How children see the world.

Children have two eyes, just like you or me...but they don’t use them the same way. What children see, in the world, is often markedly different from what we do, as adults.

Recently, I had the opportunity to take my children to a film set. It was outdoors. Now, I fully expected my two youngest kids – Fintan, 8 and Tiarnan 5, to be most interested in the actors, the cameras, the whole paraphernalia of film-making...but no: what they did instead of stand in awe at all these things, was to proceed to dig rocks out of the ground. Yes. They found the local rocks of much greater interest than the other matters proceeding all around them.

At one point, Tiarnan ran excitedly up to me:

“Daddy, daddy...you’ve got to come and see!”

His excitement was acute. What great wonder had he found?

“We’ve found yellow soil and red soil!”, he announced.

I suppressed a smile and followed him to where he led.

He pointed to a hole in the ground which he and Fintan had created by the simple expedient of removing a rock. Its imprint remained. There, sure enough, were seams of red soil – and yellow soil – both colours rich and deep.

I looked interested and smiled approvingly and left them to their interest.

Later on, I took them to see a fight scene amidst the rocks of a quarry. After the scene was over, I asked them: “Could you see the battle?”

Fintan looked a little awkward.

“We couldn’t because of the Sun,” he began, trying out his first excuse, then he looked down and across at Tiarnan. “We found some rocks...”, he trailed off.

“We were digging up the rocks!”, confessed Tiarnan.

It was funny to see their odd enthusiasm for the local rocks. However, upon reflection, I understand it. They had never been to a quarry before. All their lives they had lived in relatively manicured environments – but here, in this quarry, they were faced with a raw, rough, brutal landscape, with strange rocks jutting out of the ground. They had never seen anywhere like it. Now, they had seen people before. They had seen cameras before. They had seen fight scenes many times on TV before. What they had never seen, however, were rocks like the ones strewn all around them – nor a landscape so desolate and lifeless. To them, that was the true wonder of this “film set” – the very place it was set in.

The funny thing, though, was that the only two people to really appreciate the location, deeply, were my two little sons. They saw in each rock, something wonderful, something strange. The adults, however, just saw awkward bumps underfoot to be avoided. Not one adult did what my sons were doing: taking a close look at the rocks, their shape, their form, their substance. In a way, I suppose the only two people who came to a full appreciation and understanding of this uncanny landscape were my two little sons: they are the only people who really studied it, at all.
The adults, on the other hand, were focussed on the human things and the technical things – on their acting, their costume, their make-up, their motion and emotion, the camera work and the lighting. The actual nature of what lay underfoot was ignored by all except my sons.

So, that day, there were two sets: one that the adults saw – and one that my children saw. My sons saw the place as it actually was. The adults saw it, in another way – as a backdrop to their filmed events.

It is funny to reflect that, in a very real way, only my sons actually attained a real grasp of their environment. Everyone else just took it for granted – and labelled it, reflexively, as “rocky landscape...enquire no more”.

When they got home, I asked my sons what the best thing about going to the film set was:

“The rocks!”, they both cried out, at once.

They had learnt something – not the lesson I had thought they would learn - but they had learnt something about the world. I had, inadvertently, taught them another set of lessons, altogether, than the one I had hoped to teach them. Or should I say, they had taught themselves lessons other than the ones I had hoped they would imbibe. I think that their lesson was a better one to learn – for it arose from their own interests in the world and what is important in it, for them. They saw what they wanted to see and learned what they wanted to learn. They picked out what was newest, strangest and most unusual for them – and that, unexpectedly for me, was the rocks underfoot. In so doing they taught me, too, to realize that my world and the way I see it, is not theirs. They have their own view of the world and their own categorizations of what is important and worthy and what is not: actors are not, rocks are...at least to them, at this young age. I have come to understand that I mustn’t assume their view on things – I must observe what turns out to be their view – and to anticipate, in an open way, that this may be very different from my expectation. This, however, is good. It is refreshing to see that their view is different to my own. That is a good sign, for it means that they are growing up in an environment that allows them to nurture their own viewpoints – some families probably don’t do that.

I am left with a funny thought. In years to come, should I ask them about that film set visit, they will most probably not remember any of the things most people would remember from a film set experience – but they will be able to tell me about the types of rocks they found there. That is a delightfully quirky thought.

