Kid Amnesiac

For a variety of reasons, as of yesterday I had only posted one half of 2011’s pictures. Oops! This can be boiled down to my not liking the new Gallery interface (I’ve been complaining about that for a year I think), many of Simon’s pictures this year coming from Matt’s Blackberry when we were on the go, doing more work for other websites, and then laying off the computer during neck-gate.

So blah, blah, blah, a poor showing for photos for 2011. I’ve begun making up ground, so for those of you who are feeling deprived (ehem, Mom), please note that I have uploaded May, September, most of October (a few mobile pics remain), November, and December to date. That just leaves June, the month we traveled to San Francisco. Even being more discriminating in what I post will make that one take a while. Maybe by Monday…

Anyway, click on the image at the top or use the side menu to access the photo album and sample the year in photos that all posted late.

One of the more challenging facets of childrearing is trying to discern the difference between individual characteristics and general developmental stages. Almost all babies are lovey-dovey and smiley at around six months, for example, so how is a parent to know if their child is affectionate or just hitting a set stage? You really don’t, and you especially don’t if you only have one child. I last wrote about this in November 2010, when I learned that Simon’s style of playing hide and seek reflected an age-specific inability to shift perspectives.

Just in the last 24 hours I’ve encountered two more instances of developmental stages being able to explain behavioral characteristics. I’ll start with the ugly bit that I can explain with anecdote, then move on to actual science.

This Christmas, Simon’s gift getting behavior left a lot to be desired. He cleaned up pretty well at Chanukah, too, but was one of five kids getting presents, and I mostly tried to make him wait his turn between opening gifts. Christmas, however, was another story entirely. Our family tradition is to have Christmas Eve at my house and open presents after dinner. Simon is the only kid at Christmas, and as such he gets a disproportionate amount of loot. This has always been the case, but this year the scales were more out of balance than usual. Matt and I got him several small things this year instead of one big thing, and Jim and Evie’s gift to the adult children was a vacation this spring, a lovely gesture, but something that cannot be wrapped and set under a tree.

What this scenario spawned, to my horror and embarrassment, was a kid who grabbed, shredded, ripped, and tore his way into presents, only to hardly look at them before saying delightful things like, “What else did I get?” I didn’t see it coming and was somewhat at a loss to know what to do. In the end, I tried to correct him on the spot and then set aside some to open on the last day of Chanukah. We needed to stem the tide somehow.

So did my lovely boy turn into an ungrateful brat overnight? I was a tad worried until chatting with Caroline’s parents yesterday. I described the scene and my horror, and Carrie (Caroline’s mom) made sympathetic murmurs on her end. Turns out, Caroline did the same thing this year AND last year. And this is just about the least grabby kid you could imagine. What’s more, now that I think about it, I remember a Chanukah when my nephew Nathan was six or so when he took a careful inventory of presents to make sure he had the most. My sister-in-law was mortified. How I wish I could go back in time and say, “Tia, it’s not him—it’s the age!” Which isn’t to say that such behavior should go uncorrected or that all kids do it, just that it seems pretty common and isn’t the end of the world.

Next up comes the science. This past August, I struggled to create and describe an inventory of new behaviors in a post titled (Almost) Five. What I was seeing was Simon’s sudden ability to accomplish many new physical and cognitive tasks, an increased sociability, better empathy, a greater preference for his own gender, and a general sense that he was taking his place as a little citizen of the world.

Lo and behold, The New York Times ran an article yesterday called “Now We Are Six: The Hormone Surge of Middle Childhood,” which detailed and explained the exact suite of behavioral and physical changes I had attempted to catalog and characterize.

According to the article, middle childhood begins around five or six, when adrenal glands begin to pump out brain-affecting hormones such as dihydroepiandrosterone, or DHEA. This endocrinologial event is called adrenarche, and it fuels a great leap in cognitive ability and ambition. At about the same time, the brain has reached nearly its adult size. With all the pieces in place, the brain sets about establishing and reinforcing the billions of synaptic connections that are required for intellectual, emotional, and social development.  Here’s the money quote from the article:

Middle childhood is when the parts of the brain most closely associated with being human finally come online: our ability to control our impulses, to reason, to focus, to plan for the future…

… Middle childhood is the time to make sense and make friends. “This is the period when kids move out of the family context and into the neighborhood context,” Dr. Campbell said.

