Look at any website, social media influencer, book or other media directed at parents of young children and you’ll see they are all overflowing with ways to support a child’s development.

You can support your child’s motor skills by getting big blocks they can climb over. You can get a particular book for your 6 month old to promote literacy. You can buy a subscription box of toys and never need to wonder if you’re doing enough for your child’s cognitive development. You can talk to your child so they hear enough words all the time to support optimal language skills.

And on and on.

There’s an implicit message in all of this…if you do these things, you can help your child walk – sooner. You can help them read – sooner. You can help them talk – sooner. Because, sooner is better.Culturally, we have equated earlier development with higher intelligence and ability. An early walker is destined to be an athlete; an early talker will be smart.

Where did this come from??

There seems to be a pretty clear answer. 

As I mentioned in Essay #2, in the 1800s Americans and Western Europeans became obsessed with data. A man named Adolphe Quetelet introduced the concept of statistical averages to the study of human behavior, and the Western world began to categorize people in ways never done before. 

From Quetelet’s point of view, the average was the mirror of perfection. We now think of average as “meh” or mediocre. It’s fine. It’s not great. But Quetelet thought that not only was average perfect, anything that deviated from it was a reflection of human imperfection. Faster than average, slower than average – it didn’t matter…both were imperfect. Only average was perfection.

But clearly our perceptions have changed since then. The bridge from Quetelet’s vision of average perfection to our concept of average as “meh” came from a man named Sir Francis Galton.

Sir Francis Galton was the cousin of Charles Darwin, and he borrowed Darwin’s theory of evolution and applied it to the concept of the average. Galton said the goal of humanity was to improve on the average. Average was really the bare minimum. Above average is what we were after. And below average – that was incredibly undesirable.

Galton ranked humans as being below average (imbeciles), average (mediocre) and above average (eminent). He developed the concept of correlation in order to measure the relationship of certain characteristics across rank. 

Galton believed that an individual who was above average in one area was above average in all areas. Likewise, he believed an “imbecile” was good at nothing. And he believed it was society’s duty to “improve upon the race.” He was the father of eugenics. 

While eugenics explicitly fell out of favor following World War II, its underlying concepts still thrive, today more than ever.

Optimize development. Enrich learning. Cultivate our children’s experiences. And do it now. Because sooner is better. Because delay is bad.

Right?

More on this soon.

As I’ll note in each post: 

These are not my original ideas, but rather a synthesis of what scholars in a variety of fields have learned and written. I often do not have answers to the tensions I see – my aim is not to be another expert in a field already over-run with them. Instead, I want to shine a light on knowledge we take for granted but shouldn’t.

In each essay I write, I’ll link the relevant sources when possible as well as cite them at the end. I hope you’ll join this conversation.

REFERENCES:

Rose, T. (2016). The end of average: How we succeed in a world that values sameness. HarperOne.

Rogoff, B. (2003). The cultural nature of human development. Oxford University Press.

Galton, F. (1904). Eugenics: Its definition, scope and aims. The American Journal of Sociology, 10(1), 1–25. https://doi.org/10.1086/211295