Okay, maybe this one has always been super obvious to everyone but me. Like, I have no problem getting down on the floor and reading stories with kids climbing all over me and putting a train track together on the carpet with my boys. I learned early on with a tantruming toddler that crouching down and holding them eye to eye was more productive and reassuring than looming five feet above them and calling down frustrated words. But for some reason it took me a long time to figure out that it is so essential to do the same in a museum.
I think my awe of the sacred space that is a museum overrode my instincts as a caregiver to very young children. I mean, for several years I was going to museums with my children (art, history, and natural history as well as children's museums) with my first baby, then toddler and second baby. I figured a lot of stuff out along the way. Yet I think I still viewed the visits selfishly, that we were going to go and we were going to enjoy it for me. I somehow expected that my very very young children would suddenly and magically behave differently inside the hallowed halls of a museum. By that I mean behave like a grown-up. (A well-behaved grown-up, that is.) And though my kids behave quite well, thank you, in a museum (and better than some adults) they are kids through and through. Of course! They don't change when they step through the door to the building.
Perhaps at first they do, a little. A new experience and place is a reason for a bit of caution and wariness. A return to regular kid behavior is a very very good sign, in fact! That means they are feeling comfortable in their surroundings. A comfortable kid is one ready to laugh and learn and have a great time. A comfortable kid is a wonderful companion. A comfortable child still needs some guidance and direction on how to act in a museum for the respect of the objects, the other visitors, and their own experience.
A child sees on a different level. I am stating the obvious here, as I am apt to do. They see on a different level in part because they are shorter. We adults walk around with our heads several feet higher and our minds often on another plane again (at least I feel distracted or multi-tasking so much of my day that thinking of how a child sees something is not the first response to a situation). Children see differently developmentally as well, a vision that shifts so rapidly as they grow and mature.
One of my favorite moments of realizing how different a child's visual perspective truly is was when I was about eight months pregnant with my third. I was unloading my camera of its contents and found a picture that my five year old son had taken one afternoon when I handed the camera to him to try. He had captured--in all its glory--my belly from his eye-level. And what a belly it was! I know I looked in the mirror every morning and felt very large with child, but to him, woah! That increasingly large part of mommy was taking over the mommy he knew. It was taking over his lap space, his usually energetic mommy, the attention of all the adults around him. No wonder there were increasing melt-downs. I understood all this in some degree before, but after seeing that picture, bam. I just got it. I got down on his level by seeing through his eyes and I felt empathy.
Since then I've tried more in every day life to get down on my child's level--literally and figuratively. As the museum world has become more of an extension of my every day world (though there is still some mystical, special quality to the space I just can't describe) I've been able to see that children see objects--usually displayed up high to accommodate the adult's comfortable viewing perspective--from a different place. An adult simply sees on one level and children see on a different. The key is to bridge that gap in one way or another.
Sometimes, of course, I lift them up. They love that! (I see another tip and trick coming on . . .)
But mostly I get down with them. On the floor if necessary. I see how they see something. I see what they are pointing to. They see what I am directing their attention toward. We talk together. We think together. We linger a little longer. It's as relaxing and enjoyable as reading a story or setting up a train track for those precious minutes. I never cease to be humbled by the sublime grandeur of objects and my children's insight when I am crouched down on a level with them.
Please share with me if you have experienced an object from your child's perspective. How's the view from down there? Do you prefer to lift your child up to your level? Does your child engage with you and the objects differently when the adult and child are on the same level?
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