The all-important theory of mind arises: the awareness that other people have minds, plans and desires of their own. Children become obsessed with social groups and divide along gender lines, girls playing with girls, boys with boys. They have an avid appetite for learning the local social rules, whether of games, slang, style or behavior.

That’s exactly what I started seeing in Simon this summer! I attributed it to his turning five, and that was certainly part of it, but more accurately this summer is when Simon entered middle childhood. According to the article, middle childhood has been largely overlooked in science as it lacks the drama of infancy or puberty. But you know, I think drama is highly over-rated. To me, these quiet and unflamboyant changes are the most exciting and interesting developments I’ve tracked thus far.

Hurray for middle childhood!

Last year, all spring it seemed, Simon increased his rate of daytime sleeping, had more night-time sleep disturbances (usually involving waking up between 11:30 and midnight and hollering “Ow!”), and ate non-stop. At the end of this period, he had grown about four inches in six months, hit a plateau, and started eating less, sleeping less, and yelling “Ow!” less.

That period of tranquility appears to be drawing to a close. For the last week, Simon has resumed non-stop eating, mid-afternoon napping, and nighttime partial awakenings. He’s also grown another inch since we last measured him in late July.

So is he gearing up for another giant spurt? I’m sure he is, but I’m not sure what kind of spurt is coming our way. It could be height again, but Simon seems to be on the cusp of a huge cognitive shift as well. Here are some signs we’re seeing:

Creative:

More imaginative play, and imaginative play that lasts longer. It is largely because of this that Simon has been seeking out the company of slightly older boys of late.  He’s also started drawing more pictures and telling us stories about what he’s drawn. Drawing still isn’t a big draw for him (see what I did there?), but he’s doing it way more than he used to.

Math Readiness:

The leaps in math understanding have been huge and are largely owing to playing Cars Monopoly. All that obsessive money counting has resulted in Simon’s ability to do simple addition and subtraction in his head up into the teens. He can’t do it all the time, and the longer he thinks about something, the more likely he is to make a mistake. But more than half the time, if I ask how much money he will have after he buys a property, collects rent on a property, or has to pay rent, he gets it right.

He’s also begun writing all his numbers correctly and likes to play a game where I say a three-digit number and he writes it down. This comes after months and months of Simon obsessively quantifying things: How old is X? How much older is X than Y?  How old will X be when Y is Z?  How tall is the tallest man? How tall is Daddy? How much taller is the tallest man than Daddy? And on, and on, and on.

Then there’s the endless grilling about what we do every hour of the day I’ve been subjected to for a few weeks now. I was just about to stop answering him when one day last week he read the clock in the car and announced that at that time the next day he’d be in swimming class. Now I understand that he was measuring, sorting, and categorizing time the same way he measures, sorts, and categorizes everything else.

Reading Readiness:

And the biggie… Six months ago or so, Simon was trying hard to read. He knew all his letters and their corresponding sounds, but he couldn’t blend them. I couldn’t help him, nor was I inclined to. I’m not a teacher, and I suspected he wasn’t truly ready yet. Then he abruptly turned his attention away from books and reading to more physical pursuits: We spent the next several months hitting balls in the back-yard, biking, taking swim lessons, learning to climb, and kicking a soccer ball.

And now we’re back. Today, as we got ready to leave school, Simon looked at the sign beside our car and said, “No, paar…” The sign read “No Parking”, and Simon was able to get two of the syllables. Later, when we stopped for a treat while holiday shopping, he noticed the sign on the coffee shop door. “Mommy, what’s that? No  smoh…” That would be the “No Smoking” sign.

Now, I’m not saying he’s going to start reading next week, next month, or next spring. I have no idea, honestly. What I do think is that the wheels inside Simon’s head are spinning at an accelerated rate these days, and that a few months from now I’m going to have a kid who linguistically, socially, or mathematically is far ahead of where he is now.

Also? He might be doing all of this while wearing size 6 pants. Cross your fingers for good post-holiday sales, eh?

I didn’t think Simon looked that different this year from last. Then I got his school pics back. Last year’s were better, fyi. His hair has an odd bump  here and I’m not sure why we buttoned the top button. Regardless, the boy has really stretched out in the past year; everything here—-face, hands, arms, neck, torso—is so much longer and leaner than it was in last October’s portrait. I miss some of that old, little-boy soft roundness he used to have.