Why Your Toddler Doesn't Want That Toy: Mimetic Desire and Parenting Insights

Vance Crowe [00:00:06] Welcome back to the podcast. I'm glad you're here. Today we're gonna do an as the crow flies episode, which is when I sit down and just share some observations that I've made. I haven't done one of these in quite some time, and a lot of listeners know that the free time that I normally was spending on these is now spent totally engaged with my 14 month old daughter Violet. And I think one of the great benefits, one of the great gifts that I've received from having you, the listener, help me get out and do speaking and make that a major part of the way that I fund my life, is that I'm able to spend huge amounts of time with my daughter, probably different from almost any other time in human history. And as a way to say thank you before I head back out on the road and start doing speaking engagements. And I'm about to do a whole bunch of them in November. In January, I thought I would sit down and share some of the observations that I've made because you've given me this gift. These are observations of a person that absolutely loves communication. I love watching how people interact with one another. I am a student of culture and have spent my lifetime trying to figure out why do people do what they do and talk how they do. And also, as a person that is intensely curious about this idea of the daemon, that voice, that kind of impulse generator in your brain that you don't have any control over, but it whispers into your mind things that you know, you could be doing, the person that you think you could be.

Vance Crowe [00:01:43] And as a parent, I always thought that you kind of just told your child how to live or how to behave or how to think about things, and that it would just kind of work out. But as with all parents, once you are handed that child and they're now your responsibility, you start to realize that what you thought parenting was going to be about is not at all what it is. And because I've had so much time to be engaged with this, I've learned some things that I wanna sit down and share. I'm not sharing these because I necessarily think that they're right or they're entirely accurate. It's just that when I was preparing to be a father, I received a lot of advice from my ma male friends that was, Hey man, don't worry if you don't really have a great relationship with your child for the first year and a half. Like they can't really talk. They can't really move. And so you just kind of gotta get through this, be supportive of your wife and move past that. And you know, I always thought that was weird advice, but I didn't have another frame of reference. And so in the back of my mind, I was kinda like, something doesn't feel quite right about this. And now, because I've had this great gift of spending time with my daughter, I realize that I've had a gift that many other people don't have. Many other people have had to go to their nine to five job, or they're building businesses that are way beyond nine to five, and they have to spend time in a tractor or in all kinds of meetings or away from their family. And so the gift that I've received, I wanna pay forward.

Vance Crowe [00:03:14] I wanna be able to share with you things that I've been able to observe because of the life that I've been given in large part because of you, the listener. And the very first observation that I've made, the one that really struck me in, in a manner that I could not have expected was that my child, and really all children have a spark, a will that exists from the very moment they're born. They can't communicate with it, they don't control it. It is this thing that says, I want, I desire, or I wish this was stopping right now. And for the first four months of being a parent, if you've never done this before, no one tells you that a child can't smile or laugh with you. It can't give you any signal that you're doing a good job. The only thing it can do is tell you when you're doing something wrong or it's completely neutral. So it's a little bit like negotiating with a terrorist, but I think that's the way that it has to be, right? We all know that deep down, there are some things that must be met in our lives that are non-negotiable. We have to be able to get enough sleep, we need to eat when we're really hungry. And if something is bothering us like a dirty diaper, we will scratch and, and cry and moan and beg anything we can do to get rid of those things. So in a lot of ways, those first four months are teaching the parent, at least it was teaching me, Hey, there are some foundational things that you can't get around.

Vance Crowe [00:04:48] And there's no talking my daughter out of this. There's no rationalizing with her that she should wait 10 more minutes because I'm busy, or there are other things that are a priority over this. And so she just acts out in this way. And so this goes on for a little while until at around four months when my daughter had her first smile, her first little laugh that is like a drug. And every parent that's ever experienced this, you know, the feeling of like, wait a second, I, I did something right here. I'm not just negotiating with a person that is making demands of me. Now I've done something. And the baby is able to communicate, Hey, we are in sync together. We both have discovered something together. And at that four month mark, or whenever it happens between the parent and the child, now there is a spark of a relationship. Now everything isn't being done to avoid the negative. And instead you have this positive thing that you can try and generate and it can become a little bit addictive. And I think maybe that's why nature has made this this delayed gratification, because if you got laughter right from the very beginning, you wouldn't appreciate it. But after four months of sleepless nights and changing endless diapers and lots of demands, this laughter fills your soul. But it also is a major communicator on how is it that we can come to resolution? How can we find things that we are both enjoying, that we both understand?

