is focused on a particular task. Because they are neurologically incapable of focusing their attention like we can, babies remain open to all the experiences around them. Rather than being a tightly focused spotlight, infant consciousness is like a lantern, ready to shine its light on everything around it. Gopnik's intriguing conclusion is that babies, barely credited with proper awareness by scientists of the past, are in some ways more conscious than we are4.

Works Cited

For an overview of research on perceptual development in infancy, see Philip J. Kellman and Martha E. Arterberry, The cradle of knowledge: Development of perception in infancy, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998.

Teresa Farroni et al., "Eye contact detection in humans from birth", PNAS, 9th July 2002, pp. 9602-9605

Yoshida, H., & Smith, L. B. (2008). What's in view for toddlers? Using a head camera to study visual experience. Infancy, 13, 229-248.

For more on Gopnik's ideas, see Jonah Lehrer's piece in the Boston Globe.

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What is it like to be a small child? II

Charles Fernyhough — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 09:08:21 +0000

Cover via Amazon

In my last post, I promised to say more about those explorations of young children's experience that have taken scientific research as their inspiration. To my mind, some of these popular science treatments have been as thoughtful and imaginative as their counterparts in the world of fiction. Here are a few of the books that have made the biggest impression on me.

Although it is more than two decades old now, Daphne and Charles Maurer's The World of the Newborn is still timely, relevant and fascinating. Drawing on Daphne Maurer's groundbreaking research on perceptual development in infancy, the Maurers' book tries to convert scientific findings into an understanding of what it must be like to be a newborn baby. They write compellingly about the experience of being in the womb, the upheavals of birth, the development of the five senses, and end with some fascinating speculations on infant synesthesia: the conversion of sensory information in one modality, such as vision, into an experience in another modality, such as touch.

Another favourite from the same era is Daniel N. Stern's Diary of a Baby. While the Maurers focus on cognitive development, Stern's greater interest is in the emotions. As well as giving the depth of scientific and theoretical background that you would expect from a leader in the field, Stern takes the unusual step of actually giving the small child—a fictional infant named Joey—a voice. We see Joey responding to the sight of the bars of his crib, for example, or hungrily encountering the nipple, or reacting to his mother's face:

Her face becomes a light breeze that reaches across to touch me. It caresses me. I quicken. My sails fill with her. The dance within me is set free.¹

Stern's is a poetic and ambitious attempt to interpret a young child's experience on the basis of real science and careful thought.

One other book that is right at the top of my list wears its learning lightly, but is no less profound a meditation on young children's experience. You won't learn much about Piaget, Vygotsky or Bowlby from reading Brian Hall's marvellous Madeleine's World, but you will learn plenty about becoming a human. Hall, an acclaimed novelist, has simply set out to write a biography of his three-year-old daughter, and in doing so has brought a small human being into touching, tender focus. I could quote from this funny, moving book all day long, but here is just a flavour of it, a snippet of two-year-old Madeleine's thoughts about the mysteries of death:

She knew the word, but not from any of her books. Will fell down, the wolf was butted into the water, Angus was nipped, a variety of characters fell asleep, and everyone pooped. But no one died. The rainbow that disappeared, crying, came the closest, but Madeleine had banished that story.²

All the books I have mentioned are a few years old now. Research into infant psychology has moved on apace in that time, and next time I'll be asking where we're currently at in our scientific understanding of young children's experience.

¹ Stern, D. N. (1990). Diary of a Baby: What your child sees, feels, and experiences. New York: Basic Books. p. 59.

²Hall, B. (1997). Madeleine's World: A biography of a three-year-old. New York: Houghton Mifflin. p. 211.

What is it like to be a small child? I

Charles Fernyhough — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 16:43:25 +0000

In my last post, I talked about my search through the world of fiction for clues about the experience of a small child. I suggested that we can probably learn more from scientists on this topic than we can from fiction-writers (although, as a novelist myself, I feel that I'm rather letting the side down by saying that). In this post, I want to mention three main problems that face us in attempting imaginative reconstructions of the consciousness of an infant or toddler.

The first obstacle in our path is memory. The problem of infantile amnesia, as it is known, is one that fascinated Sigmund Freud, causing him to note that not enough attention is paid to the loss of our early years from memory1. A century on, we know much more about the circumstances under which people can and cannot remember events from their early years, although we still do not have an explanation that satisfies everyone. One question that is currently interesting researchers is whether there is a sensitive period for the laying down of memories from infancy which, if it is not taken advantage of, leads to those memories being lost forever. I have recently written on this topic on my other blog, and so won't go into it further here. The main point is that none of us can remember what it is like to be a small child; if we think we can, then our memories are probably deceiving us.

