Kids and Curiosity

Andrea Tamayo, a newsletter writer, recently published a short reflection in Scientific American (August 29, 2025). Everything she says in this mini essay is 100% true, and yet the essay itself is not! How can that be? Let’s listen in: 

Science is about asking questions. Yet, over time, many parents notice that their child might lose interest in exploring the world around them. Scientists hypothesize this might be due to some linguistic cues. When talking to children, adults may say things like “Let’s be scientists today!” (to promote curiosity) or “You’re such a good scientist!” (to praise a child). But this language focuses on science as an identity, rather than a set of activities and actions that people do, which can be demotivating. Framing science as actions that we take, for example saying, “Let’s do science!” seems to protect children’s interest in and motivation to engage with science over time.

Andrea is right, of course! No parent or grandparent fails to notice that their kids’ insatiable curiosity wanes with the onset of puberty. Yes, it is a tragedy, but it has almost nothing to do with an adult saying, ‘Let’s be scientists’ instead of ‘Let’s do science’.  

Of course, it is better to talk of ‘science’ as something we do rather than as something we are; but this fine distinction has almost nothing to do with the huge drop in teenagers’ intellectual curiosity. 

In fact, both phraseologies are demeaning and reflect adults’ insatiable need to infantilize the children in their orbit. We make it abundantly clear to our charges that they are not doing real science, that they are not being real scientists…they are just playing. 

And yet it is precisely to children (or child-like minds) that we need to look for our next conceptual breakthroughs. There is a reason why the Fields Medal is only awarded to mathematicians under the age of 40.

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? Do adults realize, consciously or not, that their rugrats are orders of magnitude smarter than they are? Is this what makes us insecure and defensive?

Between a 50 year old and a 5 year old, I’d choose to spend time with a 5 year old any day…I would, that is, if I could keep up. I can hang with my 50 somethings for months on end and never hear a fresh idea; I’m sure they would say the same of the time they spend with me. 

“…People talk of situations, read books, repeat quotations, draw conclusions on the wall.” (Bob Dylan) Adults speak ‘rote words in rite order’ but for the most part they are incapable of novelty. They can reprise CNN, Fox News, or NPR for me, but they can’t tell me what they think.  

Nor can they float a totally novel idea. We sub-out our thinking to academia and the media. After all, creative thinking is a lot of work, and we have lost confidence in our ability. We are more than happy to let those ‘more qualified’ do it for us. 

On the other hand, I can’t spend an afternoon with a 5 year old and not hear at least 3 fresh ideas.  Not all of them will turn out to be Nobel Prize worthy; but they do make me think. They show me the world in a new way, and isn’t that the point of it all after all?

Kids know nothing of ideology; they don’t watch CNN or Fox! They have few preconceptions. Everything is possible…until it isn’t. Everything is new to them and they encounter everything on its own terms. They see the world through the eyes of a poet, an artist, a mystic. Every second we can spend with them is an incredible gift…if we can endure the heat, which of course we can’t!

Sidebar: I’ve watched videos of incredible adults interacting creatively with groups of children. They’re awesome! But tellingly, none lasts more than 20 minutes, most are shorter; the adults cannot hold their own with kids for longer.

As adults we see the world as a collection of symbols; we confront nothing on its own terms, we see nothing as it is in itself. Everything we experience is carefully protected by its semantic packaging. Adults understand how things are used, where they fit in, but they have no hint of what things are. 

Case in Point: I have a spatula in a drawer in my kitchen; I pull it out only when I need to flip a fried egg or a pancake, and that’s not very often. But if I hand that spatula to a preschooler, they will play with it for hours and then carefully place it in their toybox so they can retrieve it at will…and they will do so, even though (or especially since) they have no idea what it’s used for. Utility profanes Sancity.

As adults we apply a complex ontological grid to our perception of the world. We impose our own Great Chain of Being: adults > kids > pets > other animals > plants > ‘stuffies’.  

Children know nothing of symbols or semantics; they know neither grids nor hierarchies. They confront everything on its own terms. Everything is unique, a one-off, everything has its own soul. Children are born Hasidim – they perceive the divine spark at the core of everything they encounter (animate or otherwise). What we call playing, they’d call ‘releasing the Shekinah’…if only they could pronounce it.

But sometime along the way, children shed their luminous bodies and put on the shroud of adulthood. Sartre called it ‘the spirit of seriousness’. Typically, this happens gradually but with two major inflection points, one around the age of 10 and the second at 13 or 14. 

But the tragic loss of our innate sense of wonder and reverence has nothing to do with whether some adult says ‘we are scientists’ rather than ‘we do science’. Proof: this happens to almost all children, whether they have any interest in science or not; some have probably barely heard of science. It’s happening now in our super-scientific century but there’s every reason to believe it happened to much earlier generations of children as well. 

