The reason they like bananas

by andrea

Kids ask the best questions, don't they? Their questions arise out of their innocence, a genuine thirst for knowledge and a keen interest in their surroundings and how things work. It's so fun to see this in action. (Clearly, for me, part of the fun of being a parent is the act of studying these strange little critters a.k.a. our children.)

Earlier this week, while she was eating her cereal, my daughter Emma suddenly got very serious and, not knowing which words to choose, asked me a garbled question about "the first elephant." As it turned out, she wanted to know where they came from, and how the first ones got here.

I was caught by surprise. I had nothing prepared. How does one explain billions of years of evolution (this is what we will be teaching our children) when she can hardly grasp the concept of the five years she's been alive in this world?

Just now I was researching a better way of explaining it on a level she'd understand. I found this here:

The most success I have had in getting the concept across is to keep coming back to natural selection. How some things live and some things don't. And the things that live have babies just like themselves so eventually everything looks like them.

You can play a game with colored jelly beans or M&M's to illustrate this point. Use a colored paper background, a colored carpet or, best of all, the green lawn. Talk about how there are many different colored jelly-bean-people hiding in the grass and a predator wants to fly down and eat them. Spread out the jelly beans and have the child pretend to be a predator -- catching the ones that are the easiest to see in a short period of time. Then collect the remaining ones and discuss how the green ones and the black ones "survived" and now there will only be green and black jellybean babies –- at least until the first snow.

How have you explained this big question to your child? Is there a better way?

Comments

[andrea]

I hope I didn't offend anyone with my post. It wasn't my intention. Although I don't want this thread descending into a religous debate, I would still be interested in hearing people's comments.

[VJ]

I was going to comment, but didn't because of differing beliefs about how this world began. I didn't want to offend, so I kept quiet. Perhaps that's the reason why everyone else did too.

Since we are devout Christians, we believe God created this world. Tony hears about this every day in family worship in church, and soon will be hearing about it in school.

[Elizabeth]

I'm disappointed that no-one commented! I've been curious to see what people would say. I don't have any kids, but I hope to some day, and I'm evolutionary biologist, so this question is important to me.

I think the jellybean idea is great. And since she picked out elephants, you can also talk about trunks, and large ears, and why they might be advantageous. A short trunk is better than no trunk, but a longer one is even better, etc. You can talk about eating from trees, and needing to be able to reach. The baby elephants that grow up to have longer trunks will eat more leaves, and have more babies of their own.