My daughter is 33 months old (that is just shy of three years for most laymen) which is an amazing time of child development. She is firmly in the “why” stage. I know there are endless jokes about kids and the “whys,” but I actually love them. Her curiosity is boundless.
Now my little moppet can’t just say “why”, most of the time she asks some variations of “Daddy, I don’t know about X.” The “X” can be anything from volcanoes and space to something as mundane as trees and broccoli . Often I find the more abstract ideas easier to explain then things like;”Daddy, I don’t know what poles are” while we are driving down the express way. Really, when is the last time you tried to explain what the pole part of a telephone or light pole are… and she is not just asking me to point one out, she really wants to know what makes a pole a pole, and why some are wood and others metal? Keep in mind that you have a little parrot in the back seat that will repeat whatever you say (or at least the part she remembers) back to random people in your life…
Our latest quest for knowledge has been concerning dinosaurs. Who they were, when and where did they live, what were their names… really easy things. Her level of wonder is amazing. We started out with Dinosaur Train on PBS, then moved to the internet, and lastly to a fact finding trip to the local library. What a quintessential quest for kids.
Yet the thing that surprises me the most about the dinosaur questions is not her hunger, but the fact that there is still the assumption that only boy’s will like dinosaurs. It is not just with people of the “older set” who are not “up on what’s cool with the kiddies”. We see it play out with the cloths available in the store, and in the reaction of young professionals with children her age. I just assumed that in the era of STEM education and decades of trying to get more girls into mathematics and science classes that people would be more open to the idea of girls and Dino’s.
It is not even that people have openly made comments about her interests, but I have noticed the reactions. My greater fear is that at some point she will be ashamed of her wonder and curiosity if she starts to notice. I don’t care if this dinosaur phase last long or not (I really don’t need to learn all of the long names if I don’t have too…) but I want her to keep drive to explore as long as possible. I don’t care if she grows up to be a triceratops, a paleontologist, a bicycle mechanic, a teacher or a mommy (all equally competing for her future profession at this point) but I hope she decides based on what she likes, an she does not feel that she needs to limit herself. Deep down we all know we could use a few more triceratops in our lives.
