My son is mistaking a smartphone for his mother

http://www.slate.com/id/2269679/?from=rss

by GiraffeNecktie • 16 years ago

72 26 16 years ago

TGJ• 16 years ago

Once you read the article it's shown that the son is not mistaken, it is the parent. The child is using a word that has 1 meaning for the parent and a different meaning for the child.

hasenj• 16 years ago

Yea it seems obvious to me that the child simply thinks that this object's name is 'Mama', and he thinks it's really cool and important because daddy kept telling him about this Mama object and teaching him to like it.

philwelch2• 16 years ago

It takes a level of cognitive sophistication to think that an image on one object (an iPhone) actually represents a different object in the real world. It's incomprehensible to a baby, goes without thinking starting at the age of 2 or so, and hence represents a certain intellectual or artistic sophistication to explicitly call into question later in life: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Treachery_of_Images

frooxie• 16 years ago

I'm reminded of this quote from iusedtobelieve.com:

When I was very young, my Dad was in the Navy. Naturally I spent a good deal of time asking where my Daddy was. My mother put a big picture of him on the coffee table, so I could see him all the time, and told me "This is your Daddy." When my dad finally returned from his cruise, and we met him at the docks, I refused to talk to him, saying only "This isn't MY daddy. MY daddy's at home, on the coffee table." I believed that the picture itself was my dad. -- Jupiter

anigbrowl2• 16 years ago

Eventually, he gave her a peripheral title: "Mammon," a sort of extension of his iMama. (...) since we were in Paris, [my wife] did ask a French psychologist what was going on.

'Maman' is the French equivalent of 'mommy,' but young Luka has yet to acquire his Papa's* bad habit of dividing the world into parts foreign and domestic. I suppose 'My son is learning to speak French faster than I cab learn to understand him' doesn't yield the same level of self-assurance as this ringing denouncement of telephonic inferiority.

* That's French for 'Daddy.' Those cunning froggies, always thinking they're one step ahead of us!

DannoHung• 16 years ago

And here I was thinking it was funny that he was using the name of a false god from the Bible.

anigbrowl2• 16 years ago

Indeed, but I'm not sure one pun rescues the whole thing.

lotharbot• 16 years ago

About a month ago, I heard my son (8 months at the time) saying "ma ma ma ma" several times, but he wasn't reaching for or even looking at his mother, just his bottle. My best guess is that he was trying to mimic Cookie Monster's "om nom nom nom" because he was hungry.

Kids around this age have an extremely limited vocabulary made up of simple sounds and few syllables. As such, they tend to overload certain words. The article noted that, for a child of that age, "mama" doesn't just mean mother, but several things associated with mother. Beyond that, "mama" might also mean something else that starts with an m (like "more"), or it might simply be babbling (my son currently says "da da da" to everything he touches.)

philwelch2• 16 years ago

There's a reason "mama" has the same meaning in nearly every human language; it's the first sequence of syllables a baby can pronounce, and in nearly every culture, babies at that very early stage spend all their time with their mamas. So it's the natural mapping.

icegreentea• 16 years ago

It's not just "mama", its "mama" and "papa" (sometimes baba... basically the same thing).

And then Georgian does it "backwards". "mama" is father, and "papa" is mother.

yosh• 16 years ago

Yeah, here's a paper on that topic:

http://www.sussex.ac.uk/linguistics/documents/where_do_mama2...

ceejayoz• 16 years ago

Mine says it a lot when reaching for food/bottle. I'm wondering if it's being used as "me" or "mine".

pbhjpbhj2• 16 years ago

At 8 months a baby can sign "mother" (if they've been taught) and you can avoid having to guess whether they're babbling or attempting to say a proper word.

ivankirigin• 16 years ago

My 3.5 year old son is named Luka, making this a bit weird to read.

You need to limit your personal device usage around kids. It is that simple. Taking photos might be the best exception: do it all the time.

I'm considering getting Luka a flip camera. That might be a great device to learn to make digital things at a young age without anything too addictive.

pbhjpbhj2• 16 years ago

I found it a bit depressing that they were using a phone to tire the baby to sleep; that the child is being taught to ignore the person that is with them and instead interact with a gadget.

Perhaps I'm just a fuddy-duddy relying instead on talking (stories) and singing lullabies, making sleep sounds, rocking and cuddling.

ctdonath• 16 years ago

I've thought a good product would be a real, decent quality digital camera - kid proof and kid simple. LCD viewfinder & review, 1 button capture, 1 button review, USB charging (no stupid AAs - nonremovable LiIon), smart on/off. Something a kid can get used to as a tool, not just a cheap toy, and no way to get "lost in the weeds" in menus or other discouraging traps or manufacturing shortcuts. (Anyone wanna fund a startup?)

nitrogen• 16 years ago

Sounds like a still picture version of a Flip Video camera.

karzeem• 16 years ago

Not that this is what's going on in this case, but the story reminds me of how ducklings can be made to follow anything, presumably thinking that it's their mother.

Dustin Curtis wrote a fascinating piece a while ago about similar behavior in newborn seagulls: http://dustincurtis.com/how_niko_tinbergen_reverse_engineere...

user24• 16 years ago

I found this the most interesting:

> My 3-year-old nephew in Seattle offers a window into my boy's future. When I sent a video of Luka to my brother, he immediately video-called us on the computer with his son on his lap. My nephew wanted to see us right away; he gets frustrated watching videos of family on the computer because they don't interact with him. Forget videos; Skype is his "normal."

(emphasis mine)

The next generation of internet users are not going to simply be used to an audiovisual experience, but a genuinely interactive one. I say 'genuine' because for years people have tried to sell 'clicking on links' as 'interactive web'; it's not, in the same way that 'switching channels' is not 'interactive TV'.

pyre• 16 years ago

It's more interactive than 'switching channels' because you can't submit forms with your TV. Also, you get to set the schedule, not the tv station. Compared to TV, the Internet (as it is now, or was in 1995) is interactive. Just because the 'future' is even more interactive is besides the point.

jacobolus• 16 years ago

I don’t quite understand why we’re comparing reading with watching.

Books have always been substantially more interactive than radio or TV, because you can go at your own pace, you can skip forward or back at will, you can take notes in the margins and underline important parts. You can set the book down and pick up another, or look up references when they seem interesting.

Reading books and letters never got less interactive with the development of telephones or IMs, which are the long-distance extension of the face-to-face conversation, and they won’t with the adoption of video chat either. The media (conversation vs. reading/writing) have completely different uses. Writing things down (or recording in general) is a way to crystalize knowledge. Talking in real time is inherently ephemeral and driven by instant reactions.

In response to the grandparent post: sitting down around the dinner table has always been an “interactive audiovisual experience” (tactile too!) – the addition of widespread video-chat seems unlikely to transform society nearly as much as the internet already has.

c00ki3s• 16 years ago

Ok, I'm really unsure, I was absolutely certain this whole article was a joke. But the comments don't seem to reflect that. This is actually happening? Putting your kids to sleep with an iPhone? What ever happened to singing?

billswift• 16 years ago

No one, especially small children, should be subjected to my singing.

petercooper• 16 years ago

This article seems quite careful to skirt around how much contact the mother has with the baby.

scornforsega• 16 years ago

...or maybe the kid thinks that "mama" means "phone?"

Seems like the most obvious answer.

My son is mistaking a smartphone for his mother

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