Vance Crowe [00:06:21] And many of you that have heard me speak often have heard me talk about the idea that laughter is a signal of understanding, right? There are two things that people would not have normally connected, but as soon as you connect, you give this ha ha ha symbol. That's why comedians, right, they put out a joke, and generally they're connecting two things that didn't seem like they were connected. But once you realize they're connected, you, you give this laughter, ha ha ha. And it's also why when people don't get a joke, they laugh along with other people because you wanna feel connected, right? Laughter is this deeply emotional thing, and it's not taught to us, right? It is innate in some way. And once it happens, once that occurs, now two people can share revelations, realizations. They can start to say, ah, there are things that we can learn and discover together. And so while many dads think that, hey, it's gonna be a year and a half in reality, those first four months are just you learning what are their demands. And then after they get that laughter, now you are lit onto a way that you can start saying, ah, I can teach you things. I can participate in what's going on. And I think the next thing that I learned about the children or the human spirit is that you don't really control this will, my daughter doesn't have a way to say, I'm going to sit and laugh at jokes, or I'm going to be really upset, or I'm going to want this thing.

Vance Crowe [00:07:52] It's just an impulse. It's just an emotion and a feeling. And I, I remember the other day, my wife and I were having dinner with Violet, and she's sitting in her little chair and she's got her plate of food. And Anne and I both have our plates of food. And she saw something on my plate that she wanted. There was, it was, it was these little grape tomatoes, and there were some on her plate, and there were some on mine, but for whatever reason, the ones on mine looked better than the ones on hers. So she starts grunting and pointing and trying to stand up in her chair to reach out and grab mine. And at first, before I realize what she's doing, I'm, I'm kind of confused. And I'm saying, what do you want? And what is it? And, and then you realize like, oh, she's pointing at this tomato. That's what she wants. And at first you're like, silly baby, you can't control yourself, right? And, and then you start saying like, wait a second. That exact spirit, that thing of, I want that thing and not these other things that are in front of me that is innate in all of us. It's just we have figured out culturally how to cover those over how to hide our intentions, how to ask in an appropriate way. And in a lot of ways, parenting is about teaching children to hold back on their immediate impulses and start to figure out how can I ask for these things so that we're more cooperative? But when it comes down to it deep down, when I see, you know, a big piece of fatty salmon next to some broccoli, I have to force myself to want the broccoli. I have to make some decision and have some conversation.

Vance Crowe [00:09:25] But in truth, I am no different from my daughter in that my impulse is to go for the thing that I want, and I have the ability to reason through that. And I think that spark, that will, that thing that you want is something that's really important to recognize. I don't control the things that I want, just like Violet doesn't control the things that she wants, they're there, but you have to negotiate with yourself in some way. And so she has this spirit, this daemon, this thing that is telling her I want these things. And much about learning to grow up is figuring out how do I balance the things between what I want or what this voice in my head is telling me I want versus the way that I need to cooperate with other people in order to get it. And so when you start thinking about the daemon in this way, you start thinking, well, why is it that they don't already know what they want? Are they just entirely impulse? Are they just like, Hey, I want this food, or Hey, I want that toy. But really if you sit and observe your child for very long, you don't interact with them, you aren't playing with them, you set them down in front of a group of toys and they don't know what those toys are, they don't know anything about which ones are soft or which ones are hard or which buttons to push or which blocks to stack on top of each other. One of the things that you come to realize is that children can't see anything at all if you don't point it out to them. Children are, when they're dropped into this world and they look around the room, look around the room right now as you're, as you're listening to this, whether you're in your car or in your kitchen or maybe you're outside, there are literally an infinite number of things that you could look at.

Vance Crowe [00:11:09] There is so many sounds going on that you couldn't possibly name them all. There are smells all around you, there's things everywhere. And yet you somehow are able to coordinate and filter out almost everything around you to say, these are the things I care about. Like if you're driving in your car, you're saying, I'm going to pay attention to the things in between the white lines and make sure I stay on my side of the yellow lines. If you are in your kitchen, you're maybe washing dishes, so you know, Hey, I've got to look at the dishes that are dirty. I've gotta interoperate between these. But for the most part, your brain is filtering everything else out around you. Really, all the human mind can see, as Jordan Peterson pointed out, is things that are tools to help you get what you want and things that are obstacles, things that are standing in front of you. And we filter everything else out. Now, the way that this plays out with a child is that a child has no idea what to pay attention to. All of the things around them might be goals, and they might be obstacles, but they have no idea because they don't even know what they should be doing. They don't have a purpose, they don't have a priority list, they don't have like something that they need to accomplish by the end of the day. And so therefore, they're looking around wondering, what should I be paying attention to? And the theory put forward by a man named René Girard called Mimetic Desire really helped me understand what was going on with my daughter. Girard made the observation that children have no concept of what they want.