Posted by Valentine Cawley

(If you would like to support my continued writing of this blog and my ongoing campaign to raise awareness about giftedness and all issues pertaining to it, please donate, by clicking on the gold button to the left of the page.

To read about my fundraising campaign, please go to: http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2011/01/fundraising-drive-in-support-of-my.html and here: http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2011/01/fundraising-drive-first-donation.html

If you would like to read any of our scientific research papers, there are links to some of them, here: http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2011/02/research-papers-by-valentine-cawley-and.html

If you would like to see an online summary of my academic achievements to date, please go here: http://www.getcited.org/mbrz/11136175

To learn more of Ainan Celeste Cawley, 10, or his gifted brothers, Fintan, 7 and Tiarnan, 5, please go to: http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2006/10/scientific-child-prodigy-guide.html

I also write of gifted education, child prodigy, child genius, adult genius, savant, megasavant, HELP University College, the Irish, the Malays, Singapore, Malaysia, IQ, intelligence and creativity.

There is a review of my blog, on the respected The Kindle Report here:http://thekindlereport.blogspot.com/2010/09/boy-who-knew-too-much-child-prodigy.html

Please have a read, if you would like a critic's view of this blog. Thanks.

You can get my blog on your Kindle, for easy reading, wherever you are, by going to: http://www.amazon.com/Boy-Who-Knew-Too-Much/dp/B0042P5LEE/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&m=AG56TWVU5XWC2&s=digital-text&qid=1284603792&sr=8-1

Please let all your fellow Kindlers know about my blog availability - and if you know my blog well enough, please be so kind as to write a thoughtful review of what you like about it. Thanks.

My Internet Movie Database listing is at:http://imdb.com/name/nm3438598/

Ainan's IMDB listing is at http://imdb.com/name/nm3305973/

Syahidah's IMDB listing is at http://imdb.com/name/nm3463926/

Our editing, proofreading and copywriting company, Genghis Can, is athttp://www.genghiscan.com/

This blog is copyright Valentine Cawley. Unauthorized duplication is prohibited. Use only with permission. Thank you.)

Mischievous marketing to children.

A few days ago, my son Fintan, 8, asked a question that made me wonder at the deviousness of marketers.

“Do Smarties make you smarter?”, he asked, most innocently. He seemed quite prepared to believe that they did.

“No, Fintan, it is just a name.”

He didn’t seem entirely satisfied with that. I intuited his unspoken thoughts as being along the lines of: “If they don’t make you smarter, why call them that, then?”

This little exchange drove me to ponder the freedoms we give marketers: they are allowed to call their products anything at all – yet, sometimes, they don’t seem to use this freedom honestly. Fintan was right. There IS the suggestion in the name “Smarties”, that the product is connected, somehow, to smartness. It IS a fair and quite reasonable step to infer, as Fintan had, that the product must be so called, because, somehow, it induced “smartness”. Indeed, perhaps that is exactly the reason they were named “Smarties” in the first place. Perhaps, they wanted children, all over the world, to associate their product with smartness and consume them, therefore, in increased numbers, motivated by the illusion that they were going to enjoy positive cognitive change.

Children and unintelligent adults are susceptible to manipulation through the naming and marketing of products. It would seem wise, to me, to place safeguards on the naming of products so that false associations and inferences are not attached to products, for the purpose of increasing sales to vulnerable groups. Fintan is a bright child. He is socially very switched on. Yet, his conclusion when faced with a product named: “Smarties”, is that they must induce smartness – for why else call them that? How many other children, around the world have the same, perhaps unvoiced thought? How many of them UNCONSCIOUSLY make that link and are motivated to buy them? It is a somewhat disturbing thought. In a way, there is something unethical about naming a product with a reference to a property it doesn’t have, creating an association it cannot fulfil. Smarties don’t make you smart – but they might make you fat, or your teeth rot, if overly consumed. That would be a fair set of truer associations to link to the product, than “they make you smart”.

The funny thing is, that, until Fintan pointed it out, I had never reflected on the implications of the name “Smarties”. Sometimes, children are quicker to see the broader truths of things, in their world, than we are. Perhaps that is because they are thinking about them for the first time, and trying to find meaning in them – whereas adults, in some ways, have lost that habit, to some extent.

