9. one example: when moonbot learned how to hold small pieces of food between her fingers, that didn't automatically come with the ability to put the food back between her fingers if she accidentally grabbed it in her palm
that skill is one she picked up this week!
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10. it's really incredible how almost nothing comes "preinstalled" when you're born
babies come out with a few reflexes to help with basic survival, familiarity w/the scent of their mother (I think) and a brain that is frantically trying to make sense of everything
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11. apparently they don't even have the ability to separate the different streams of sensory input
babies are on a wild, synesthetic, psychedelic trip
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12. this isn't about moonbot but one of the stickiest early lessons seems to be about the availability of food
foster kids I've known who were neglected as infants and then adopted while still infants often continue to act food-insecure well into young adulthood
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(I think I might actually get to 100, but it's going to take a while)
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13. it's extremely hard, if not impossible, to direct our baby towards learning a specific thing
sometimes it becomes obvious later that she was missing a necessary prerequisite that we couldn't have identified
sometimes she's just focused on other stuff!
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14. It makes me wonder about devemopmental timelines, how much you can actually *make* a kid learn something specific...I've met feral children and it's obvious that kids need exposure to lots of things to pick them up at all, but directing it? how?!
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whoa whoa you’ve met feral children? i’m *so* curious what they’re like!!! like what they’re missing or maybe what everyone else is missing that they have if anything?
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it depends on the kid and "how" feral they were, and how old they were when they ended up in foster care (when I met them)
I only knew 3 or 4 that I'd call feral as opposed to neglected, and only two of those well
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oh and none were older than 4ish when they were removed from the home
commonalities:
-food insecurity like crazy
-violent and not the way a normally socialized toddler will go through violent phases
-major verbal issues
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so these are kids who were like... so neglected they basically weren't taken care of at all?
gosh. i guess they weren’t raised by wolves in the forest then even 😔
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