Andrea is right. The problem is tied up with ‘identity’…but it has nothing to do with science. Put yourself back in your mother’s womb. Your cognitive infrastructure is, well, ‘embryonic’; your experience of the world consists of swimming in a sea of amniotic fluid.

Imagine the shock of being born: “Who am I? Where am I? What is all this?” Your brain is still developing, and it is immediately tasked with making sense of, and surviving in, an entirely alien world.

Since Plato, Westerners have thought in terms of classes and members. There is a class of objects known as ‘chairs’; they all serve a common function but no two of them are identical. Children know no classes. They learn how to ‘classify’ from adults. Initially, every object, every person is its own class. ‘William and Mary’ have no more in common than ‘William and Oatmeal’ – a great name for a new British pub BTW.

Children have no role in society. They serve no function (unless being ‘cute’ is a life’s work). Each is an independent entity immersed in a sea of independent entities. But as they ‘grow up’, they gradually internalize the categories of the adults around them. The way our contemporary languages are structured, children must learn about classes in order to communicate. They must learn to identify ‘a chair’ rather than just ‘that chair’.

Sidebar: 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 the so-called Winged Chair was simply a chair that happened to have wings. 

When children age from day care through kindergarten into first grade, they begin to understand their day to day experiences as part 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 programmed task, not a spontaneous response to one’s environment.

As we age further, we become immersed in roles. We are players on a little league team, members of a cub scout den, voices in a church choir. Later, we are cast members in our high school’s musical, we play right guard on the football team, and we write for the school newspaper. We have gained competence…but at the expense of curiosity.

But it doesn’t have to be this way! There’s nothing wrong with competence per se; in fact, it’s a good thing and 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 editors. And yes, Andrea, we do not just ‘do’ science, we are scientists.

In fact of course, we are none of those things. In fact, we are not anything in this world. We are the “inbreaking” of the Transcendent. We are consciousness! We are the simultaneous awareness of our environment and of ourselves. We are recursion! We are the Universe looking at itself…and making adjustments.

We are right to be terrified. Our power is awesome…and we are totally alone with that power. Like kids on their first day of middle school, we are desperate to fit in, to sand down all our rough edges, to cover-up any identifying marks. We yearn to be ‘just like everybody else’. 

We are sleeper agents of a foreign power - not the USSR this time but God (or Gaia if you prefer). Our MO is to blend in, to attract no notice, to be as much like everyone else as possible. 

But just like sleeper agents during the Cold War, we are almost certain to go native. We forget all about our secret mission and we focus on lowering our handicap (that’s golf talk). And when our ‘handler’ finally reaches out with orders from ‘on high’, we say, “We don’t know who you are; you must be mistaking us for someone else.” 

We have become what we are here to observe and correct; we have become part of the problem we were meant to solve. And, of course, we will eagerly perpetuate this cycle of doom with our own offspring. So again, Andrea is right, identity is the enemy of creativity…but on a scale she doesn’t imagine.

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

The pressure of living in our aspirational society is all consuming. We are 110% invested in making a living, raising a family, saving for retirement, and there’s no relief until we reach seniority (or senility, whichever comes first).

“Work/Life Balance” is a meme without meaning. Or, if it means anything, it refers to balancing our different roles: e.g. cutting back on work time so that we can coach our kids’ sports teams, etc. There’s no question of our making any room for us. Now none of these activities is bad per se; they are only ‘suboptimal’ when we become what we do.

Once we’re hooked, most of us will not have a realistic opportunity to pull back until we’re ‘seniors’. Of course, by then we’ve totally lost touch with the infinitely curious 5 year old inside us. We want to rediscover ourselves, but we have no idea where to begin.

A recent study in Psychological Science, led by postdoctoral scholar Radhika Santhanagopalan, Ph.D., confirms this hypothesis and offers a compatible but different explanation. “Children are notorious for seeking out information, often in the form of endless questions. So when do we… decide that, actually, the number of calories in a slice of cake is none of our business?... As children aged, the tendency to avoid information grew stronger. Though 5- and 6-year-olds still actively sought information, 7- to 10-year-olds were much more likely to strategically avoid learning something if it elicited a negative emotion.”

Pre-tweens learn that information has real world consequences, and often those consequences trump satisfaction of curiosity. Information becomes a tool…and eventually, perhaps, a weapon. It is no longer ‘merely’ a source of pure enjoyment. Bit has become It. Eventually, they will learn to say things like, “What I don’t know can’t hurt me…curiosity killed the cat…it’s on a need to know basis,” etc.

Perhaps Social Security needs to be expanded to include free classes, or even complimentary consults, on Rediscovering You. In the meantime, do yourself a favor: worship the pre-teens in your life and spend time learning from them and enjoying their company…as much, that is, as you can stand.

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Jan Steen’s Children Teaching a Cat to Dance (1660–79) captures children absorbed in mischief, their curiosity unfiltered and free of constraint. The scene illustrates how kids engage with the world without roles or rules, turning even a household cat into a partner in discovery.