Kids and Curiosity

1500 words, 6 minute read

In a short reflection in Scientific American (August 29, 2025) Andrea Tamayo accurately observed that children, as they age, seem ever less interested in exploring the world around them.

She reasons that this might be due to linguistic cues coming from adults. For example, when talking to children, we might say “Let’s be scientists today” or “You’re such a good scientist!” This language focuses on science as an identity, a role, something you play at or perform, rather than something that is an integral part of daily living.

Andrea is right, of course! No parent or grandparent fails to notice that their kids’ insatiable curiosity wanes with the onset of puberty. And yes, adults’ language can be spirit robbing and demotivating. But at most, the two phenomena are loosely connected and identifying one with the other denatures both.

First, face facts: adults have a deeply felt need to infantilize the children in their orbit. In Andrea’s example, we make it abundantly clear to our charges that they are not doing real science (whatever that is), that they are not being real scientists…they are just playing.

Adults are bigger and stronger and know more than most kids, so why do we feel a need to marginalize them and trivialize their contributions; why do we damn them with faint praise? My hypothesis: Consciously or not, adults realize that their rugrats are orders of magnitude smarter than they are and that makes us insecure and defensive.

Wait, smarter than we are? My kid is smarter than me? You bet! Here’s how it works: A 10 year old’s brain processes information 4x more efficiently than a 40 year old’s. Raw mental acuity declines in what approximates a straight line (i.e. arithmetically) from birth to death.

However, learning is predicated on what we already know (we stand on the shoulders of giants) and the average 40 year old knows 4² (16x) more than the average 10 year old. Knowledge increases geometrically: the magic of compound information. 

In one year, a 40 year old will learn 4x as much as a 10 year old, even though the 10 year old is learning 4x faster than we are: 1/4 x 16 = 4. That’s how it is that superannuated ‘know-it-alls’ can’t keep up with their size 10s. Memorize the periodic table? You have an edge. Find an imaginative solution to a unique problem? Don’t even bother!

Let’s break this down. Studies show that the central nervous system ‘reorganizes’ according to a timeline that doesn’t map neatly onto the milestones we typically celebrate (6, 16, 21, etc.). For one study, scientists compared MRI diffusion scans of more than 3,800 people, ranging from newborns to 90-year-olds; they found that our brains ‘molt’ 4 times, once at around age 9, and then again around 32, 66, and 83. I am reminded of how caterpillars totally reassemble in the chrysalis as they become butterflies.

Our brain’s connections wire themselves in a certain way from birth to nine years of age. Our neural architecture reorganizes as we prepare to enter adolescence and that pattern persists into our early 30’s, marking our transition to full onset adulthood. This is the point at which intelligence plateaus and personality crystalizes.

Since Plato, Westerners have thought in terms of classes and their members. There is a class of objects known as ‘chairs’; they all serve a common function though no two of them are identical. Organizing experience into classes and members is a form of data compression; it is our way of adjusting to declining metal acuity. It works…but at a price: we are now one step removed from the material world as it actually happens.

Children know no classes. They only learn how to ‘classify’ from adults. Initially, every object is its own class, a class of one. When I was a child, our house was filled with all sorts of interesting furniture. Each piece had its own unique name. I had no idea that what was called the Winged Chairwas simply a chair that had wings.

Children routinely nominalize adjectives. Ab initio, every noun is a proper noun. To the extent that we internalize Plato’s categorial scheme, tangible things become the intersections of abstract qualities; we lose contact with the concrete.

Children have no role in society. They serve no function (unless ‘being cute’ qualifies). When children age from day care through kindergarten into first grade, they begin to understand their day to day experiences in the context of a ‘role’. How many parents have said, “Our job is to go to work and earn; your job is to go to school and learn?” And so learning becomes a scheduled task, not a spontaneous response to one’s environment.

As we age further, we become immersed in our roles. We are players on a Little League team, members of a Cub Scout den, voices in a church choir. Later, we are in the cast of a high school musical, we play right guard on a football team, and we write for our school newspaper.

We not only break down the external world into classes and their members, we define ourselves in the same way. Our roles abstract us from naked experience. We gain competence…but at the expense of the concrete contact that promotes curiosity.

It doesn’t have to be this way! There’s nothing wrong with competence per se; in fact, it’s a good thing and it is a prerequisite for survival in this world. The problem comes when we identify with the roles associated with those skills.

We do not just ‘play’ football, we are football players; we do not just ‘write’, we are authors. And yes, Andrea, we do not just ‘do’ science, we are scientists.

In fact of course, we are none of those things. We’re not anything in this world. We are, potentially at least, much, much more!

We are the world transcending itself. We are not just conscious, we are consciousness. We are stereoscopically aware of our environment and of ourselves being aware of that environment. We are not just recursive, we are recursion. We are how the Universe looks at itself, judges itself…and adjusts itself.

We are right to be terrified. The power is awesome…and we are totally alone with it. Unbearable! And so, like tweens on their first day of middle school, we sand-down our rough edges and cover-over our identifying marks. We yearn to be ‘just like everybody else’, someone who belongs, a member, one who plays role, an adult.

As we get older, we ask, “Who am I?” and we expect an answer! Of course,  Odysseus (via Homer) gave us that answer 3000 years ago: we are Nemo, we are no one! More recently, we were reminded by Jean-Paul Sartre that we are Neant. We are the subjects of our lives, not artifacts of a civilization.

We are like sleeper agents of a foreign power - not the USSR this time but God (Kosmos or Gaia if you prefer). Our MO is to blend in, to attract no notice, to be as much like everyone else as possible. And just like sleeper agents during the Cold War, we are almost certain to go native. We forget all about our existential mission and we focus on lowering our handicap (golf talk).

As we age, we become ever more identified with our roles. We become spouses, parents, employees, managers, entrepreneurs. Gradually, these are no longer things we do or even roles we assume; they become who (or what) we are.

The pressure of living in our aspirational society is all consuming. We are 100% invested in making a living, raising a family, saving for retirement. Work/Life Balance is a meme without meaning. Or, if it means anything, it refers to balancing different roles, e.g. cutting back on the job so that we have time to coach our kids’ sports teams. There’s no question of making any room for us.

So we gradually become what we are here to observe and correct; we become the problem we were meant to solve. And, of course, we eagerly perpetuate this cycle of doom with our own offspring; our fondest hope is for a mini-me.

Once we’ve bought in, most of us will not have a realistic opportunity to pull back until we reach seniority (or senility, whichever comes first). Then we’ll yearn to reinvent ourselves, but by then we have no idea where to begin. Perhaps Social Security benefits should include a free class: Reawakening the Kid in you.