Weird Beings

Tonight at the gym, I was listening to a downloaded lecture from a course on developmental psychology by Allison Gopnik given at Berkeley, and she said something that made me laugh out loud. This was, of course, just a touch awkward, and I quickly pulled my MP3 player out of my pocket and shook my head in amusement as I rewound the clip to replay it in an effort to make it clear something zany had come from my MP3 player and not the voices in my head or the comedy of the awkward person in front of me. It was mostly in the way she said it, but the thought is a beautiful one, nonetheless: she was enumerating the reasons to study child psychology, beginning with a grand evolutionary scheme of things, then the benefit of understanding the developmental patterns we've all been through and identifying how those influenced our own development, and finishing with reason 3 (which she claims to find most compelling): children are weird. They're very strange beings, she says, and they do really weird things. And any scientist knows that the most fascinating thing to study is the thing nobody quite understands. And children fit that bill perfectly.

I totally identified with that: I am often fascinated by what's just out of mental grasp. If it's too likely understood, I rarely bother studying it unless I have to. And while part of me thinks children are actually beautifully simple and easy to understand, another part appreciates that part of their appeal is, in fact, their unpredictability, their random streams of consciousness, their mostly harmless volatility. It certainly keeps life interesting.

Of course, I also wondered why it wasn't enough to say, "It's important because children deserve the best upbringing we can offer them to achieve the most they can and to be loved and be aware of that love and support, and understanding what they are going through can better equip us to help them in that process." But that's awfully mushy and non-compelling for a bunch of heady, cerebrally cutthroat textbook drones, so I guess she appealed to the less altruistic motivations (yes, Isaac, I still believe in altruism). Perhaps she just knows her audience?

In short, kids are weird beings. Delightfully weird. I'm looking forward to the rest of the course.