Kids Teach Us About Us

I have a nearly five year old son.

The best part about observing my son as he grows and develops is that he has a lot of behaviors that I think we have learned to stifle as we age, so in a way he's a window into our "true selves." Impulse control issues aside, I am constantly admiring how much it seems he can teach about user friendly design issues and the various thoughts and observations that run through our heads that he'll say out loud while we stifle them at some point from being uttered.

The latest thing I noticed is that, like other people, he lives in a magical world. If it doesn't directly relate to something he wants or something he's directly curious about, he just takes it for granted. He doesn't ask questions about most of the things around him, and somewhere he files it away that that's just the way things are.

I can't for the life of me remember how we got directly on the topic, but I enlightened him to the fact that poop comes from food. Apparently he thought poop just appeared.

Me: "Yes, food you eat turns into poop after many hours. Where did you think poop came from?"
Him: "My butt."

We live in a world where you literally have more knowledge available to you than ever before. The Internet, your library, the bookstores...you can learn everything from how Twinkies are made to how to survive in the woods to how to grow your own food. You can learn about World War II and the sex lives of Romans and ancient Greeks. You have access to knowledge that great men and women in history would have killed to know. It's almost laughable the sheer volume of information that we have access to yet take for granted. And yet today we have people that believe the world operates on a set of arbitrary magical rules. Ignorance is almost celebrated in our culture. It's a sad commentary.

For the most part this quick post is little more than a random observation. I was simply struck by the fact that my son had naively never thought to question why he had to go to the bathroom. It just...happens.

Although now he thinks that when he eats food, he's eating poop.

Oops.