You do not have my ideas!
Our son was three years old, and he was in the kitchen with me and my wife as we were preparing to eat breakfast one morning. Standing in front of the open refrigerator door, he announced that he would like to have a pickle on his cereal. “That’s not a great idea,” I said. He closed the refrigerator door and turned to face me, planting his feet solidly on the kitchen floor. “You do not have my ideas!” It dawned on me that my relationship with my son had changed rather significantly. “You’re right,” I stammered. “I do not have your ideas. You can put a pickle on your cereal if you like.”
I’ve told that story in a variety of settings over the last few decades — most recently at our son’s wedding reception — usually concluding with something like “When he was 3 years old, this was rather funny. When he was 17, not so much.” I thought of it today as I read Michael Pollan’s account of the implications of emerging episodic memory in a child’s development.
With the arrival of episodic [or autobiographical] memory comes the emergence of executive function — the ability to exert a measure of control over one’s own mind, a capability located in the prefrontal cortex. “Put a muffin in front of a four-year-old,” [psychologist Alison] Gopnik said, describing one of her own experiments, “and tell them their mother said it was okay to eat it. If you then ask if they can decide not to eat it, they will tell you no, they can’t. You want it, so you have to eat it. But a six-year-old will tell you that of course you can decide not to eat it. Why? They’ll say, ‘Because I’m the boss of me’” (A World Appears, p. 183).
That’s interesting, I thought. “I’m the boss of me, and you do not have my ideas!” But Gopnik suggests that this strong sense of self emerges around the age of six. I’m sure that our son was not yet four when he announced that he was the boss of his own ideas. After turning to the next page of Pollan’s book, I found an explanation.
Enter the volitional self, exhibiting a newfound degree of self-control and free will, or at least the illusion of it. But unlike the earlier stages, the timing of which appears to be hardwired in humans, this one seems to be culturally conditioned. Perhaps not surprising, the self that proclaims “I’m the boss of me” emerges earlier in American children than it does in, say, children in Asia.
I’m not sure what to make of the differing developmental timelines in the U.S. and Asia. But I fear that it has something to do with the wild west metaphor, the idea that each one of us is radically independent and has little need for the help of others. If I had another go at fatherhood I think I might find ways to talk about how much I’ve relied on others as I develop the ideas that I call my own.
