The boys like books. Joseph pretends to read by telling us the story while he turns the pages. James pretends by looking at the pictures.
I guess I told Jonathan about Joseph's last trip to UT's Children's Research Laboratory but didn't blog about it. He did a study about language absorption that Elena did a few years ago. The research student showed him a few toys and he happened to be in the group where she didn't apply labels to them so it was just "Look at that." Then she pulled out a stuffed dog and said "This is a gep," and Joseph was puzzled (as was intended), trying to figure out how that new word fit in with what he knew of the world and saying that "it shape lite a dod." She did the same thing with a ball, calling it a danew. Then we played a game. She put out three toys and asked him to find the gep. He went straight for the intended target, picking up the stuffed dog. Then it was the ball's turn. "Joseph, can you find me the danew?" He picked up the ball, stared at the other toys, set the ball down, and repeated about three or four times. He knew that the research student wanted the ball but refused to concede that it was called a danew. He even tried to rationalize this by discussing what the other toys were. "What that one? I thint it a bird. Maybe it a owl." In the end she had to end his session and admitted that she had no clue how to code it because he never made a real decision.
Elena also did one, right before school started, that was looking into children's perceptions of race and how parents address it with them. Apparently, this an offshoot/companion study to the one in this Newsweek article on the subject--in summary, children notice race at a very young age but have no words to describe what they see because their parents balk at discussing the topic. For ours, we read books where either the main character was a different race from us or the story was an allegory to race relations (an interesting book about what would happen if zebras lost their stripes) and they wanted to see what kind of questions the kids asked and what topics the parents brought up. I'm not sure if we passed, if the article is any judge. We did better a few weeks later at General Conference, though. Elder Sitati got up to speak and Joseph piped up with "He need to get his head white again!" We laughed and told him that Elder Sitati is from Africa so his skin is darker than ours, just like Daddy and Elena's is darker than mine and James'. Simple, direct and honest without going into a ton of needless details, right? I really hope so. It was a lot like when I had to explain to Elena why Joseph was built different, really.
(P.S. This article has some really good suggestions for talking to little kids.)
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