Vance Crowe [00:12:44] So what they do is they look around and they try and figure out what is it that other people want? And if I want that too, then whatever they're headed towards, then I'll be headed towards that as well. Now, this can seem like a weird concept, right? Like you don't perceive yourself as saying, I'm gonna look around and what other people want is what I want. You feel like know I know what I want, I know what I'm after, or I want things that are different and I don't wanna be like other people, but just sit and watch a child that hasn't been taught how to play with a toy, or doesn't know which toys are gonna be soft and fun to play with. And you'll quickly notice that toys are completely meaningless to them. They have no concept of it until you sit down and play with the toys as well. And this is a funny thing because it's the natural impulse is to say, I'm gonna show you how to play with this toy and then I'm gonna hand it to you and expect that you are going to derive some enjoyment out of this. But if instead you look at the toys that you have in your little playroom and you start figuring out, what can I look at? What can I observe about this toy? What can I do that will be enjoyable? And you become engrossed in that toy, you'll notice that the child now suddenly wants that toy and they wanna do whatever it is that you were doing with it. And it's funny because we sense that human beings are like, Hey, I'm gonna teach you and then you're going to replicate what I'm doing. But the teaching is all in the mimicking that the child can do when they're interacting, when they're watching what you're doing, and they wanna do what you wanna do.

Vance Crowe [00:14:17] And this plays out in all sorts of interesting ways. It can be you becoming fascinated with the texture of the little stuffed animal that you have. It can be that you are bouncing a ball and you're totally engaged in the idea of how many times can I get this ball to bounce? Or you take a set of blocks and you start stacking them on top of each other. Our senses that I need to be trying to teach the child how to do this. But in reality, all you need to do is be fully engaged in it, and the child is designed to want to mimic it. Now, this is a funny thing because I've observed quite a few parents now that I'm a parent, we have playgroups and we get together with other parents. And oftentimes you see them sit down at children in front of a bunch of toys and they're watching them and they say, well, when the child finds something interesting, then I'll engage with it. Or when the child does something, then, then I'll get in there and engage. But in truth, the child then doesn't do anything. They cry and they want to be picked up. They, you know, start to crawl away, and then the parent has to go chase after them. But if instead the parent sat the child down and then sat down next to them and became completely engaged in any toy, whatever that toy is, the child will come over and try and take the toy from you and do whatever you were doing. And this isn't just true of infants. You could take a child three, four, or five years old and you want them to pay attention to the world around them. All you have to do is pull a book down from the shelf. It could be an encyclopedia, it could be a book of 900 birds, right?

Vance Crowe [00:15:52] And if you get it out and you open it up to a page and you start becoming very interested, your face ex gets excited, you start making noises about, ooh, ah, oh, you'll notice that children will drop what they're doing and they will walk over to you and they'll want you to pick them up and sit them next to you so that they too can see what you're interested in. And so I think the reason that this is so important is that it, it kind of changes the frame set with which we use to engage and get children to be excited and want to do things. Now, you can do this in all sorts of ways. You can do it inside around toys, or one of my favorite things to do with Violet is to take her outside and sit in the backyard. And all we do is anytime we hear a new bird sound, we point where the bird sound is coming from. And as a 14 month old, she doesn't have any words yet. She can barely say maybe 45 or 50 words, but she certainly, you would think, not be able to identify these different birds. But if you do this activity of pointing where the birds are, after two or three times being outside, she will begin to mimic the bird sounds. And within a week she can start now making the same bird calls as all of the birds around her. Right now, violet can do starlings, she can do crows, and she can pick out all these other songbirds. And even though the sound she's making with her mouth doesn't actually sound like those birds, they're distinguishable.

Vance Crowe [00:17:24] And the only reason she can do this is because she's trying to mimic it. And I would say it will not be very long before her ability to name birds outpaces mind. And this is before she even has words. The child's mind is so programmed to mimic things and to be interested that the way you can help them learn is to show them what to pay attention to

Vance Crowe [00:17:49] By you paying attention to it. I'm gonna end this kind of as the crow flies with an exercise that I found to be really engaging and a lot of fun. And you can do it with a child that is maybe four months old all the way up till, I don't know, probably their teenage years, which is everybody has heard the phrase that smell is the most closely tied to memory. But we don't really think of this with kids, right? You probably have memories of smells like campfire smells or roasted marshmallows or pie or different smells of holiday season, maybe like pine or, or things like that, right? These are well established in your brain, but with a really small child, you can start getting them to identify smells that you would never imagine that they could learn. So one thing that I love to do with Violet, even in the wintertime, is to go to the freezer and pick up bags of frozen fruit. And then I open the bag and I let as much air as I can into it, and then I take it over to Violet and I press the bag so that the air comes out and it, it just shoots out at her face, right? And the first time you do it, she'll have kind of a blank look on her face, right? But then you let the bag fill up with air again, and it's got all that peach smell in it, and you push it out again. Now all of a sudden, when that poof of air hits her, you see her light up. It was the same smell she smelled just one second ago, but she didn't have a term for it.

