Young Children and Ultimate Questions: Romancing at Day Care

Abstract

Introduction:  What follows is one piece of a series of conversations that I conducted with a small group of young children in a day care center where I was working in 1983.  The children were between the ages of 3 and 6, and we had been together long enough to speak frankly and comfortably with each other.  I used small group time to ask six questions, all of them about the ultimate issues - the origins, ends, and limits of things, death, dreams, soul, spirit, self, God, evil.  Taken together, the conversations we had make for a transcript of 65 manuscript pages.  The issues raised there are many, and provoke questions not only about how young children think, but how adults influence them to think.  The issues taken up below - the origins of things - was continued past this conversation, and its sequel will appear in the next issue of Analytic Teaching.  Although the text tends to speak for itself, a few comments on the pattern of the conversation follow the transcript.