Issue 2 - Reflective Piece

Capacity vs Capability

There is so so much to discuss and reflect on with brain development. This topic has been complicated, heavy, and just with so much to process and understand. And I have barely scratched the surface of it all, to be quite honest. There is so much more to learn, but I'm going to stop here to let us digest and understand all this information. So, what to reflect on out of all this information?

I think, the environment.

There are many ways to think about this, but I suppose I'd like to return to the idea of how we think about, understand, and stimulate children's growth. Now we know children really need that stimulation, it becomes a matter of figuring out how to do that. Such answers will come in later issues, but at the moment I realise that it can become a bit difficult to understand what children are capable of at what stages. Like, how much stimulation do they need when, what kind of stimulation. What is their little brain's physical capability and what capacity do they have to navigate their development? We will dive into this in due course.

In my time of working with, and just being exposed to children, I have always been surprised by how frequently caregivers and other adults are unable to truly understand the capacity vs the capability of that child. We see adults placing too much expectation on their young children whether to be responsible in a certain way or think things through a certain way when they simply are not at that developmental stage. This is overestimating their capacity and capability by expecting them to think the way we do, which they do not.

Another one is underestimating their capacity. So, this could be where adults use baby speak because they think that children cannot comprehend in any other way. Or they just behave however they want to in front of the child, thinking that it won't register or be understood. They don't realise that children are quite capable of a form of complex thought and associations in the world. Children, from quite an early age understand social dynamics well enough to become quite skilled at lying and manipulation (without even needing to be taught how!). They are also really able to think quite complexly about the world around - again, just not the way we do.

I remember a young boy of about 10 or 11 who I told to throw his gum away because he was not allowed to be chewing gum in class. This young boy walks up to the dustbin, puts his hand to his mouth and pretends to throw the gum away. Now, I'm watching him, and I hear no sound of impact from the gum and clearly see the fake ploy. The boy turns around and looks at me. I give him another chance and ask, "did you throw away your gum"? He nods a very firm yes and walks away. Now, because this happened in the middle of a class, I decided to let the little guy go and not cause a disturbance.

But I chuckled to myself, thinking about how this champ really thought he got away with it, and I let him think so. Even while I judge him, I can remember in the far reaches of my mind pulling a very similar stunt when I was young and thinking that I got away with it too and was so smart. I can't have, the teacher MUST have seen. This is a prime example of how children think very differently to adults, but also, how they have the capacity (which is often undernoticed) to lie from very early on. This has ties to self-preservation, but we won't go into that now.

This example shows to me the complex ways that children are able to think of the world and social dynamics, but also the limits in their thinking due to their early stage in life and still-developing brains. Somewhere in that little boy's brain and development from the belly was a whole lot of events that led him to think and behave in the way he did in that particular moment in time. But the process is not finished. It is still going. With every experience in his life as he grows, his thinking and behaviour will continue to change in response to an increased understanding of how the world works.

It's truly a fascinating thing, development.

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