Vance Crowe [00:19:20] She didn't even know what to expect. And so now you've created that pattern and that laughter that we talked about before instantly happened. She immediately smiles. She immediately recognizes a pattern. And once you've done this, you realize, wait, I can do this with all kinds of smells. So I have started taking her out. We grow a little patch of mint in a, in a, in a garden. And what I do is I take her and I swoop her down and I have her touch her hands to that mint. And then I take her hands and I put it to her nose. I only had to do it like two different times. And now anytime we walk past that mint, she wants to take her hands, push them down into the mint and smell them. Or we open up cinnamon and we have her smell it, and we use those words. And even though she doesn't have words for these things, she's made that connection. We've told her, Hey, you should pay attention to smells. These are things that that you can recognize and you can pay attention to. And now we're watching her be able to open her eyes and have this connection between these smells. And I don't really know what will happen with your child when you do it. I don't know if they'll laugh. I don't know if their eyes will get wide. I don't know if they'll shake. But you will immediately recognize that they've spotted a pattern. They now, the second time you pull out the cinnamon, or the third time you take them out to the mint, when they start making that realization that it smells the same every time and they can start to predict it and they know what it is, you see that connection and you've helped them understand out of all the things that they could pay attention to, these are things that are worthwhile.

Vance Crowe [00:20:58] These are things that are gonna pay off in them. Being able to smell something and to be able to react to something. That thing that you're doing is telling them what to pay attention to. And for children, attention is the currency of happiness. Attention is the thing that they need you to teach them. What should I pay attention to? And you'll also notice that the only thing they really care about is you paying attention to them. As I close out, I just remember the other day I was sitting on my phone after watching Violet for hours and hours and hours. I just needed to get a couple of emails out that were really important. And I heard her making noises and kind of stumbling, crawling over to me. And then she would go back over to her toys and then come back. And after about five minutes, I looked down and I realized she has brought a pile of stuffed animals and they're all sitting underneath me. And what she was doing was she was trying to find the toy that she could bring to me that would make me pay attention to her. And as soon as I saw that, I realized, put your phone down. I'm going to give her exactly what she wants. She's reaching out, she's struggling, she's trying to figure out what do I need to bring dad to get him to pay attention to me? Because the only thing children want is your attention. And they wanna know what your paying attention to. And that is the very core of mimetic desire. So if you ever want to have an impact on the daemon, that spirit, that impulse that your child has, you can never tell it what to do.

Vance Crowe [00:22:29] You can only provide it with a way for it to know what to pay attention to, so that its desire can be about things that are far bigger than just what society around it wants to, or whatever catches their attention because it's loud, or making noises or shining bright lights. And instead, you can have it point towards things that are far more subtle, but far more engrossing and will lead them to having that rich and bountiful relationship with you that is filled with them having that smile and that glee because you've shown them something and you've taught them. And now that makes their life so much more rich. So I'm gonna wrap this up. These are clearly unfiltered, really raw thoughts they need to be piled together and honed. And I would really love it if you've enjoyed this, that you leave comments. What are things that you have figured out are a great thing for your children to pay attention to? Beyond smells? How do you do it with sound? How do you do it with other attributes and, and you know, senses that we have, and what is it that you wanna hear more about? I love making observations about my daughter and and being able to extrapolate it out to the human spirit. And you can help me think of new questions to ask and really help me have a more enriched relationship with my child, whether she's 14 months old or 14 years old, or maybe 45 years old. So thank you so much for tuning into this. If you are the type of person that likes conversations like this, you may want to consider joining the Articulate Ventures network.

Vance Crowe [00:24:04] There are dozens and dozens of people that every day are having conversations about what they've noticed about their children, about how they build better relationships with their parents or their spouses. And we really have a great time reading books for book club and practicing speaking skills. So if you're interested in doing that, you can always go to network Articulate Ventures to find out more. And if you have a group that you think might be interested in having me come in, you can see right now the genesis of ideas that I have about how children think and where they go. And you can watch this morph into talks that entertain audiences of hundreds or even in the thousands. And I would love to come and speak with your group about cultural ideas about how the daemon works and about how to motivate yourself to do things that seem very difficult to do, but once you do, make your life that much richer. So if you're interested in that, go to Vance Crowe dot com and we can book a time to talk about your audience. Thank you so much. It is you, the listener that makes it possible for me to have this much time with my daughter. And I hope to come back with another as the Crow Flies episode, where I can share more of these thoughts and you can gimme comments back that helped me be a better father. So thanks, and we'll see you next week with another wonderful interview.