End of the line

March 17, 2008 by Barbara.

Child psychologists analyse many things about the way kids behave since kids aren’t so good at telling what they’re thinking about. I’ve had 2 semesters of Psychology, including at least 2 weeks (that’d be a good 6 hours) dedicated to children. This qualifies me, I think, to analyse Reid’s behaviour. It’s good that I never took any electrical engineering courses, really !+)

Whenever I’ve seen pictures of Reid’s daycare classes going for a walk - kids on a rope, so to speak - Reid is at the end of the rope. It occurred to me just recently why this would be the case. It’s hard to believe that the teachers wouldn’t enforce some sort of turn taking among the kids who wanted to be at the front, and so Reid would have to be too apathetic to try for the front. That would be a good explanation if Reid weren’t willing to state (clearly,  believe you me) what she wants. I wasn’t worried about the reason, really, but then I thought about how Reid tends to be close to a teacher when there is a group shot. My theory is that Reid’s priority is to stay close to a teacher. Since there will be many children who want to be at the front, where one teacher is, Reid heads for the end of the rope where the other teacher stands. Reid is like the Coldstream Guards, a British Army unit, who march at the end of a military parade rather than being second another unit (since they are last)  in order to live out their motto “Second to none”. Reid’s motto is “Close to the teacher”, though.

I haven’t run my theory by the teachers at daycare to prevent any additional facts from distorting my tidy theory. It could be they always rotate positions and I see only the pics where Reid is at the end. She could be a wanderer and thus forced to be at the end of the rope (though I highly doubt this idea).

Ken, on the other hand, said he’d never wondered about where Reid stood in line when the kids were on the rope gang. He had this expression on his face when I told him my theory that suggested that I think too much about these sorts of things. Or it might just have been a slight variation on his usual look of loving adoration.

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