I get this all the time. Kids these days are so advanced. Well your baby has good head control because he's an advanced 21st century baby. WTH? I really don't get it. I mean people say stupid crap to me all the time, but this one is by far the most nonsensical. Trying to reason with people that say these things is an utter waste of time. I get it, we live in the digital age, yes Evan can perform basic functions on my iPhone. But you know what I bet a chimp could too.
I am pretty sure that Evan came into this world with the same MO as any other baby in the history of babies. Eat. Sleep. Poop.
When Evan was about a week old, I got my first "advanced". He had his eyes open and was looking around. To my knowledge this is an all babies in the history of babies thing. Human are not puppies and do not have sealed eyes for the first week or so.
Then around 2 months when Evan had remarkable head and neck control I got another "advanced". Again totally normal.
I kept getting "advanced" remarks off and on when Evan gabbed.
He scored poorly in subsequent "advanced" motor skills. He mastered head movement, pacifier return, and a spectacular sitting to belly swoop move early but hit all the rest of his milestones a tad bit late in the spectrum. Was my kid no longer advanced? When I talk about walking, its the early walkers that get the "advanced". But anecdotally, I hear about many people older than me walking at 7,8,9 months. But they are not so advanced now. What happened? Were they ever regarded as advanced?
When do babies/kids stop being advanced? The first time they wreck something or show signs of laziness. When they don't live up to their potential? The way people are saying the word advanced; they use at as the kids are growing up too fast. Evan? he's right on track. He talks and jokes more than the average baby his age but he is still your average baby who doesn't know how to read or do long division. Kids are arguably not advanced at all. Test scores are down. No one under the age of 25 can spell worth a damn. I grew up without spell check. We had video games but we also played outside. With 2/3 of the adult population overweight or obese. We are not advanced. We are stagnant and worse backsliding.
Evan is an awesome kid, who knows maybe he'll become an entrepreneur. I don't think kids these days are advanced, they are just in a new normal of lazy/fat people that can work a computer better than anything else in their lives. You just don't see kids writing their first composition at 7 anymore, that my friends would be advanced.
Very interesting issue. I don't know if you're an NPR listener still, but did you catch I think it was David Carr yesterday? He argued journalism is actually in a golden age currently, not declining like everybody says. His computer has more journalism power than the whole newsroom when he first started.
ReplyDeleteI say developmental milestones have nothing to do with adult behaviors/intelligence. Or rather, I'm more of a "nurture" guy that we can overcome our biology with things like education and experience. So I'm also going to argue for today's kids--surprising. They have to make sense out of the chaos of the digital age and they do it better maybe because of the way they've lived with it since Day One. There's plenty of people around right now under 30 doing stuff I have no clue how to do.
Though I'll conclude with another of the points from NPR yesterday where he said he checks his Twitter and FB so much in discussing journalism that sometimes he feels like he never does any actual journalism. lol