Life with two kids: A short attention span

[andrewducker]

Sophia: "So mummy took a year off from her job when I was born and then she went back?

Incredulously: "And they remembered who she was?"

Comments

[channelpenguin]

But did she remember who they were?

(I might not, judging on how quickly I lose the names of ex-colleagues. I'm not a people person)

[andrewducker]

Jane is significantly better with names than I am.

[calimac]

A year is a very long time for a small child.

[andrewducker]

It is. Although she has a friend from when she was 1⅓, so you get continuity, I'm pretty sure she remembers very little from more than two years ago.

[calimac]

I spent a lot of time with a 4-year-old. I was collaborating with her parents on a big project, and part of my job was to play with the kid for a couple hours each afternoon so that they could get some of their own work done without interruption.

After that, I didn't see the kid again until 3 years later. It was pretty clear that she didn't remember me. I was expecting that, but it was kind of sad.

Still, now she's 23, and certainly does remember me between widely separated visits.

[andrewducker]

Yeah, we had to adjust to the idea that they would forget a lot of the early things we did with them, but those things would contribute to their overall growth, and so were totally still worth doing.

[emperor]

*snort*

[juan_gandhi]

It's a beautiful question.
When I was a manager, I took special measures to rotate project between engineers, so that the projects of such moms wouldn't be abandoned, and they could pick up from something where they were working on.

[andrewducker]

You were clearly a good one.

[juan_gandhi]

I thought so too; but it wasn't always like this. I still feel some kind of shame for certain actions.

[andrewducker]

Everyone makes mistakes. Goodness knows I've occasionally gotten frustrated with the kids and yelled at them when I wish I hadn't.

[simont]

I wonder if a good answer might have been "They might have written it down, so they wouldn't forget."

I still have to remind adults that they can do that. In the middle of complicated pair-debugging, when someone re-ran the same grep for the 10th time to recover a thing they looked up earlier, and was leaving half of the shared screen unused, I had to point out last week "You could write that name down over there, because we keep needing it."

[andrewducker]

I'll think about that for the future.

Although I'm pretty sure that the small team that Jane had worked with for a decade at that point weren't going to forget her!

[simont]

Of course! But I think there is value in explanations of the form "Here is one way that this thing could have happened. It may not be the way it actually did happen, but at least now you can see that it's possible."

It would be misleading to say that they did write it down. I'm sure you're right that they didn't need to. But saying they might have written it down is implicitly saying "If you need to remember something after a year, here's one way that it could be done, even if it seems impossible right now."

Then again, all my own experience of teaching things to people is with students rather older than Sophia, so I'll leave it up to you whether this is actually likely to be useful :-)