Children Are Fearfully And Wonderfully Made

I'm teaching a child psychology course this summer, and the reading keeps confirming things I'd already come to believe. Even so, there's always another detail to pick up. Children are fearfully and wonderfully made. From the moment they're born, they're busy as beavers, arriving with a remarkable set of equipment that lets them take in their surroundings and start making sense of them.

A newborn isn't a passive container waiting to be filled with whatever drifts past. Infants are wired to absorb what reaches them in a particular way, then put it to work. Out of that raw material they build something astonishing: a three-dimensional, multi-sensory model of their surroundings. That model becomes their sense of what the world is.

Once the model is in place, a child starts forming assumptions about how things work. Those assumptions let them predict what's likely to happen next around them. That's the groundwork for abilities we tend to take for granted, like depth perception and knowing an object still exists after it rolls out of sight.

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