Setting a precedent

Since my eldest broke his collarbone he has been doing more sedentary activities. I'm not generally keen on letting him sit around all day but it has stopped him from playing roughly with his brother, and feeling pain. He has been using his problem solving skills, attempting to learn how to play new video games despite being pre-literate and not able to follow the text prompts. He has been enjoying playing Lego Starwars and finished the story mode very quickly with minimal input from anyone else ("I think the bit that you're missing is you use the grapple hook to attach a rope to the walkers' legs and then fly around them in circles to trip them over." "oooooOOOohh").

He has also been watching a lot of cartoons. The way we do things, this means he has been watching things that we have chosen specifically for him to watch and he is streaming files off a server to watch in all their ad-free glory on the large screen TV. This sort of glorification of media is probably not ideal, but at least we know what he's watching and can talk to him about any messages he gets, that he needs to unpack.

Today the big question on his mind was "Why were Rarity and Pinky being so mean to Fluttershy? Why wouldn't they let her buy the cherry?"

So we had a discussion about setting precedents. If you do something one time, then people might expect you to do the same thing the next time. It's like if Great-Granny offers you a marshmallow when you leave her place, you want a marshmallow every time. If Fluttershy lets someone charge her an unreasonable amount for something she really wants, then next time he goes to sell her something he might want to make her pay more too... and Rarity and Pinky Pie didn't want that guy trying to get lots of money off their friend... so they were actually trying to be nice!

This all seemed to be straightforward enough... but I was asked, why was he charging so much? Because she really wanted something, he felt like he could ask her to pay a lot, because there was only one left. That's what's called "limited supply". If there is only one of something that people really, really want, then the person who owns that thing sometimes puts the price up, because people are so desperate to get it that they will pay a lot of money for it. It's called "Supply and Demand".

Further explanation proved to clarify this, but I doubt it will go in just yet. I think it helps to introduce ideas, even if they are a little bit over what a child has experience of. They can play with the ideas and might recognise a few things if they encounter this idea again. They may know what to look for in interactions with others. Just because a child seems to have their head around a concept the first time they encounter it like this, doesn't mean they are going to retain the information. We only hold onto information that is useful and relevant to us. That's why I think it's important to talk to my kids about how they make sense of their world, even if the experiences are simulated ones like in video-games and television programming. One of the great things about not relying on syllabi and curricula is that you can cover material as it comes up and when it is relevant to the person who is trying to make sense of their own world. It matters to them.

Say what you like about television programming, it does allow children to experience a variety of social and physical situations that they would otherwise not be exposed to, from the relative safety of the couch. My children can learn a lot about bullying, and making friends, and lions, and diseases, and X-Games, and.. supply and demand from the relative safety of the couch, and without having to be the ones making the blunders... though I doubt it will ever really stick for good until it's made real for them in their own lives.