| Small Minds |
By: Lois Kellerman, columnist, “Mother Knows Best”
On 12/11/05
“My head is bigger than yours!”
“Is it?” I asked absent-mindedly, reaching for more popcorn. My son was six and into measuring things. This particular night’s technique involved the use of string with knots tied in it. The distance between each knot was one ruler long.
| "Despite my eagerness to educate my son toward different assumptions, I decided the lecture on what was inside the head could wait." |
“Mom!” He inserted his head between me and the television, pressing his brow against my glasses. “Did you hear what I said?”
“You said…hey, wait a minute. David, your head isn’t bigger than mine!”
“My head is so bigger!” David gleefully shouted.
“Is not!”
“Is so!”
As I opened my mouth to once again protest, my husband, Hal, cleared his throat. Peering over his newspaper, he said, “Drop it, Lois.” He knew I could never win. After all, I had fallen into the “is so, is not” trap.
During the silence that followed, David wrapped and rewrapped the string around his finger. Finally, he asked, “Don’t you want to know why I said my head is bigger than yours?”
“Why?” I asked.
“Because my foot is much smaller than my head, but your foot isn’t, Mom. And…”
He knew he was on to something, but he didn’t know how to draw down the conclusion. If he’d been able to put it into words he would have said something like this: “If we look at the size of the rest of our body parts, my head is proportionally bigger than yours.”
Actually, this discovery was amazing. Artists for millennia before the Renaissance had failed to notice what my son had observed with just string and unabashed observation: A child’s head is larger than an adult’s in terms of its relative size to the rest of the body.
“Yes, you’re right.” I said. “Your head is bigger than mine.”
At this I heard my husband’s newspaper rustling. I looked across the room and saw that his mouth was wide open. Now it was my turn. Sensing that he was about to express disbelief, I said, “Drop it, Hal.” I didn’t have time to tell him the line of thought that had led to my response, nor the fact that I intentionally hadn’t made my sentence conditional: “In one way, your head could be seen as bigger than mine.”
Sometimes kids need to be allowed the full glory of their breakthrough moments without the intrusion of picky adult narration.
“Yaay! I’m right, I’m right!” David sang, dancing around in circles.
I laughed, suddenly remembering a boyfriend in school who had measured my forehead with his thumb and forefinger and then – after comparing the length to his own brow, proclaiming that it was higher than mine – said that it indicated his superior intelligence.
Despite my eagerness to educate my son toward different assumptions, I decided the lecture on what was inside the head could wait. Left-brain right-brain concepts… the bridge between them—the Corpus Callosum—and what role it may play in the developmental and female/male experiences… brain versus mind theories, and so forth: it would take a long time to explain. Besides, it was already past David’s bedtime.
As I marched David off to bed in his footed pajamas, he turned to me with a grin:
“Mom, don’t the people with the bigger heads get to stay up late?”
I stifled a smile, sighed, and stared down at him. “Just keep walking, David. Just keep walking.”
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