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Child pyschological development is always a entertainingly fuzzy science, but I think there's at least some good reason to believe that the ability to apply mul
by jerf 4y ago
Child pyschological development is always a entertainingly fuzzy science, but I think there's at least some good reason to believe that the ability to apply multiple categorization systems to a set of objects at a time is something that will take until the teen years to really come in. Some people never really grok it.
With my younger kids, I settled on just introducing the ideas of multiple overlapping systems, but not pushing on it too hard until they're older. They're only now getting to that age and I've been folding it in to some conversations lately more strongly. I think having some fun with it early as you are is a very strong approach to the topic.
I sort of dislike the framing of this sort of article, as well as the "actually nothing's really a berry" and similar culinary silliness, because this is a really important cognitive skill for higher-level thinking and introducing it with an approach virtually guaranteed to produce resistance and associating it with trickery rather than clear thinking is a real disservice, in my opinion.
This article, once it gets going, is good; I'm only complaining about the framing, not the content.
I will complain about the culinary version of this, where the trickery I'm referring to is "You think that a strawberry is a berry (often heavily implied, 'dumbass'), but really it's an aggregate accessory fruit (often heavily implied, 'as I am smarter for knowing than you')." The whole frame is wrong; it isn't really one thing or the other, it is both, and several other things besides. The multiple classifications all exist at once and they aren't better or worse than each other, they are better or worse for certain uses, and there certainly isn't one classification that is the "real" one and all the rest are fake. For people pushing this, it's like, yeah, you almost get the idea that multiple classifications can exist at once, but you've still completely missed the point.