Brain Rules for Baby

Author:John Medina
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pear Press
Published: 2010-09-29T16:00:00+00:00

The toddler in the litter box

The main thing to consider when you think of exposing your kids to Screen World is the content of what your child will be consuming, for two reasons.

The first is that kids are really good at imitation. (Remember the light box and the baby touching her forehead to it?) This ability to reproduce a behavior, after witnessing it only once, is called deferred imitation. Deferred imitation is an astonishing skill that develops rapidly. A 13-month-old child can remember an event a week after a single exposure. By the time she is almost a year and a half, she can imitate an event four months after a single exposure. The skill never leaves children, something the advertising industry has known for decades. The implications are powerful. If toddlers can embed into memory a complex series of events after one exposure, imagine what they can consume in hours spent online and watching TV. (Not to mention what children are consuming as they view their parents behaviors 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Deferred imitation helps explain why we are still so prone to imitating our parent’s behaviors years after we leave the nest, as I was doing with my wife and the car keys.)

With children, deferred imitation can reveal itself in unexpected ways, as this tale from a young mother reveals.

We had a great Christmas. At one point, I noticed that my three year old daughter had disappeared. I went looking for her and I found her in my master bathroom. I asked her why she used my bathroom instead of hers and she said she was “being a kitty”. I look over at the litterbox and sure enough, she had gone poo in the litterbox! I was speechless...

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