Thursday, August 26, 2010

Self awareness in kids

This is a page out of one of Ro's favorite books, Brown Bear. After reading the book we would get to this page and then start assigning names to all the kids. I would let Ro name all of them and he picked the names of his daycare friends and his bff G.

The little blond boy on the bottom left was always Ro and the brown skinned, black haired boy (bottom row, third from left) was always G (who in real life is very blond/blue).

Then we got a bunch of new books and stopped reading Brown Bear for a few weeks. In one of these new books, there was a row of kids on top of a page and I asked Ro if he was there. He said "Yes!" and pointed to the little boy in the bright green shirt.
This caught me by surprise, so I went back to Brown Bear and sure enough Ro now pointed to the top row, third from left kid (right above the kid named G) and said that was him.

He has also started identifying colors on the body (rather than on paper) saying "Papa has blue eyes, Ro has brown eyes" etc. I find it fascinating that while so far he was unaware of the details of his coloring, now he is tuned into who he is and what he looks like. It makes me smile.

Next step: Seeing if the blond kid who used to be called Ro will get to be called G :)

2 comments:

Clarese said...

My friends' daughter is 3 years old. One afternoon, we were having a neighborhood cookout. She looked at her father and said "You are the only brown one here." Interestingly, her coloring is much closer to her father's than her mother's. It was interesting to hear her perspective in that way.

MrM said...

Exciting to watch his self-consciousness develop over time. It's really fascinating!