The second obstacle is a language barrier. Although children become experts in their native languages amazingly quickly, a child's early experiences will not always be matched for richness by the language she can use to express them in. Most two- and three-year-olds are not linguistically competent enough to give detailed accounts of their experience. Novelists find it hard enough to put a consciousness into words; asking a toddler to do anything remotely similar is simply asking too much.

A third problem relates to the changing nature of consciousness itself. It may come as a surprise to some parents, but not everyone believes that infants and toddlers are conscious in quite the same way that we are. This is a true can of worms, and to do the arguments justice would take much more space than I have here. Let's just say that consciousness must depend on a certain degree of cognitive and neurological sophistication, and that this is just one more reason why we cannot assume that the subjective experience of a toddler will be qualitatively like our own. There is one school of thought, for example, which sees consciousness emerging gradually in childhood, on a schedule constrained by gradually developing neurological sophistication2.

So much for the problems; what about the solutions? Next time I'll look at some of the attempts to reconstruct young children's experience that have taken scientific research as their inspiration.

1Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 15 (translated and edited by James Strachey), p. 200, London: Penguin, 1963.

2Philip David Zelazo, Helena Hong Gao and Rebecca Todd, "The development of consciousness in ontogeny", in Cambridge Handbook of Consciousness (edited by P. D. Zelazo, M. Moscovitch and E. Thompson), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

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Where did all the toddlers go?

Charles Fernyhough — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 09:02:36 +0000

Image by mikebaird via Flickr

My project for the last few years has been to try to understand small children's mental worlds by combining scientific knowledge with a healthy dose of imaginative projection. I'll be talking more about this in the weeks to come as I describe some of the scientific research that has inspired my own imaginative efforts. In this post, I want to mention a conundrum that has been puzzling me from the beginning, and which I think tells us something important about our attitudes to small children.

When I started writing on this topic, I thought I might get some clues about young children's experience from the way that writers have depicted them in fiction. Writers through the ages have described an amazing range of experience, both human and non-human. If you want to ask what it is like to inhabit a particular part of the universe, you could do worse than consult a novelist, poet or short-story writer.

The depictions that I was looking for, though, turned out to be hard to find. There are babies aplenty in fiction, although they function mostly as plot devices, or as something for a ‘real' character (usually an adult) to react emotionally to. They don't tell their own stories. There are some wonderful child narrators in fiction—think of Scout Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird, for example—but they are rarely younger than around five (Scout is six at the start of Harper Lee's novel). The first-person experiences of humans between the ages of zero and five are almost never represented in a way that is true to their psychology.

I find this a real puzzle. I have read novels narrated by shopping trolleys and Sumerian urns, but I have not read any in which the story-teller is a healthy human toddler. You could argue that small children are unlikely to make good narrators, embarked as they are on a quest to acquire (or at least to realise an innate disposition for) fundamental concepts of time, agency and self. I disagree. One of the themes that emerged most strongly for me in writing A Thousand Days of Wonder was how much Athena made sense of her experience in terms of narrative—how she applied principles of story-telling to a world of information that needed to be organized. Nevertheless, young children's narratives have their quirks, and won't necessarily be the stuff of satisfying grown-up fiction.

Forget about narration, then, and show me some little kids who function as proper fictional characters, with their own unique sets of desires, motivations, secrets, and beliefs. They aren't there. Young children can be sources of family color or overburdened little confidantes, but the fictional realisations of their characters rarely match up to what adults ask them to do. Is that because the personality of a three- or four-year-old is not yet formed? I can't imagine that many parents would agree with that idea, and yet it is what writers' depictions of young children implicitly seem to be telling us.

You'll note that I'm making a particular assumption in all of this. Young children have subjectivity, character, and personality; those experiences and patterns of being just aren't necessarily like our own. I think this is one of several very good reasons why toddlers are almost invisible in fiction. Next time I'll be suggesting that our best way of understanding a young child's distinctive subjectivity is to turn to science. I'll end with a fairly major caveat: I haven't read everything (far from it), and I am certainly not an expert on the literatures of non-Western cultures which might give a much richer depiction of the experiences of little people. I hope that commentators on this post will prove me wrong.