And that goes doubly for children. Skylar needs to discover things for herself, at her own pace. There's something comforting about having arrived at such a basic decision. The problem is that it's a lot harder to put the theory into practice. For one thing, it's impossible to realize it in any absolute sense.
Children learn by watching adults and their parents in particular.
It's not like they're stranded on some island in the middle of nowhere like Brooke Shields in The Blue Lagoon . So no matter how hard parents try not to influence their children's process of discovery, they will still be influencing it every minute of the day with the words they use, the place that they live, the objects that fill their home and so much more. It's not just a question of what parents buy for their children, since the children are usually just asinterested in what the parents buy for themselves. Bearing this in mind, we've decided that, since we're going to be influencing Skylar no matter what we do, that we want to put some thought into how we're influencing her. The most immediate result of this decision is a willingness to expose her to a wide variety of situations.