My whole family was in the car when one of my kids announced, “Eva has a lunchbox with a princess on it. Sophie has a fairy on hers, but Eva doesn’t think fairies are real.” Is it just me or does this sound like gossip?
Since I first really noticed a comment like this, I’ve been listening more carefully. Now I’m fascinated at how children talk unabashedly about their friends and their friends’ problems.
“Ryan wanted to go down the slide yesterday, but he wasn’t allowed because his pants were wet. He wets his pants a lot.”
“Daddy? We listened to that song at school once, but Terri said she didn’t like it. She says she only likes movie music.”
“Brian ate steak for lunch. He ate the whole thing.”
“When we had a fireman come to the school to talk about being a fireman, Isabel wanted to sit in the front but couldn’t because her parents brought her to school late and made her miss the beginning part.”
The inflection when these comments are spoken is devoid of any meanness or envy. They are spoken with such an earnest this-is-so-awesome vulnerability that you’d think they were thanking someone for a favorite birthday present. My replies are forcibly noncommittal, along the lines of “I see” and “Oh yeah?,” but that’s good enough. They’re don’t need validation from me. This is their news, the headlines of the social drama that is preschool, the very first building blocks of the he-said-that-she-said-that-she-thought urgency you hear from the mouths of middle-schoolers.
Years ago I believed that a person’s intelligence was reflected in his dialogue. People who spoke about ideas outrank those who spoke about events, who outrank people who gossip. For preschoolers there still isn’t a whole of lot of “ideas” to talk out. My son is learning karate; my daughter is learning the planets. I teach them about cooking with the aid of Ratatouille, and I bring every bug I can catch in a box to their day care. But conversation with my kids is dominated by conversation first about themselves, and then about others. They know the names of every creature that has ever crossed their path, from television characters to neighborhood pets, from friends to distant relatives. They are still beginning to construct the foundation of their life-view, and people and their relationships are the hardest and most important parts to learn right now. So when my daughter says, “Me and Donatello both drew flowers in our drawings, but his stems were smaller than mine,” I see the future shadow of all life’s challenges laid out ahead of her: competition, creativity, sexism, science, apology, self-image, compromise, and emotional health. The gossip of preschoolers is not fluff. It is a casual but critical oversimplification of an unknown world. In response to this, the adult is reduced to nearly nothing.
“Really?” I say. Yes, very really.