Celebrate your child's love of learning

© Wondertime

Letting a child explore cause and effect can really pay off.

Two-year-old Charlie was a kid who pushed buttons. From the time he learned to walk, VCR buttons, light switches, dishwasher controls — anything that could be pushed, pulled, turned, or toggled — commanded my son's attention. Toys? Fun, yes, but they didn't compare to the thrill of electronics.

Believing at the time that there was a technological solution to every problem, I bought a childproofing device called a TV Guard. The TV Guard sat under the TV set and had a plastic shield that went in front of the buttons, preventing inquisitive fingers from getting at them.

Charlie quietly watched me set it up. When I was done he inspected it from every angle. Then he wedged his fingers between the shield and the TV and pulled. I got to him before the TV fell, then went back to the packaging and read the fine print: "If your child might pull on Guard, TV stand, or wall unit in any way, do not use." Might? We're talking about a kid who had pulled baby gates down from the wall, who had stuck his head in the banister, who had once, for reasons known only to himself, walked around the house with raw eggs in his pockets. Of course he might pull on the TV Guard.

Even with something as mundane as a light switch Charlie could, well, push my buttons. I'm curled up on the couch with a book. I hear the scrape of chair legs on the floor. Darkness. Light. Darkness. Light. A few minutes later, he's gone to change the settings on my dishwasher. It was a frustrating clash of interests. I wanted our electronic devices to work in a predictable manner. Charlie wanted to play. He wanted to learn how to make things work, and to do whatever we were doing.

Still, it was the thermostat that led me to wave the white flag. What had taken hours to program was undone in the amount of time it took for me to shout, "Charlie, no!"

So I surrendered. The next morning I approached him before he had a chance to flip a single switch. "Today," I told Charlie, "is Button Day." I led him to the light switch and hoisted him up. He turned it off (darkness), flicked it on (light), again, and again, and again.

"Are you done?" I asked. "Yes!" he said.

He dragged me to the TV, pushed the power button and the volume, adjusted the color and the tone. He fiddled with every button until finally he nodded.

"Done?" I asked. His answer: "Car." The car was Charlie's Holy Grail. He had never been inside it without being buckled in his car seat. He sat in the front, on my lap, his excitement so intense that he couldn't say a word. He stretched out his hand toward the dashboard and looked at me, amazed. "Go ahead," I told him, smiling, as I turned the key.

He turned on the windshield wipers: first fast, then slow, then intermittent. He moved on to the headlights, the turn signal, the radio, and (heaven help me) the horn. For 20 minutes we sat there (my hands protecting the gearshift; I had some limits) while he tried each and every button. This button makes a light go on. This one makes a noise. He was taking a crash course, so to speak, in cause and effect

Like most toddlers, Charlie didn't have a lot of control over his life. I told him when to go to bed, what to eat, where to put away his trucks. But with a touch of his finger, he could make the radio come to life.

Then, as abruptly as the honk of the horn, he was sated. He hopped down, went inside, and didn't touch a button for the rest of the day. For awhile, Charlie's button-pushing dwindled. My appliances were safe again. But everyone needs a refresher course once in a while. A week later I saw him making a beeline for the VCR. I stopped him and asked what he needed. He beamed. "More Button Day!" We had just two more Button Days after that, and he never asked again.

Now, at 8, Charlie's got his own "shop," where he keeps everything he finds — toilet-paper tubes, rubber bands, and the like — and builds contraptions. He recently made a cardboard gizmo with which to bop his older sister on the head. I had to let him try it — just once, in the name of science.

Sticky Fingers
Preserve your thermostat settings:

Teach your child how to load and play CDs. Many 3-year-olds can handle this task, with supervision, and by 4, she'll be programming the dinner music.

If you can locate an old typewriter (at Grandma's maybe?), kids find the clacking of the keys satisfying. Watching the letters appear on the page is a bonus.

Break out the bubble wrap. A few squares of the stuff provide lots of bang for the button-pushing buck.

Why Kids Do This
Tina Grotzer, assistant professor of education at Harvard, says that children's interest in button pushing has to do with beginning to understand space and time — that you can do something in one place and it has an effect somewhere else. When a toddler pushes a button on his toy, its lights may go on. But when he pushes a doorbell outside, the sound comes from inside the house.

And yes, some kids may love button pushing exactly because parents prefer they didn't do it. Grotzer says a reaction of any kind is exciting to children.

She says parents should try to see button pushing as growth. Children are learning to make predictions about how the world works. "They're not trying to "push your buttons." They're building scientific minds.