Thank you, Fintan, for your question. Smarties won’t make you smarter – but perhaps thinking about them will.

Posted by Valentine Cawley

(If you would like to support my continued writing of this blog and my ongoing campaign to raise awareness about giftedness and all issues pertaining to it, please donate, by clicking on the gold button to the left of the page.

To read about my fundraising campaign, please go to: http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2011/01/fundraising-drive-in-support-of-my.html and here: http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2011/01/fundraising-drive-first-donation.html

If you would like to read any of our scientific research papers, there are links to some of them, here: http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2011/02/research-papers-by-valentine-cawley-and.html

If you would like to see an online summary of my academic achievements to date, please go here: http://www.getcited.org/mbrz/11136175

To learn more of Ainan Celeste Cawley, 10, or his gifted brothers, Fintan, 7 and Tiarnan, 5, please go to: http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2006/10/scientific-child-prodigy-guide.html

I also write of gifted education, child prodigy, child genius, adult genius, savant, megasavant, HELP University College, the Irish, the Malays, Singapore, Malaysia, IQ, intelligence and creativity.

There is a review of my blog, on the respected The Kindle Report here:http://thekindlereport.blogspot.com/2010/09/boy-who-knew-too-much-child-prodigy.html

Please have a read, if you would like a critic's view of this blog. Thanks.

You can get my blog on your Kindle, for easy reading, wherever you are, by going to: http://www.amazon.com/Boy-Who-Knew-Too-Much/dp/B0042P5LEE/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&m=AG56TWVU5XWC2&s=digital-text&qid=1284603792&sr=8-1

Please let all your fellow Kindlers know about my blog availability - and if you know my blog well enough, please be so kind as to write a thoughtful review of what you like about it. Thanks.

My Internet Movie Database listing is at:http://imdb.com/name/nm3438598/

Ainan's IMDB listing is at http://imdb.com/name/nm3305973/

Syahidah's IMDB listing is at http://imdb.com/name/nm3463926/

Our editing, proofreading and copywriting company, Genghis Can, is athttp://www.genghiscan.com/

This blog is copyright Valentine Cawley. Unauthorized duplication is prohibited. Use only with permission. Thank you.)

Children's Day, Singapore, October 1st

October 1st, every year, in Singapore is Children's Day. This is, as the name suggests, meant to be a day of celebration of children and childhood. At least, that is the theory.

Fintan enjoyed a party of some kind, at school, for Children's Day - and, in the evening, Syahidah arranged for an outing to mark the day. We had in mind two activities - one for Ainan and one for Fintan.

For Ainan we wanted to go to the top of one of the tallest buildings in Singapore. Ainan has an interest in tall buildings, and has an encylopaedic knowledge of their heights, locations and designs. He has even been to the top of the Petronas Twin Towers (the tallest twin towers in the world) in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. (He did so a few weeks ago).

However, we had not been to the top of any of Singapore's tall buildings.

Anyway, we went to UOB Plaza and into UOB tower, myself, my wife and two children in tow. We had done our research and knew that, although we couldn't go to the top (62nd storey), we should be able to go to the restaurant on the 60th floor.

Once in the lobby, I soon saw an escalator going up, with a sign on its side: "Restaurant 60th floor". I saw others taking it, upwards, one after the other. I walked towards it, trailing my family. I was within three steps of it, when a guard approached. "Where are you going?" He asked. "The restaurant." I said pointing upwards.

He looked at his watch. "Six thirty. It opens at six thirty."

He wasn't going to let us up. I could see that. The matter of the opening time of the restaurant was just an excuse. It should have been obvious why we wanted to go up to the sixtieth floor with children in tow: to see the view. That, however, was not to be allowed.

I did note that no-one else had been stopped - only us. It must have been because we had children with us. A funny thing this Children's Day: people are so charitable on it - and clearly believe in the importance of children.

Next we tried Republic Plaza. This too is a very tall tower - similar to UOB Tower.

This time I thought it best to approach the guard directly and raise the issue with him, to gain permission.

"Is it OK if I take my children up?"

"Yes. Sure." he said.

Great, I thought, that simple.

I turned to call my children in.

"Which floor?" he then asked.

"The top."

"Oh no. You can't go up there. It is a private club: the Tower Club."

