So, as a parent, and particularly a parent involved with the creation, care and feeding of media/videogames, I get a lot of opportunity to study how children grow and evolve and I pay particular attention when it comes to the learning process of play.  Now, I am by no means an expert, and my observances are limited to my kids and their friends, which gives us a pretty piss-poor sampling if we are looking at children in the greater sense I suppose, but then, I’m not a scientist and these observations are for my own edification and modification of the way I handle my kids and their peers.

So this a couple weeks ago my daughter (5.5y) discovered a newfound love of Pokemon, and in particular the cartoon that goes with the game.  Being the media-loving parent that I am, I hunt up the only play on demand movie that’s available on Netflix, through my XBox 360.  She is delighted and, by my count, has now watched through the thing at least once per day since I first downloaded it.

Now, She and I have an understanding.  I won’t try to *teach* her in any formal sense and she won’t scream at me and get all grouchy and frustrated.  It works for us.  It doens’t mean she’s unteacheable, by the way, she takes instruction from her teachers and other adults with a smile, even her father can walk her through “lessons” in a more formal sense.  This is between her and I for some odd reason.  Instead from me she learns through observation.  I can “show” her things that I think are cool (or that I pretend are cool so she’ll want to learn them) but I have to simply execute the action while she watches, I can’t give her instruction or ask her to copy my outright.

The point to all this parental rambling is that I wasn’t able to set up the movie for her this afternoon, I had my hands tied up in something little brother related.  So, in true form, she set it up herself.  She’s never asked one question about the order of things.  It’s a complicated setup, you have to turn on the TV, make sure the channel is set to the proper input, login to my XBox Live account (but that does not require a password) find the NetFlix function, then find the movie she wants and start it up.  My husband has a hard time executing all these steps sometimes, my babysitter won’t even try.  My daughter just went and did it after observing me do it on her behalf dozens of times already.

Damn, she’s a smartie!