Metacognition

Metacognition -- the human brain's ability to think about what you're thinking about -- is a really fascinating and really emerging and studied branch of neuroscience.

A lot of adults have a lot of inappropriate expectations of how much metacognition their children already have.

Asking young children "Why did you do that?" is often asking them to guess or invent a reason after the fact, because what they were thinking of before the fact was as simple as "impulse entered brain > followed impulse".

Even on up into teenage and adulthood this can happen! I distinctly remember a time when I was about 16 years old and I was chatting with my mom in the kitchen.

While talking (so my brain was distracted and involved in whatever we were talking about), I saw an apple on the counter and picked it up and began fidgeting with it. It's common for me to fidget with my hands or objects while chatting. There were also scissors on the counter. I picked them up too and idly went to snip the stem off of the apple, again, no real thought process involved here.

Because of how I was holding the apple, I snipped the palm of my hand with the scissors! Literally in the middle of a perfectly normal conversation. I knew how to use scissors, I knew how to eat apples, I knew how to have conversations, I knew that none of these things really went together. And if somebody had asked me "what the heck were you thinking?"...the only answer I would've had was, "I wasn't thinking. I was just doing things while I thought about something else."

A 6-year-old might not have the ability to even say, "I just *wasn't* thinking" (either because they don't know that they weren't, or because they haven't been allowed to give that sort of a "non-answer" by the adults in their life.)

It's tough to keep that in mind when you're talking with an eloquent small person, because they seem so capable of talking about what they're talking about. But their brains are still so new!