It seemed that he had supposed that I was taking my children up to my office. Once it was clear that I was just visiting the matter became an impossibility.

"What about another floor? A high floor?"

"No. You can't go up. It is not open to the public." He had changed from helpful to resistive in an instant. It was almost funny to watch, were it not to our disadvantage.

"Where then?" asked Syahidah, "Where in Singapore can we go up to the top of the towers?"

"In Singapore?" he began, as if to say..."Are you mad? Don't you know what it is like around here?" "They are all closed to the public. Except for Raffles City...you could try there."

"The restaurant?"

"Yes."

No - we both thought. Not tall enough - and too far from where we were now, what with our other plans to see to.

So, Republic Plaza wouldn't let two children go up to the top on Children's Day, either.

A funny thing this Children's Day: people are so charitable on it - and clearly believe in the importance of children.

My wife didn't want to go back to try UOB Tower again for it had seemed clear that he just didn't want us to go up. There was no reason why we couldn't go up to the sixtieth while the restaurant was closed: the view would still be open.

Ainan managed not to be too disappointed, though we had failed to give him his wish for the day. Or more precisely Singapore had failed to deliver what it could so easily have done.

It is a puzzle really. I have been to New York and been to the top of the Empire State Building. No-one tried to stop me. No-one said I couldn't. I am sure, too, that I could have brought my children had they been born at the time. Most countries make tourist attractions of their tallest buildings - but not Singapore. Singapore makes a no-go area of them. I can't see why.

The next wish was easier to grant. We went to the cinema to see Azur and Azmar - a fantastic film set in a world that never was - one of Arabian magic and Djinn Fairies. My wife particularly liked it because of the drawing style of the cartoons. It was directed by Michele Ocelot and is to be recommended to those who have children whose imaginations have not yet died. Even if they have, this might perk them up a bit. I won't say too much about it, lest I do what I loathe to see others do: spoil the plot. Let us just say it takes a look at childhood, motherhood and how lives turn out. It is also a comment on brotherly love and sibling rivalry.

One thing I did note on going to the cinema was that we had to take an MRT (underground train). I have never done this before with my children in tow, since we normally use taxis with them. I was rather surprised to note one thing: there was no children's rate. Both our children paid the full adult fare. That is rather surprising, especially compared to all the other countries I have been to. Everywhere that I can recall has a children's rate for transport - and for cinemas, by the way. Our children paid the full adult rate for the film, too.

Singapore may have a Children's Day - but it is far from being a child friendly city or culture. Perhaps that is why so many potential parents, here, choose never to become parents at all. Nothing is free here. In England, kindergarten was free, when I was a child - here, in Singapore, it is most definitely not - and is really quite expensive.

Everywhere we went, on Children's Day, our children had to pay their way, like fully-fledged adults: on the train, in the cinema...and at the restaurant (no children's portions).

Personally, I think it is a very short-sighted way to build a nation. The future of the nation is the little ones, the children. Yet, despite the existence of a Children's Day - and even on Children's Day itself - children get short shrift in Singapore. There are no concessions made here for parents or children. A country that chooses not to support children, in this way, is one that won't have too many children to support. In a few short decades, such a nation, will be an ex-nation. For without children, there is no future.

It comes as no surprise that Singapore has one of the lowest total fertility rates in the world (at 1.26 births per woman, listed 186th out of 195 countries, on Wikipedia). That rate, note, is so far below replacement rate that, without immigration, Singapore would drop to 60 % of its original population in one generation. It wouldn't take too many generations for there to be nation, at all.

Everywhere we went on Children's Day, not one Singaporean showed any evidence of consideration towards our children. No-one in Singapore seemed to know that it was Children's Day - or what Children's day meant.

A funny thing this Children's Day: people are so charitable on it - and clearly believe in the importance of children.

(If you would like to learn more of Ainan Celeste Cawley, a scientific child prodigy, aged seven years and ten months, or his gifted brothers, Fintan, four years and three months, and Tiarnan, twenty months, please go to: http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2006/10/scientific-child-prodigy-guide.html I also write of gifted education, IQ, intelligence, College, University, Chemistry, Science, genetics, left-handedness, precocity, child prodigy, child genius, baby genius, adult genius, savant, gifted adults and gifted children in general. Thanks.)