Jared has discovered his. I'm sure he's had one for quite a while, but he hasn't been able to communicate effectively such that we realized he was living in such a rich pretend world.
It started out a couple of weeks ago when he took his beloved Thomas the Train[1], put him in his high chair and said "Thomas eat!" and then started moving pretend food to Thomas's mouth with his hand. Over the next week he confused the heck out of us by demanding to 'eat!', so we would try to feed him a snack... but then it turned out he wanted to feed us air (or "brokri!" as he says when you ask him what we're eating). Since then he's also enjoyed putting Thomas or his bear on the swing and pushing them (after buckling them in for safety, of course), putting his helicopter in the air and repeating 'bop bop bop bop' like his Daddy taught him and a variety of other new games.
When we first had Jared (almost two years now? yikes) I eagerly looked forward to his Major Milestones: smiling, cooing, turning over, crawling, solid food, table food, walking. All of those are very physical milestones, however... Why does the literature not give as much airplay to the mental milestones such as this one? For some reason this outward expression of his imagination is a huge milestone in my mind, and I can't help but grin everytime he displays it.
[1] The rubber on the wheels wore out on our two month old Thomas this week so that it does not have much traction on the train track. Fortunately, earlier that day I'd bid to buy two additional ones on ebay because of my fear that one day we wouldn't be able to find Thomas and Jared would have a meltdown. Disaster narrowly averted!
> Why does the literature not give as much airplay to the mental milestones such as this one?
Maybe you're not reading the right literature? :-)
Seriously, there's lots of literature on childhood mental development.
In fact, the famous practical epistomologist Jean Piaget called out the ability to play "let's pretend" as the dividing line between his "sensorimotor" and "preoperational" phases.
In the first phase, mental development is primarily about making sense of sensory input and translating that into motor skills.
In the second, the child can understand that a picture of a dog represents a dog, but can't consistently reason logically about abstract entities. The combination of ability to manipulate abstractions of reality with a lack of real-world logic can certainly give rise to a rich fantasy life!
Posted by: Eric Lippert | April 22, 2005 at 02:55 PM
Ah, I should have clarified =) The literature in question is not anything as brainy as books *focused* on said mental development, but rather the literature that every new mom must trod through for some hidden rite of passage, such as "What to expect the first year".
Posted by: Cynical Mom | April 22, 2005 at 05:16 PM
It only gets better from here. the explosion of their imagination, ideas and words coming out of their little mouths that you hear and ask, "where did that come from?" the delight in watching as their creativities and imaginations take off... My daughter would spend hours and hours and hours with her little plastic animals just talking and talking, doing amazing imaginary scenarios, we'd just listen and it would be funny and amazing.
Posted by: chip | April 23, 2005 at 05:51 AM
Oh wait! Liam (3.5) now has conversations with himself. I hear him in the back seat replaying some very normal everyday family situation like mommy or daddy refusing to let him have another cookie. So I ask him what he's talking about. "Mom! (in exasperated voice) I'm just talking to myself."
Posted by: Karen | April 23, 2005 at 08:32 PM