Sensitivity to the laws of human nature.

Tiarnan is only six years old. Yet, in his few years, he has come to certain assessments of the nature of people which are interesting to hear, at times.

He was watching “Once upon a time”, recently. This is a TV series in which a fairy tale world and the real world collide, with fairy tale characters living in our world. Tiarnan quite likes this. The other day we got a peek into the kinds of things he is thinking as he watches it.

Having observed the characters for a few episodes, he suddenly piped up, whilst watching it:

“Good guys can become bad but bad guys cannot become good.”, he said to his mummy. He said this because he clearly did not believe that one of the bad characters was being genuinely good, as he appeared to be. Tiarnan was "seeing through" his behaviour. It was surprising, given his extreme youth, that he had not been fooled, by the character's actions and words - because, superficially, they did seem like "good" acts.

We were both quite taken by this, because it seemed he had used the evidence of the personalities at play in the TV show, to draw a general rule about human behaviour - and to come to his own view about a particular person's moral nature. This is a very rational thought process, akin to what scientists do: gather evidence, and spot patterns, to draw up laws. That is what Tiarnan is doing, about people. It is interesting to witness his developing understanding of people – and to see just how he thinks about them.

I see in Tiarnan’s human rule making, a cross between Syahidah’s thinking and my own. Syahidah is socially skilled and I have a tendency to invent laws, in the scientific manner: Tiarnan is crossing both thinking styles to deduce his own laws of human nature. Of course, this is just the beginning of his thinking about people. It will be interesting to see how far he takes this approach to understanding people, in future. Perhaps, not all TV watching is useless!

Posted by Valentine Cawley

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Tiarnan, the brave

Last night Tiarnan, fourteen months, did something very interesting.

He pointed to a gap between the bed and the wall. He found it curious...like he was asking: "What is down there?"

I took the opportunity to tease him. I slid my hand down the side of the bed, then pretended some unseen monster had caught my hand and started tugging at it, making me thrash around, with a bit of added, appropriate-seeming, noise from my mouth, rather like a dog gnawing a bone.

I suddenly pulled my hand out, unscathed.

He looked at me in a kind of wonder, his eyes wide, his mouth quiet. Then he did something rather brave, considering what he had just seen. He slid his hand slowly down the side of the bed, clearly waiting for the unseen "Thing" to grab a hold of his hand and thrash him around.

Nothing happened.

He turned to me suddenly and said: "Daddy, look! It's gone!" Then he took his hand out.

I pretended to be surprised at this and slid my hand down there again, and began to thrash about, once more, accompanied by my bone-gnawing sound.

He smiled, and understood at once. He put his hand down there...and began to thrash around like me, with his own impression of the bone-gnawing sound. He understood that I had been teasing him. He took his hand out and smiled broadly at me.

What impressed me was the initial courage he showed in putting his hand down there, when I had convinced him, the first time, that some unseen creature would attack his hand. He had seen daddy do it. He had seen what happened to daddy - but he went ahead all the same. Brave boy.

The second time he did it, was also interesting, for it showed how quick he was to understand that it was just a game.

Tiarnan's sentences are also becoming longer. That was an implicit five word utterance. (Daddy, look! It is gone!"). Again, one may note that the structures are grammatically correct - just as his three word sentences were when he was eight months. It is interesting to observe what a good grasp of grammar even a young baby may have. It seems to me that would take a lot of analytical power to work out so young.

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