Following up my aborted post from the other day: Children sense patterns and act upon that. At first, the patterns are narrow, especially in time – two events taking place at different times won’t be linked together. But as the child grows, the recognized patterns spans wider and wider contexts.

Children act on recognized patterns, but to compensate (it seems) for the narrow patterns, the child randomly tries anything it can think of. I think that this is how many of the early words enter their vocabularies: they randomly try out different sounds, and since parents so badly want their children to speak, as soon as they hear something resembling a real word (this is especially the case for the words “mama” and “papa”) they reinforce it by giving positive feedback. So those words are reinforced and will be repeated; the child has little clue of the meaning, except for the words fitting in with some recognized pattern.

To add to this, children also copy actions of their parents and of other children. Again, I don’t think they understand much what they are doing early on; they just do what results in positive feedback, or in otherwise pleasant surprises.

When we were in Copenhagen, we visited the Verner Panton exhibition at the Danish Design Centre. There, the biggest impact on my daughter was Panton’s Fantasy Landscape Room. A day or two after we had gotten home, we showed her a picture of it from the cover of the book Sixties Design – to which she replied “Boo,” meaning Granny, who went with us there. So she linked a picture of a place with the memory of being there a few days earlier, together with her grandmother. It was the first time we’ve seen her refer to something that had happened in the past.

Or in other words, this was the widest pattern we had seen her recognize.

At some point, the pattern recognition gets so wide and deep that the child begins to understand the meaning of things experienced. But I’m not sure when this happens. I’m not sure it has happened to my daughter yet (18 months in a couple of days).

This explains why reasoning with small children doesn’t work that well. You feel like a respectful parent, but it won’t work – you have to show respect in actions and not words.

This also explains why punishments and rewards work, if stuck to consistently. And I believe it explains why applying punishments and rewards is a stupid rearing strategy for children that have passed the point of understanding the meaning of things. Positive and negative feedback makes sense when it’s intended to strengthen and weaken patterns – but it completely misses the very important Why that bigger children need to be able to make judgment for themselves. The only why that is conveyed is an implicit “Because I, your parent, says so!”

And speaking of positive and negative feedback, I have a feeling that positive feedback is far more effective than negative feedback. I wouldn’t classify negative feedback as something that works if it were in the form of violence. Sure, it weakens patterns, but it conveys if not hate, so at least not love. When you hit a child that simply acts on narrow and shallow patterns, what do you convey to it? I believe that you should convey nothing but love to a child, and not use love and hate (or not-love) as means to strengthen and weaken a child’s patterns.