Yesterday, when my youngest granddaughter and her little brother arrived at our house to spend the day, she got right to work, asking my wife, “What liquids do we have?”
The scientist at 5.
So my wife gathered oil, vinegar, milk and other things together, and my granddaughter started meticulously measuring amounts, calling them out to my wife in milliliters, and mixing the liquids in different concentrations in little plastic cups.
My wife’s job was to write down the amounts and observations. My granddaughter would draw the results next to the notations, when she found them visually interesting.
She kept saying, “I love doing this! I love it!” My wife observed that that was a good thing, since she wants to be a scientist.
She’s five years old, and just finished 4K at the local Chinese-immersion charter school. So she also speaks Mandarin, and hasn’t started regular kindergarten yet.
Our girl’s wicked smart.
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Well alright! How precocious! She’s going to be fun to watch growing up. 🙂
Yeah, but be careful–soon there’ll be tears and affairs, amirite? Can’t let girls be scientists….
Scientists and engineers change the world. Encourage her. Enable her.
That is very cool. Buy her some of these toys wish they had them when I was a kid. I just played with my brother’s Lincoln logs, tinker toys, erector sets, and those sets from radio shack with the springs and wires where you could make a gazillion different things.
https://www.yahoo.com/tech/these-3-high-tech-toys-help-teach-girls-to-stick-with-94203491069.html
There are girl-scientist Lego sets. And link her to Emily Lakadawalla’s Twitter account.
Meanwhile, my grandson was in the next room with his trains, crashing them and calling out “derailed!” He’s 3.
My wife said I forgot to mention that our young scientist already reads fluently. Whatever she sees written, she calls out without hesitation. A big shock, the first few times she did it. We had no idea…
My wife is thinking about taking my grandson’s trains out and putting them in our garage. She can’t get him to sit still to be read to.
She never had that problem with any of our other grandchildren — who are, of course, all girls. He squirms and wants to hop down and get back to racing and crashing his cars and trains…
Obviously you are enforcing gender stereotypes on him and making him into a boy. You must stop calling him “big guy”,”sport”, and “buddy”. Stick to “hey you”, “person”, and “non-specific child”.
And if he picks up a stick and starts pretending it’s a gun, put him in timeout and tell him he
can get the stick back after you complete a background check.
Reminds me of one of my favorite quotes:
“Some parents say it is toy guns that make boys warlike. But give a boy a rubber duck and he will seize its neck like the butt of a pistol and shout ‘Bang!'” -George Will
Yep.
Of course, we may have gone a TAD overboard in my generation — toy cowboy sixguns, toy rifles, toy .50-cal machine guns (I am NOT making this up) and toy hand grenades.
You’re too young to remember the awesome Mattel “Shootin’ Shell” system, There were a lot of different guns in this series, but what made it special was the ammo. There were brass shells with built-in springs, and these gray plastic slugs that clicked into the shells. When the firing pin hit the back of the shell, the spring would launch the shell out the barrel of the gun. If you wanted sound, there were little round caps you could stick onto the back of the shells.
Oh, but it gets more extreme than that.
There was this little mechanical man about two feet high, with a moving arm with its own pistol attached. You’d start the mechanism, and if you could draw and shoot and hit him in the right spot quickly enough, the mechanism would stop. If you failed, BANG! you’re dead.
I had one of those. I could draw and shoot from the hip and get him, as any self-respecting cowboy should be able to do.
I don’t know what happened to me over the years. Now I can’t hit the side of a barn with a revolver. And I’m not as quick as I was in my Wichita days. So I have to live in fear that one day, I’ll be minding my own business, having a drink in a saloon, and some little two-foot-high sidewinder lookin’ to make hisself a rep will draw down on me…
Just so you don’t think I’m making it up, here’s what I’m talking about.
Before the “Shootin’ Shell” toys, there was Mattel’s “Fanner Fifty.” I had one of those, too…
Then, there was a Shootin’ Shell version of the Fifty. Here you can see the whole system in action…
“You can tell it’s Mattel — it’s swell.”
If erector sets make engineers, it’s a wonder I didn’t grow up to be a terrorist or something…
“There was this little mechanical man about two feet high, with a moving arm with its own pistol attached. You’d start the mechanism, and if you could draw and shoot and hit him in the right spot quickly enough, the mechanism would stop. If you failed, BANG! you’re dead.”
You had me at “Hello”.
I think Saki has a story with that plot.
The Toys Of Peace
http://www.eastoftheweb.com/short-stories/UBooks/ToysPeac.shtml
We actually did try raising our first couple of kids in a gender-neutral way, because that was all the rage in the mid-70s and we were on board. Before our first child, we painted the nursery in neutral greens and yellows. She grew up to be a lawyer.
Our second child — who created the video on the flag rally — is the father of the little guy with the trains. When our son was a toddler, sitting in his high chair, he picked up an L-shaped crust of toast, started aiming it around the room and saying “POW! POW! POW!” Broke my wife’s heart. For my part, I understood, although I felt bad for her. He had not been exposed to ANYTHING that would encourage that behavior. It just came out.
Fascination with trains is not a bad thing. My husband and several of his colleagues are seriously fascinated by trains. A few of those even have people skills!
Oh, I don’t think it’s a bad thing at all. We just wish we could interest him sometimes in something that doesn’t have wheels. That’s where it started — a fascination with how wheels work. Since before he could walk, he’s been lying down on the floor to get his eyes on the same level as wheels, and checking the way they roll on various surfaces.
And he’s learned a lot. Well before he turned 3, he was talking about “shunting” cars off onto “sidings,” and other relatively esoteric concepts.
He only graduated to making them crash fairly recently. And now, they ALWAYS crash…
A career with Amtrak seems likely…
“We just wish we could interest him sometimes in something that doesn’t have wheels.”
Do airplanes count as something “without wheels”? Henry loves trains, trucks, and construction equipment — but most of all, he’s an airplane kid.
Our boy likes planes, even when landing gear are not deployed. But he really grooves on the way wheels roll…
I see a future in STEM…
“Meanwhile, my grandson was in the next room with his trains, crashing them and calling out ‘derailed!’ He’s 3.”
Sounds exactly like my three year old son.
Read this from a comedian on Twitter today:
“A man showed a photograph of gluten to my son Gennder on the bus today. I am livid & will be extremely blogging about this”