Child development; Infant psychology; Motor ability in children
I saved her confidence in my good faith by substituting something
else as good, and more immediately practicable, for the mysterious
attractions I had offered, and used due caution thereafter in recording
her answers.
It was evident that in a primitive way the little one was comparing and
inferring not a little by this time. A week before, her grandmother
had told her which was O on a set of letter cards she played with, and
presently she showed Q with an inquiring cry: “What is this that looks
so much like O and yet is not O?” It may be added that she always knew
O afterwards, and picked up most of the other letters as easily--an
evidence of the unnecessarily hard work we make of learning the letters
by postponing them till the normal age of picking up the name of
anything and everything is past.
She was, of course, sometimes quaintly misled in an inference by lack
of knowledge. In the last week of the month I shut my eyes and asked
her, “Where are aunty’s eyes?” The baby tried in vain to find them
behind the lids, and then leaned over from my lap and looked carefully
for the lost eyes on the floor!
I hardly think that memory is much developed at this age; the
probability is that even the two year old remembers things only in
glimpses--one here and one there, but nothing continuous: this is one
of the great differences between his mind and ours. But our little
girl plainly remembered some things for days. In the second week of
the month her uncle showed her how he lifted the window sash, and four
days after, catching sight of the finger handle, she tugged at it with
impatient cries, trying to make the sash go up. A few days later,
having a flower in her hand when her feet were bare, she began, with a
sudden memory, to beg to have something done to her toes with it, and
it proved that two or three weeks before her mother had stuck a flower
between the fat toes.
All this month, even more than in the eleventh, she was incessantly
busy in exploring and learning. She opened boxes, took things out,
and put them back; worked with infinite diligence and seriousness at
such matters as getting a rubber ring off a notebook I had stretched it
round; investigated crannies, spaces under grates, doors ajar, with an
undying curiosity.
She began to imitate our actions more: she tried to comb her hair, to
put flowers into a vase, to mark on a paper with a pencil; she pulled
at her toes and muttered, as if she were saying the piggy rhyme.
She had a distinct idea as to what constituted herself, and when she
was asked, “Where is Ruth?” she did not indicate her whole body, but
always seized her head in her hands with certainty and decision.
She took delight in the new uses of mind and memory, no less than in
her bodily powers; she would recall the association of an object and
its name with joyous laughter, and her “Dă!” when she was asked to
point to something was a cry of pleasure.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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