A Child’s Wild Kingdom
By JON MOOALLEM
Published: May 4, 2013 58 Comments
IN a couple of weeks, my daughter will turn into a dolphin. Right now, she’s a fox. Last year, she was a cricket.
That’s just how it works at the Montessori school where she goes.
Instead of “4-year-olds” and “5-year-olds,” or even “preschoolers” and
“kindergartners,” each class is given an animal name and, at the end of
every school year, the children graduate into being a different species
entirely, shape-shifting like spirits in an aboriginal legend.
It can be a little alarming to step back and realize just how
animal-centric the typical American preschool classroom is. Maybe the
kids sing songs about baby belugas, or construction-paper songbirds fly
across the walls. Maybe newborn ducklings nuzzle in an incubator in the
corner. But the truth is, my daughter’s world has overflowed with wild
animals since it first came into focus. They’ve been plush and whittled;
knitted, batiked and bean-stuffed; embroidered into the ankles of her
socks or foraging on the pages of every storybook.
Most parents won’t be surprised to learn that when a Purdue University
child psychologist pulled a random sample of 100 children’s books, she
found only 11 that did not have animals in them.
But what’s baffled me most nights at bedtime is how rarely the animals
in these books even have anything to do with nature. Usually, they’re
just arbitrary stand-ins for people, like the ungainly pig that yearns
to be a figure skater, or the family of raccoons that bakes hamantaschen
for the family of beavers at Purim. And once I tuned in to that — into
the startling strangeness of how insistently our culture connects kids
and wild creatures — all the animal paraphernalia in our house started
to feel slightly insane. As Kieran Suckling, the executive director of
the conservation group Center for Biological Diversity, pointed out to
me, “Right when someone is learning to be human, we surround them with
nonhumans.”
SCIENCE has some explanations to offer. Almost from birth, children seem
drawn to other creatures all on their own. In studies, babies as young
as 6 months try to get closer to, and provoke more physical contact
with, actual dogs and cats than they do with battery-operated
imitations.
Infants will smile more at a living rabbit than at a toy rabbit. Even
2-day-old babies have been shown to pay closer attention to “a dozen
spotlights representing the joints and contours of a walking hen” than
to a similar, randomly generated pattern of lights.
It all provides evidence for what the Harvard entomologist Edward O.
Wilson calls “biophilia” — his theory that human beings are inherently
attuned to other life-forms. It’s as though we have a deep well of
attention set aside for animals, a powerful but uncategorized interest
waiting to be channeled into more cogent feelings, like fascination or
fear.
Young children have been shown to acquire fears of spiders and snakes
more quickly than fears of guns and other human-manufactured dangers.
And in this case, the researchers Judith H. Heerwagen and Gordon H.
Orians offer one logical, evolutionary explanation: if you are an infant
or toddler spending a lot of time on the ground, it pays to learn
quickly to fear snakes and spiders. Fear of big predators like bears and
wolves, on the other hand, doesn’t kick in until after age 4, around
when the first human children would have begun roaming outside of their
camps.
Children also fixate on animals in their imaginative lives. In her book
“Why the Wild Things Are,” Gail F. Melson, a psychologist at Purdue,
reports that kids see animals in the inkblots of the Rorschach test
twice as often as adults do, and that, when a Tufts University
psychologist went into a New Haven preschool decades ago and asked kids
to tell her a story that they’d made up on the spot, between 65 and 80
percent of them told her a story about animals. (The heartbreaking
minimalism of one of these stories, by a boy named Bart, still haunts
me: “Once there was a lion. He ate everybody up. He ate himself up.”)
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