It’s a great time to have a curious 15 month old boy. It’s sunny and the garden is trimmed and safe for him to run around and discover fauna and flora. Ben’s intrigue knows no bounds as he digs and climbs and pulls and pushes his way around the garden, rapidly expanding his perception of the world.
Recently I taught him to “hi five”, it’s a great little social skill and it lets people interact with him in a safe way (he likes to pull glasses off noses and poke eyes because he doesn’t know that he shouldn’t). It didn’t take long, half an hour here and there over a couple of days and now he comes up to me and wants me to hi five him which is very cool.
He’s learning stuff all of the time and yet at the same time he doesn’t know that he can’t do a whole bunch of stuff; jumping being an interesting one. After all I cannot remember a time when I couldn’t jump, and yet Ben looks at me puzzled when I leap in to the air to demonstrate. He doesn’t yet have the information to even let him comprehend what I’m doing sufficiently for him to understand that it’s a skill he doesn’t have and can learn.
So the communication line is dead. We don’t have enough in common for him to understand what I’m trying to teach him. Despite of his voracious appetite for learning.
And it makes me wonder, when someone I talk to just doesn’t “get” what I’m trying to tell them, is it simply because we don’t have enough in common for them to understand? I wonder if finding out more about what they do know well, and using that knowledge to get my point across will save lots of time and frustration in getting to where I want them to go?
