My dad is an electrical engineer by training. He has spent much of his adult life taking things apart and putting them back together. He’s a tinkerer.
I’m not an engineer, and while I know my dad is deeply proud of me and the man I’ve become, I think he probably wishes sometimes that I’d become an engineer. I had the aptitude for it, as I always did well in math and enjoyed making things, but the pull of languages was stronger.
Now that I’m a father, I’m beginning to think my daughter may fulfill that engineering destiny and make her Grandpa proud, though I honestly can’t decide if I’m just witnessing toddler-hood.
My daughter is an ever-present example of entropy at work. There is no button she will not press, no tissue she will not remove from its box, no book she will not take off a shelf, and no puzzle she will not disassemble. If my wife and I didn’t clean up after her every night, there would be no livable space left in our house. I’m not even sure the house would still be standing, if it were up to my daughter.
Here’s the thing, though. It sounds like an incredible amount of wreckage, if I’m just describing the spaces left in my daughter’s destructive wake. My 13-month-old isn’t just destroying everything in her path, though it feels that way sometimes. There’s something else going here, something constructive, something mysterious.
To incorrectly paraphrase Tom Waits, I ask, “What’s she building in there?”
The mental connections for Eleanor are coming fast and furious these days. I point to a picture of shoes in a book, and she grabs her feet. I ask her what sound the elephant makes, and she purses her lips like a trumpet player (though she can’t quite get the sound right). I set her down on the floor and she starts walking. She uses sign language to tell me when she wants milk, or even when she sees someone else drinking it. I ask her if she wants cereal, and she says, “No!”
I’m having a hard time catching all these connections in her brain, all these constructions she’s building and adapting as she processes more, newer information at an ever-faster pace. In education circles, they’d describe her evolving frames of reference as schema. She’s building physical and communication skills constantly, and they seem to be coming faster and building on top of each other faster than I can track. It’s impressive and it’s an amazing thing to experience firsthand. It’s not dissimilar to being a teacher and seeing the proverbial light bulb go on for a student, but the process is so much more powerful because it’s happening faster and it’s happening to your child.
Do all those engineers out there know something the rest of us adults don’t? That the secret to understanding the world is tearing it apart? That creation comes from destruction? I don’t have a lot of experience being around toddlers, so I suspect that much of what I am seeing is developmental, but I think we can learn something from these engineers, be they electrical or of the two and a half foot tall variety. Don’t be afraid to take things apart and put them back together. You might learn something.
Last week, my daughter started building things you can see. We have this old-fashioned wooden cylinder puzzle that she has been ripping apart for six months. For a while, she had this habit of meticulously removing each piece, one at a time. Then about four months ago, she started knocking it over and pulling out the puzzle base, spilling all the pieces at once. She seemed to figure out the fastest process for deconstructing the puzzle and then got bored with it for a few months. A couple of weeks ago, something strange happened. She started taking the pieces off one at a time again. And then she tried (for a few days) to put a piece back on the base. She kept failing, because she was only using one hand and she kept misjudging the distance between her and the puzzle base. But she kept trying, eventually with both hands holding the piece.
And then she got it, that first piece finally sliding into place. And then she put all the pieces back on. And then she started stacking other things on top of the puzzle, like books, or pieces from other puzzles.
Whatever she becomes when she grows up, I know one thing about my daughter right now.
She is an engineer.
Whatever she’s building in there, it must be pretty cool.
